Soul-crushing Trees

Hey there

Finishing up my studies of tutorials now, course commences on Monday. Just ranting to secure my own thoughts, feel free to look at the pretty picture and ignore the rant.

Course starts on monday. Filled with a sense of apprehension, what if like, everyone there is uberly talented, what do I do? I mean i'm at wits end as it is, Working as a waiter during week nights, fighting crime and making sure that food arrives at the table on time, working at concerts on the weekends as security, which allows me time to drive home, grab a cup of coffee then leave for college. On top of that trying to be a good boyfriend and improve my abilities in art.

Being an adult sucks.

Right, now the touching, soul-crushingly depressing life story is over:

What I learnt in this tut was

•Save materials to a material library
•Save objects in mr Proxy file format
•Create mr Proxies and associate them with imported proxy files
•Add materials to mr Proxies
•Use Object Paint to instance and distribute mr Proxies in a scene

Quite fun, rendering time is a force to be reckoned with, but apparently it's to save time, still took quite a while (left to go grocey shopping so I can't offer a definite time)

See ya around, feel free to leave a comment, anyone can comment, no need for an account.

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Music:  Nickelback - Shakin' Hands 

Studies and...Buddies? pt.2

Lo again.

Wasn't quite finished with studying for the day so I have a whole bag of goodies to show to those who may be interested (Not you Steve.)

Started a study in how to do lighting and shifts in a day / night scene.

Things I learnt this lesson were thus

Part 1 (daytime):

•Use a Daylight system to illuminate scenes set in the daytime.

•Set up illumination based on the scene’s geographic location, orientation, and time of day.

•Use the Sky Portal object to gather skylight and apply it to the interior of buildings.

•Adjust scene exposure.

Part 2 (nighttime):

•Place photometric lights in a scene and adjust light color.

•Set shadow parameters so lights cast shadows properly.

•Change the exposure for a nighttime scene.

•Use a bitmap image as the scene background and adjust its output to compensate for night lighting conditions.

And there ya have it :D the following are just the images from 9:00am, 14:00, and 17:00 respectively.

The night works are renders of the Wip while I was adding in and working on details.

And for nighttime

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Music - Celldweller Own little world - we will never die remix

Normal Bump Mapping

Been busy busy like a bee today with studying, completed a study in Normal Bump Mapping.

Apparently what I did yesterday was known as Regular Bump Mapping. After some digging about I managed to find the explanation of why the two are difference in a bit of text I skipped over in my morning haze. (Too much work and not nearly enough caffeine) They explain it as follows:

"Normal bump mapping is a technique that lets you simulate high resolution surface detail on low resolution polygonal models.

Normal bump mapping is similar in some respects to regular bump mapping, but it conveys more complex surface detail. Normal bump maps store not only the depth information used in regular bump mapping, but also information on the direction normal of the surface, to produce more life-like results. "


So in general this task was to do the following:

Normal bump mapping involves two objects: a high resolution, polygonally detailed object as the source for the normal bump map information, and a low resolution target to receive the map and use it to appear more finely detailed than it really is.

And what I learnt in this task was the following:

•How to set up the map projection using the render to texture controls.

•Define diffuse, normal bump, and height maps, and bake the resulting texture onto a destination object.

•Preview the baked result in a viewport.


The first image is the information from the diffuse map only. The height and bump maps have been put in to the texture (They call it baked) of the plane but are not visible at this time.

The second image is the completed render, simple yet convincing.

And the final image is just a render of what they gave me to work with and as you can see how mapping works, taking something huge and in depth and simplifying it down and tricking the eye.

In other news, working on some sketches that i'll post soon enough



-Francis

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Music: Apocalyptica - Path