For me, summer (or any time of the year where the sky is blue and temperatures are ok) is about getting yourself immersed from times to times in places where there is a lot of green and nature. We love to improvise picknicks or apéritifs and often choose to go nearby water or in places that are surrounded by trees .
Part 1: prepping the stage with the elements I want to include with rough elements . I feel I wat to be at a little cabin at a lake with a little boat and a campfire/table/barbecue and drinks. I roughly stage some elements and add 2 blocks with nearly my proportions in order to get a visual check if everything looks the right size.
then we are selecting the draft camera position:
Selecting a texture as HDRI and background - not sure if it 'll be the final, but let's iterate until it all comes together:
For now i'll try to start adding some grasses (Low poly) and add a temporary texture to the ground. Both the ground and the water are generated with modifiers. For the ground I added a subdiv surface (simple) and then added a displacement using a standard cloud texture. The water was generated similarly, but using the ocean modifier and adding a second subdiv modifier afterwards to remove the edges.
Getting some hero details:
Making the table and a self generated wood like texture:
To give it more depth and before jumping to my work, I quickly added a displacement map to the ground based on a noise texture and played with a grass particle system. -> probably will switch to nodes, we'll see. also I created a "dirt" texture by playing with noise and mixrgb shader
The current result feels too "fall", not summer, so I'm changing strategy
New elements that make it more summer and warm:
By connecting 2 edges of the cylinders and subdividing it, I can give it the form of the textile of the seat. Adding a checker texture where I completely stretch the Y axis it gives this nice summer lounge chair feel.
The boat is one I made in another little project, to win some time:
And like I did on the moon scene, creating a very draft low poly person to look at the boat (with a little companion dog)
And as always, testing out a different point of view and moving things around and trying to get more warmth in the image.
That's all for now, see you around for the coming updates.
---UPDATE---
Not convinced about the previous setting, I started playing around, My little lo poly character needed to be seated. I removed the bench and the little hut to give more room to the calm of a navigating boat on the lake while the other reads (empty pages -> it's a real philosopher :) ). trying to add some fireflies, but still not convinced. This HDRI in the background seemed to fit the scene more, it's a lake on top of mountains. I added a little Bruckheimer filmstyle strip at the top.
He got a little upgrade ande a light behind his back. Maybe I'll timelapse the sun disappearing... We'll see. There still is a lot of work to create the right color palate and dream like effect. Also the hdri isn't generating shadows like I need them. Anyway, The calm is almost there :).
To be continued.
slenaerts That's a very promising start 😀! After having read your thoughts I'm curious to see what will come 😊!
PS: Good to see that I'm not alone in the challenge, although getting all 4 x 500 points would be nice as well 😉😁 ....
duerer we could do like in the olympic games and share the medal :)))))
Still lots of work on this and probably stuff that is way beyond what I can do today. But let's see. 2 weeks is a challenge !
Nice idea slenaerts , a lovely peaceful place for a picnic,
I'm sure you can do this. With this one, I thought we could keep modelling to a few assets and focus more on color and lighting for a warm happy feel, you done great work in the lighting course. The last challenge you completed early, a great result with animation, you can do this 👍
don't ruin it and add people 😂
remember to put your rubbish in the bin 🗑
Thx @adrian2301 , I'll do my best! I'll add a trash can for sure and a weird kind of person on the scene :)
A bit of documentation for some elements I previously added:
the dark "bruckheimer" effect on top is a volume shader
The water was created using voronoi displacement and a length math shader to create a very aquatic blue and more yellowish water color the more you get too the border.
For the lamp on the left of the man I used a distance math shader based on 2 coordinates which creates a really nice effect on the bottom of the lamp:
Added some details as well to make the scene more complete. The light and color lights make it more like a nice spot for long summer nights. A boat can stop there as well to join the party. In case you fall off, we can save you with thelife buoy.
A little puzzled here...
I wanted to create a cinemagraph like effect with flowing water and only the boat that is slightly moving. The boat animation I can (and still will tweak in the graph editor to finetune the movements), but for the water I can't control these animations through the timeline/graph editor or other animation things... I did animate this by changing the values while scrobling, but that gives a way too broad unprecise result.
when I select the boat -> i have all the needed accesses to tweak the "normal way"
For reminder, this is how I created the water...
Help? Any idea why that doesn't work? thanks or any better way to animate the water? @adrian2301
And this for the log of new items:
the original hrdi sun values were not creating the effect I was looking for, either the strength made the background too bright and you lost the "sunset" feel, or it became too dark and didn't light up anything. I decided to help out this HDRI sun by adding two spotlights (one near the bridge, one near the boat with same direction/angle as the sunà with very bright settings to add this "golden hour" feel to the image:
the change is subtle , but it does add up to the atmosphere and to the bridge, without changing the texture of the bridge.
For the night scene I changed the HDRI and removed the extra suns that generated the extra "golden hour" effect. added 2 lights to the scene. The sky was slightly repositioned to het the stars at a more believable height. This HDRI gives a nice glow from bottom to up making the evening lighting pretty beleivable. I selected ad different point of view as I wanted to get the full attention on the reader.
I've also decided to give a go to the movie editor in Blender for the end result to mix up both scenes and add a little music:
and a little change of point of view from the cabin.
To dress it a little more, I added a piece of cloth with a self made texture, the rest is a little lighting and some decoration:
Hey duerer, how are things? I'm eager tot discover the Sandman's story! Hope to see your thread moving soon! Cheers, Seb
different point of view (had an older version of the file locally while on the train) -> added some glow in post based on @theluthier 's feedback... Kent was right, it does change the scene completely
