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[Dune]

The Siege of a Dutch village by Spanish (and international) soldiers hundreds of years ago. The village is supposed to get a 'warlike' mood, this is just the very start. It will be rendered as a 360º web image, to show in an app on location. Building all the (destroyed) houses now, starting to add soldiers and the like....

[Doug]

very nice

what are the blue arrows showing?

[masonspappy]

Love the detail and life-like rendering!

[Dune]

Blue arrows I forgot to take way, it's to point out parts that need to be changed, but are more work to model, like top window sills extending into the wall sideways. 

Thanks, Masonspappy.

[Stormlord]

Exactly Dune Styled!
Nice scenery Ulco.

STORMLORD

[sboerner]

Very nice. Incredibly detailed armor and uniforms on the soldiers. The 360 view will no doubt be impressive.

[Dune]

Thank you both. It's a pretty daunting undertaking, but I'm getting close. Here's a few screen dumps from the equirectangular viewer. I changed one of the simple shapes, so a pop of soldiers was suddenly missing, but they're back in place now. The tracks are too thin, already taken care of.
The dog is a little joke. If you start looking in the 360º, you won't look down immediately....

Any comments are welcome, of course.

[masonspappy]

Love the ladt peaking out from the tent and the horse 'souvenirs' on the ground.

[Dune]

Thanks.

[Dune]

By the way, here are some 'clay' views of the small village I'm building for this 360º render.

[sboerner]

Quite an ambitious project. Are the models commercial, yours or a little of each? Lot of assets in this scene.

I'm dying to know what's in that enormous barrel. Is that a tun? Or something larger?

Cool castle.

[Dune]

All mine. I built every model in a combination of Lightwave, ZBrush, Marvelous D. and Speedtree. The barrel has been disapproved of by the client It'd better be hay or something he said. I don't know why I made it actually, probably my desire for a good Belgian beer every now and then  Thanks for 'tun'. First time I realized they all have different names.

[sboerner]

Very nice. I'm looking forward to seeing the final product. What does your timeline look like for this sort of project?

I like the canal boat. I've often wondered why European canal boats attached the towline to the top of a mast. (Here in the U.S. it was always fastened to the bow.) Was the mast stepped or hinged so it could be lowered to pass under bridges? What a hassle that must have been.

[Dune]

Well, this took me about a month or so, with other jobs in between. I'm hurrying to get it finished before September 14, when there will be an offical introduction of these 2 reconstructions. As you well know it's quite complicated to match objects and terrain. Like making a revetment/timbering along the canal, it means making fidling, adjusting, refitting... hoping it kind of fits.

I don't know actually. Seems like your US method would be smarter. I will ask around (now you triggered me). It might be so the line could pass over lower objects along the canals. I now encounter a new 'problem; I need to redo a bridge, but there's also a drawbridge further down. But the new bridge is not a drawbridge, and should thus be pretty high (they can take the mast down, but there's still all the luggage/freight on the roof). Indeed seems strange. And difficult to match with the terrain, as it should have 2 pretty robust ramps (I draw them as local heightmaps, which takes a lot of fiddling).

[sboerner]

Whenever I need to fit objects to a terrain I export a terrain mesh out of Terragen and import it into Blender. It doesn't have to be super high-resolution. The meshes can be targeted and quite small. I always have an ortho camera in the scene and a renderer set up for micro export.

Then the objects are modeled and placed on the mesh in Blender. If the object is near the scene origin I export the obj at that position. If it is far away I jot down the coordinates in Blender, move the object to the origin and export. Then type in the coordinates when placing in Terragen (allowing for different coordinate systems, of course).

Clusters of models (passengers on a boat or men working on a crane, as I will have in my current scene) are positioned relative to the same origin. So if you move or rotate the boat, you can duplicate the coordinates for all the objects and they will stay together.

For me this is a very precise way to work -- you can position objects to the cm -- and saves a lot of fiddling.