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[dwsel]

I'm making lately building in medieval style. It's for 'DIORAMA' challenge on Animanon forums. I just decided to make a bit more 'pretty' render than the previous ones. I hope you like it

More details on the progress and further plans in this topic: http://www.animanon.com/Forum3/index.php/topic,878.0.html
Any more ideas what can I improve before the deadline?

[RudySchneider]

I really like the old-tyme "grainy" feel of that render, dwsel!

[ENSONIQ5]

Excellent render.  Recessing the windows and door, rather than having them added on the outside, would make the building more accurate, as doors and windows are usually inserted into a gap in the wall.  This is particularly true of the door, as the ground floor walls would be quite thick to support the weight of the building above.  A bit more depth on the stone wall material (ie. deeper bump, darker shadowy bits) would also be an improvement.

Overall a really nice render, as Rudy mentioned it has a nice grainy feel and I also particularly like the material used for the timbers, nice grain and respects the techniques of timber construction.

[dwsel]

I really like the old-tyme "grainy" feel of that render, dwsel!

Thank you! I used on the image the same texture as it's on the wall. On the other side the grainy shadow starts to annoy me after I look about on it a bit longer. I will work more on lighting later after I add vegetation and some props.

Excellent render.  Recessing the windows and door, rather than having them added on the outside, would make the building more accurate, as doors and windows are usually inserted into a gap in the wall.  This is particularly true of the door, as the ground floor walls would be quite thick to support the weight of the building above.

Ah, in my area in older buildings it's not that uncommon to see cellar with stone walls of thickness like this, with windowsills on each side deep on 20 cm (not counting the window thickness), that could serve easily as a bunker

Here it's the case of flawed design. Windows and doors are not recessed into the wall, because in this model walls are paper-thick with cut out holes of the size of windows. Redesigning them would require now some additional steps I want to avoid during this comp. And I like wooden window frames at the moment It's much worse with door, because I did not design yet any hole in the wall and the wall has real bumps in geometry, so door look even more detached...

A bit more depth on the stone wall material (ie. deeper bump, darker shadowy bits) would also be an improvement.

Actually all of these materials have bump of strength between 50 and 100. I'd like to make bumpmap stronger for some of them, but the value of 100 can't be pushed further (even with tweaking file by hand - when I set it to i.e. 300 as far as I remember it returns to default or to 0 value). What you see on the ground level's wall is bump of 100 (bumpmap brightness is scaled so that the whole range of values is used), then I noticed it flatness so I subdivided the surface and started to move vertices around by hand. Now I see I could prepare subdivided surface in Terranim8or earlier and import it to get higher grid resolution than I was still able to handle by hand, for greater quality and less work.

BTW, I'm wondering if bumpmap in ART is object scale dependent or bitmap scale dependent. Did anyone ever made a tests of this? I'd really love to have native normal maps or displacement.

[headwax]

hey great stuff

For me I would bash it around a bit use a warp modifier? Just pull a few verticies around so the building looks lived in.
Has anim80r got soft select - can't remember - if so that would help.



 

[dwsel]

hey great stuff

For me I would bash it around a bit use a warp modifier? Just pull a few verticies around so the building looks lived in.
Has anim80r got soft select - can't remember - if so that would help.

Thank you!

I believe only bones have soft selection, though house is not single object i guess it won't be that easy to push vertices around now. There's a lot of object instancing going on here - just to keep file and display light. There's one repetition quite strongly visible at the front actually that I have to fix Making it more natural is good idea. I'm considering giving wooden bars hourglass shape (thinner at the middle) or a little bit more noise later.

[headwax]

Instancing? You using a replicator in Carrara? That'll keep the vertex count down. But if you want to you can turn the instances into meshes, group the whole lot, export it as an obj file. When you reimport it you will h ave one object that you can mess with.

[dwsel]

Instancing? You using a replicator in Carrara? That'll keep the vertex count down. But if you want to you can turn the instances into meshes, group the whole lot, export it as an obj file. When you reimport it you will h ave one object that you can mess with.

Main rule of this comp is to use Anim8or only (using UWMapper and Terranim8or different renderer from scanline/ART is in fair use area). This is fully modelled with Anim8or and 2 layers were rendered in ART.

Instancing is done by simply adding to scene one object (i.e. single wooden bar) several times, and placing them according to plan/design is SCENE mode. As in Anim8or there's no 'duplicate object' command it can be faster to duplicate objects in scene using.... copy and paste in notepad There's obvious difference of file size on disk (not checked difference in memory yet) compared with using instancing in object mode (with the ASL script available on forum). Pity there probably won't be speed up in display (there should be dedicated instancing tool in scene mode with bounding box preview).

I came to the same idea after reading your suggestion that exporting/importing a whole would help. If I wanted to join whole scene into one object (another useful command that would be great if existed in Anim8or) I'd indeed have to export the whole scene using Ani2pov and import back the *.obj file.

In 3ds Max i.e. I guess I would be able to apply modifier (bend, taper, ffd) to the group of objects just like that: http://docs.autodesk.com/MAXDES/13/ENU/Autodesk%203ds%20Max%20Design%202011%20Help/files/WSf742dab04106313366400bf6112a1cea097-7ff4.htm

[headwax]

thanks dwsel

My workflow wouldn normally be to make the whole lot in obj mode.
It's a good idea of yours to do it in scene mode to keep memory down.!

I guess I have been spoilt recently. I am presently working on a 1.2 gig carrar file - so no need to keep poly count down.
Yet.

good luck with the comp!

[dwsel]

thanks dwsel

My workflow wouldn normally be to make the whole lot in obj mode.
It's a good idea of yours to do it in scene mode to keep memory down.!

I guess I have been spoilt recently. I am presently working on a 1.2 gig carrar file - so no need to keep poly count down.
Yet.

good luck with the comp!

Thank you!

The file size is currently ~2,8MB only. Out of curiosity I compressed it to *.rar archive to find out that it has then 359KB... so the scene is pretty well optimized However there's not that much advantage in memory, as textures in *.jpg format take 25MB in total, so again it's ~500MB in memory.

Small update here:
Current version (raw Anim8or render), and some effects tests on version between current and previous.
I plan to plant some willows (Common Osier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salix_viminalis ) and more grass as well.

[onespirit5777]

Looking good!

[ianross]

Great work.

[dwsel]

@onespirit5777, @ianross:
Thank you! I still have something like 4 days to deadline to put some more plants

[dwsel]

I think this is finished. I left the previous effects stack.

[$imon]

Great stuff, dwsel! The end result is really some work of art - the plant size makes the whole thing extra trippy (is it a gnome house?!)
Its a pleasing image to look at - but if you had more time, it might need a story.. a character of some sort maybe?

good job