Excavating the Deep Cut

Started by sboerner, January 21, 2020, 04:32:19 PM

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sboerner

Quote from: undefinedWrinkles by shader?

Thanks, and yes. That was a great tip you gave me a while back. Once he's posed there will be more folds and wrinkles in the mesh, of course.

DocCharly65

I get more and more curious about the whole final :)

sboerner

Test render of the horse and crane assembly. At this distance the horse could use more detail, but I'll wait to see how he looks in the main scene and will add it then if necessary. (Don't think it will be.) Planning to call this part done so I can move on to the next challenge!

Hannes

Great! I think, if the horse will be not that close to the camera, it will be absolutely OK.

DocCharly65

What a great creation! It will look surely good in the final!

Dune

Stunning detail, and I'm sure it will be quite enough. The boy is really good. I have one remark about the horse; it seems a bit elongated... but it could be the pose, I can't tell. Boy will need some dirt on his feet!

sboerner

Thanks, everyone. This is going to be in the middle distance so I should re-export all of the shader maps at lower resolutions to save load time.

Ulco, the horse may be distorted slightly by the low angle and wide angle lens. (That's my story, anyway. :) )

This model was another test of sorts . . . I'm learning to use Maya's nCloth simulator for clothing. It's a little more work up front but eliminates almost all of the manual sculpting I was doing before. The folds and creases look pretty natural, I think.

Dune


sboerner

The scene is going to include many human figures and I realized I needed a simple way to try out different poses. Thought about ordering an artist's mannequin but then realized I could make my own virtual version. Turned into a fun project and good way to spend the day yesterday. Now I can use this to pose and position all of the human figures in the scene, then replace them with real models as they're completed.

I'll post a rigged fbx version of this model in the sharing section in case anyone else might find it useful.

Does anyone know where I can find an image sequence of someone swinging a sledgehammer? I've looked but have come up empty-handed.

Dune


sboerner


sboerner

#71
Latest iteration and the last one before adding the rest of the workers. I wanted to nail down the terrain before that step, since all the displacements had to be finalized first. Dust clouds are v2 clouds. Being a novice at clouds I started out using v3 but the many layers made the 3d view impossible to navigate and sent rendering times through the roof. Did a few searches on the forum and learned a thing or two. V2 works fine at this scale and actually renders nicer (and *much* more quickly).

By far the lion's share of my time on this scene was spent on the shoulder of the cut. That had to be right but creating the transition from topsoil to rock layer took a lot of experimenting. I ended up adding additional cube primitives for the topsoil. So now there are five cubes (two topsoil, two rock strata, plus the ledge for the towpath), with a plane for the floor. Pretty satisfied with the result.

Dune's grass, here and there, struggling to thrive in this environment.

Dune

Great that it all worked out so nicely. I love it. You only see the magnitude of all once you notice th worker and horse, so I'm looking forward to seeing the additional workers.

Two things I want to say; I liked your original clouds better, less patchiness. And I would add a slight color variation across the dug out heaps of stones, be it variation in the stones or dirt attached to them, maybe also a layer of dust across them (slope restricted)?

sboerner

Thanks. I'm not sure what happened with the sky cloud layers. The cloud settings haven't changed in weeks. They've been moved to allow some direct sunlight through in the foreground, and the camera angle has changed. So maybe we're just seeing things that weren't in the frame before. Any suggestions on how to get rid of the patchiness? The cumulus layer is an Easy Cloud.

Adding a slope-constrained dust layer to my to-do list. Great suggestion.

DocCharly65

Unbelievable good! Can't say anything else...