COLLAB 2021 – WIP – duerer

[Ingmar Franz]

Just some quick notes on the “Color Texture”:

1) A blue-grey color brushed on the model with a procedural “Marble” texture is intended to add a kind of “grain” to the stones in order to break up the monotone grey or dark grey base color.

2) White and orange patches added with a procedural “Cloude” texture shall evoke the impression of lichens growing on the stones

[Kent Trammell]

As I said during the stream, let’s talk about your chimneys! First of all I really like the additional color details you’ve added via the layer painting method! Distinguishing the mortar and varying the brick colors is a nice upgrade.

I’m not 100% sure if you’re finished to you but you’ve reached a finished state to me. If you were planning to do this things below, humor me. But I’ve mastered your chimneys and optimized them in these ways:

• Collapse color map layers. Maintaining the layers is very inefficient which is fine for a WIP but definitely needs to be collapsed to a single texture in the end.
• Shrinking all textures to 1K. I didn’t see a notable visual difference between 1K and 2K versions of your textures. So 1K it is of course optimal.
• Removing the second chimney. Your chimneys look similar enough to warrant duplication over separation. I think the idea behind keeping them separate was the function of the chimneys inside the house, which is a valid thought. But now that we’re at the end, I think we’re going to have to cheat the chimney’s interior position. I.e they will not necessarily align on the outside and inside. So it’s optimal to think of the exterior chimney as detached from the interior.

The texture savings from the above methods takes your 51 MB total down to 4 MB. Again if you were planning on doing this already, good thinking! You’re welcome to run through the process for experience but I’d like to keep the mastered version as is.

In closing I want to offer a suggestion. It’s something you can take or leave. Between Collab 2020 and Collab 2021 I’ve learned that you are an incredibly detailed, technical 3D artist. You work intricately with modifiers, object relationships, and outliner organization. There’s nothing wrong with this, especially not in your personal projects. But I must say that I’m a little scared of your .blend files 😅 Your final chimney file isn’t bad but your axle from last year and your house blockout from this year was dizzying.

Again there’s nothing wrong with this so long as you can make sense of it. But when working on a team project it helps a lot to consider the other people that will need to interact with your scene. In other words keeping the file simpler than complex goes a long way.

Sorry for the wall of text – I’ve been meaning to find time to express this feedback for over a week. Most importantly you have been an amazing team leader! Lobbying for your team members, very present throughout the forum, going above and beyond with the house blockout, AND you created a solid asset that will be featured. Thanks so much! As always it’s a pleasure working with you, Ingmar 🤝

[Kent Trammell]

Forgot to tag you @duerer ☝️

[Ingmar Franz]

@theluthier I totally agree with the changes you made in the file. That’s one of the reasons why I saved it as WIP.  The 2K textures and the separation of the “Color Textures” into individual layers were just temporary in order to make later adaptions easier if needed. You’re also right with your assumption concerning the second chimney. I finally would like to thank you for the collaboration and for your professional advice 😀🤝! There couldn’t be a better Spice Lord than you 😀!

[Ingmar Franz]

Testing an idea for the “Chimney Beauty Shot” experimenting with @adrian2301 ‘s  cloud creation method presented by Kent @theluthier in his livestream for week 4 (“Finalization”):

@splat21 What do you think?

My node setup for one of the two cloud carts sets with one separate texture for each set:

[Ingmar Franz]

With the “Cascaded Shadow Map Count” for the “Sun” lamp set to 1, the vignette screenshot from above looks much better:

[Kent Trammell]

That’s a really cool way to present your chimney! 

[Ingmar Franz]

@theluthier Thank you very much 😀! I was thinking at some kind of cloudy hand that presents the chimney while hiding at the same time its open bottom part. Is there an explanation why the vignette only shows up clearly when seen through the camera? I’ve used adrian2301 ‘s world background node setup as orientation for my experiments. I’ve also learned that “Alpha Hashed” can approproximate “Alpha Blend” if you set the render samples high enough so that the gradients look less grainy.

[Ingmar Franz]

A new version of my “Chimney Beauty Shot”:

@splat21 and @theluthier What do you think?

[Vincent]

@duerer My 2 cents worth are that I (personally) prefer the look of your previous test renders in comparison to this new one..

In the new one the cloud looks more like an underwater vapor of some kind and the smoke (at the moment) looks like either a thin piece of honeycomb candy or an equally thin slice of extra bubbly polystyrene (the kind that you find in the middle of foamcore boards).

Apologies if this comes across as overly harsh criticism, I’m just trying to explain as best what I think may or may not be problematic in this latest render and hopefully give you a better jumping off point to continue with.

Maybe you could paint a smoke trail instead and add a displacement to the texture coordinates/mapping perhaps? Just an idea.

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