Groboto objects

[Mohawk20]

Mohawk, have you decided to render this for the poster?

Yep, but I'm working on some other projects too at the moment (quite a lot at once actually: the Genesis project HD anim that's rendering for months on one pc; this one; an anim for the fairy scene where I'm still putting in the key frames, tedious work; and I'm updating my site and am re working the graphics a bit, but have to render some parts again), so I don't know how soon I will start rendering the big version, let alone when it will finish.
But It Will Come!

[Henry Blewer]

Cool.

[cyphyr]

Mohawk, have you decided to render this for the poster?

Yep, but I'm working on some other projects too at the moment (quite a lot at once actually: the Genesis project HD anim that's rendering for months on one pc; this one; an anim for the fairy scene where I'm still putting in the key frames, tedious work; and I'm updating my site and am re working the graphics a bit, but have to render some parts again), so I don't know how soon I will start rendering the big version, let alone when it will finish.
But It Will Come!

I so empathise pop

richard

[Oshyan]

I'm loving the more recent images here with the lights and shadows. Great stuff. It does remind me though that we really need a better solution for noise-free light sources than simply cranking up the atmo samples to insane levels.

Btw Scott: The Belgian Waffle was unbelievable in person. One of the most amazing things I saw in 8 years at Burning Man. Truly.

- Oshyan

[scott8933]

Years ago I had this dream where I was out in the desert and came across a man who'd built a mountain made of barbed wire, he said about 1 mile high (dream logic being what it was - I don't think it was actually a mile high). But anyway, it was big. I didn't climb it in the dream; instead I was at the base of it, talking to the man who built it. Strangely enough, under it was the ocean - like when you go to a dock and you can see between the planks and the ocean down there underneath.

It inspired me to try to visualize this someday with CGI, as close as possible given the non-linear nature of dream imagery.

But when I saw photos of the Belgian Waffle, I thought "someone just got pretty close"...

...

Btw Scott: The Belgian Waffle was unbelievable in person. One of the most amazing things I saw in 8 years at Burning Man. Truly.

- Oshyan

[Zairyn Arsyn]

i like the glowing orbs in your last renders, they both look extremely hot.... like miniature suns 

[Mohawk20]

Well, the big render finished surprisingly quick, only 2 days (in stead of a week or more on other occasions)!
I added a little extra glow effect in Photoshop, but my mom didn't like it compared to the original, so I'll post it here and see what you guys think.
As the jpg is 5 Mb, here is the link: Light Towers Big Version.
On this other page of my website you can find the earlier small render and this new one next to each other. If you open them in different tabs you can compare the glow effect.

[Henry Blewer]

I looks great! Nice work. I am going to look closer at your site sometime soon. The quick glance was intriguing.

[Mohawk20]

Thanks...
I just updated some things recently. Any advice on further improvements is welcome.
Another Making-of is coming soon as well.

[scott8933]

I suppose I can see why she might prefer v1. vs v2 - the glowing orbs in 1v have a more definitively "orb" shape. They have a lot of spread in v2 and lose their definition.

On the other hand, art is pretty subjective. Maybe she was just in the right kind of mood the first time, and lost the vibe for the second one. Who knows! Personally, I liked that there is a lot of contrast between the very bright areas and the dark shadows. The dark shadows would be a good opportunity to show some more... something. Depends on what you're going for thematically. But I could see something mildly sinister in there - offset by the very bright parts of the composition where its extremely light.

Regarding your website - those images are all really good!

One thing in particular, your "making of". You should try to do more of those. Clients (aka, the numbnuts you'll have to be talking too in the recruiting departments of the studios to get your foot in the door) love to see the process of how you got from point-a to point-b.

[Mohawk20]

The dark shadows would be a good opportunity to show some more... something. Depends on what you're going for thematically. But I could see something mildly sinister in there - offset by the very bright parts of the composition where its extremely light.

Well, I could put in some kind of forest in the distance... Or some more GroBoto objects, which would be more conforming the theme.

Regarding your website - those images are all really good!

One thing in particular, your "making of". You should try to do more of those. Clients (aka, the numbnuts you'll have to be talking too in the recruiting departments of the studios to get your foot in the door) love to see the process of how you got from point-a to point-b.

Thanks for the compliment, those are just the least ugly of all the renders I made since I started using Terragen 7 years ago (yeah, time flies, that was only 2002).
And there will be more Making Of's, as soon as I get my storage pc working again. Because obviously the pc with the biggest hard drives, and thus the one with all the files I ever use, is the only one likely to crash. Luckily the drive that crashed was the only one with no useful data on it, just the OS.

As soon as I buy a new small drive I'll be updating my site once again.
(An interesting thing about hard drives by the way: 80GB is the smallest you can get and costs €40,- For an additional €3 you get a drive that is twice as big, and for an extra €5 you get a drive that is twice as big as that. So for €8,- more you quadruple the storage space. I'll be going for the 320GB drive...)

[scott8933]

Not sure I'd want to touch what's going on outside the central part of the scene - you've got all your action focused in there, and "background" may detract from it. It would also have the effect of putting these things in a place, which would lose the ambiguity that you have right now - which I find kind of interesting.

I was just trying to put myself in your mom's shoes by looking at the two and thinking why she might prefer the first over the second, since they're fairly similar.

The main thing that came to mind was that there was more geometric "purity" in the first, where the glowing orbs were defined as very spherical. Version 2 lost some of that.

But who knows. Art's subjective that way. Personally I think its very close the way it is. The only thing that bothered me about v1 was that the shadows were noisy.

Well, I could put in some kind of forest in the distance... Or some more GroBoto objects, which would be more conforming the theme.

[Mohawk20]

The printed version is now hanging in our livingroom. Picture below!

Besides that, I happened to come accross a picture I took in Belgium in 2008, and I knew I had to do something with that.
So I made another object in GroBoto.

Second image below is rendered in 3DsMax, but I'll render the object again in TG2 to see if it looks more realistic there.

[Henry Blewer]

The picture looks great. I'm glad you took the time to render it large.

[Dune]

That's quite a different perspective you get when seeing a TG render hanging in a living room. Looks great!

---Dune