Trawler

I’ve been building a boat in Blender. The hull is mostly there (though not very detailed). I’ve been having the most fun with the bridge, though.



I have been playing with Blender’s internal toon shader. The edge lines are done with Freestyle.
I attached a lamp to each light bulb, and I kind of like the pattern of shadows that the light fixture cages make on the ceiling. As you get farther from the cage, though, the shadows don’t fade. Notice the black area on the side of the chair. That’s a shadow from the light bulb cage. Realistically, the shadow’s edge should get soft and then the shadow itself should fade into the background. Since this is a toon, I’d like to get the shadow to fade without losing the defined edge. Far enough away, the shadow shouldn’t show at all.
Any ideas?

In the lamp shadow settings, try increasing the ‘Soft Size’ value and number of samples
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Lighting/Shadows/Raytraced_Properties

In the lamp shadow settings, try increasing the ‘Soft Size’ value and number of samples

That eliminates the far shadows really well. Thanks. I’d tried increasing the soft size, but I didn’t increase the number of samples, so it didn’t really do anything. I appreciate your help.

wow, that’s really nice! Besides the good modeling, the toon shader looks very good! I find it hard to get such good looking results as you have, especially for the outlines. (I’ve just followed a tutorial in a half-hearted way)
What’s with the place where the arm of the chair is attached to the seat? Looks like some interference (think it’s called “z-fighting” or something similar).

I had to see this! My uncle was a fisherman in Weymouth, Dorset, and when I was a kid he’d take me out to “help”. This is really nicely modeled, and Freestyle looks like something I will have to try. Are you going to put some sea out the windows? I live by the beach in Tanzania and I have tons/tonnes of pics if you like one.

What’s with the place where the arm of the chair is attached to the seat? Looks like some interference (think it’s called “z-fighting” or something similar).

I fixed that spot since doing this render. What happened was that the piece that supports the arm rest is one object and the piece that curves down under the seat is another. The two objects overlap on the same plane leaving the z-fighting effect, as you call it.

Are you going to put some sea out the windows?

Actually, my plan is to put the boat in drydock. I have a story kind of bouncing around in my mind, and the trawler is an integral part of it. I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day, but it’s been my pet project for a while now.

For some reason I look at this and think “Archer”

I made some minor changes to the scene. The chair is much smaller. I dropped an average-sized human into the scene and sat him in the seat. He looked like a five-year-old sitting in grandma’s rocking chair. Maybe I should have tried this sooner. Lesson learned.

I’ve done some fiddling with light. I used samples=5 and soft size > 0. I got the shadow to fade in the distance, but the shadow’s edge became soft. This was… okay. But, it’s a cartoon render, so I wanted to keep the hard edges. I just wanted the color of the shadow to fade. So I experimented with the settings.



I also added multiple lights to the scene, but this only gave me complicated patterns where the shadows intersect.


I have no idea what’s wrong with the face of the barometer. I’m not using cycles, so I don’t know where the noise is coming from. Standard newbie stuff, I guess.

Anyway, I may eventually grit my teeth and have soft-edge shadows, but in the in the meanwhile, I’ll keep trying to figure out how to have hard-edge shadows that fade as they get farther from their obstruction. Either way, I’ll post my findings here.

I guess we haven’t watched the same movies… or I’m just slow.

As in Captain J. Archer?

I really like what you’ve made so far. At first I wasn’t too fond on the ‘toon’ look, but the more I look at it the more I start to like it. I can imagine this looking pretty nice as a game. In fact, if you ever release this as a game or a Blender file, I’d very much enjoy exploring the bridge/boat :slight_smile:

I really appreciate your encouraging comments, everyone.
I’d be happy to share blend files, but not just yet. Right now, most of the boat is kind of devoid of detail. The bridge has the most guts, and you’ve pretty much seen it all.
Ultimately, this won’t be a game, but if I ever get anywhere with it, it’ll be a still-frame comic. My big obstacle right now is the people. I’m slowly learning how to model them and (much worse) rig them, but so far I don’t yet like my results. I keep practicing though.

I found a workable solution. The problem was that I wanted shadows that would fade in the distance but wouldn’t lose their hard edge. Here’s what I did:
I had the lamp set to ray shadow. I changed it to no shadow. I’ll call this one the light lamp.
I created a new lamp and set it to shadow only. I gave the shadow lamp a distance of about 0.3. This allowed the shadows to fade at about the right distance.
The light lamp has a distance of about 3 meters. This gave me the effect I wanted.


Oh, I also added a modifier to the Freestyle line style. The line thickness depends on its distance from the camera. If I remember the settings accurately, they’re min dist=0, max dist=10, max thickness=2, min thickness=0.5. I kind of like the result, though I still may tweak it a bit.

I told you I’ve been having problems modeling humans for this project. I spent a couple of hours (maybe three) on this one. I think it’s my first “reasonable” attempt. Not my first attempt, mind you. I’ve made a LOT of really crappy human models.



Obviously, he isn’t finished. I still have to fiddle with the hair, fix the hands and rig the guy. Oh, and then there’s clothes.

This archer: http://www.fxnetworks.com/archer

Okay, I can see that.


Okay, I know this is dark, but the scene calls for it. I may up the light levels anyway, though. The scene looks brighter on my laptop, where I did the render.
I’m learning a lot about lighting with this project. I first tried ambient light in the world settings, but that gave me soft-edge shadows, which don’t really work here. So, I used two lamps like above: a dim, long-distance point light that casts no shadows and a shorter-distance point light that only casts shadows but doesn’t illuminate. This scene needs more detail, but it’s coming along.


Same scene with improved lighting. I haven’t done much work on this in the past few days. I’ll be back when I can get something done.