Its a standard WW1 support trench, not too shabby, but not sanitary either. The weather is sunny, slight bit of fog from the nearby bogs but that’s it. Any suggestions on anything at all? I’m aiming for good, not realistic. There is one main render layer, one for fog, one for volumetric rays, and one for freestyle tracing at 80% opacity. Textures are mostly diffuse, cup and helmets have glossy. Historical accuracy is also dead on ATM, but feel free to ask any questions. The more questions the better
I would say it looks pretty good. I think you may want to add some dirt to the ground to make the scene more like a trench in a war. Can you tell us exactly what you’re aiming for?
Maybe some dirt seeping through between the boards, some splinters also. Also the texture on the side of the blanket/bedroll looks a little off, I know you’ve been having texturing problems for the last 2 months.
@profanity: I’m working on a WW1 movie. As you can see, there is already dirt on the wood boards, so what do you mean by dirt on the ground? Also, trenches during the first world war ranged from craters completely submerged in water, to underground houses with electricity, running water, furniture, beds, concrete, and finished floors. The trench you see here is in relatively good condition for a British trench, but yes I will make more decrepit ones. @Immortalzombie: I see what you mean about dirt seeping through the boards, though I’m not sure how I could make that look good. Any idea how? As for splinters, good idea. And what do you mean by the texturing of the bedroll being off? Its supposed to be some kind of animal fur, what do you think I should do to make it look better?
Not really that much different, its a couple hours later in the day and there is some light rain. I used dynamic paint for the mud and a vector blur for the rain.
I don’t see the rain, is it the three streaks on the left side of the image? If yes, then I think you should try a different approach to implementing rain. Depending on your art direction, my comments may not matter - but as it stands I would say my main issue is with the perfectly straight planks of wood, with very crisp hard edges on everything. In reality the planks will be warped slightly, there will be chips knocked out the wood due to wear and tear, cracks, splinters, rot due to wet conditions etc. The floor looks way too clean for a WW1 trench, those things were really really dirty. They were usually waterlogged, muddy, damp, wet, lots of soil and rubble debris.
What do you mean by a different approach - should I make them transparent, smaller and more numerous? As for crisp edges, I agree and its partially due to the freestyle I have on it, and partially due to the low polycount. I also wanted to keep the wood plain so it wouldn’t draw your attention so much during the movie, but its probably too plain now. I think I’m going to work on the chipped edges, so I’ll start testing that out now.
As I said about trenches before, the neatest trenches were actually underground, reinforced with concrete, with wallpaper, finished floors, running water, and electricity. (This is from the book “The Great War and Modern Memory” by Paul Fussell.) This right here is a well maintained reserve trench, but I will be adding paper, cigarettes, and cartridges soon if that will help make it dirty.
Yeah I’m not sure what to do with this rain 0-0
I could put the dirt a little bit inletted into the wood, I think that would look cool, thanks. I’ll get to working on the dirt and splinters for the wood.
Well if anyone could refer me to a rain tutorial besides Andrew Prices (which I already followed) or if they could give me an idea of how to do it, I’d appreciate it. I experimented around but I can’t get it to look like rain, I’ll try again in a couple days.
One thing you could do to emphasize that it’s raining is darken the wood a few spots. Making use of vertex paint masks and/or droplet meshes to give the wood a damp look could make the rain a bit more implied. Right now the wood looks too light and clean (to me).
Perhaps something at the end where the turn to the left is, just to give your eyes something to focus on, that way the trench will lead your eyes down from the bottom of the image into the middle where a nice bit of eye candy is sitting, maybe a couple rifles in the right corner and a helmet or something at the base of them. Perhaps if you wanted to go for more of a horror feeling (which I don’t think you do,) you could add an arm hanging over the wall.
There is no turn to the left! XD there will be in the movie, and I actually hope its hard to see, since its very hard to see a turn IRL. If the trenches are hard to navigate, the defender can memorize them and it is harder to attack.
We have rifles modeled, just need a texturer but I’m so behind in texturing. D3W0 modeled the rifles, did a good job too. I hope to add them after the mountain of improvements I need to make on the trenches so far.
I was hoping I could create some scratches and indents as a texture, then give them a negative normal so that they inlet into the wood. Is this possible in cycles?
Not sure what you mean by a memory. Working on a movie, so its about halfway between game and render. Anything in particular lacking? It would be helpful if you explained what exactly was lacking, so I could add it.
Water in the low spots (left side from viewer’s perspective) on the trench floor would emphasize much. I don’t know how hard it would be to achieve and render shallow water in the confines of the trench. But I really like the texturing. Same response I felt towards a recent work of Elrond. This is like an illustration from a book.
