Christmas in Mordor

Sauron summoned all those who serve for battle, Santa and his Wargs march through glaciers heading for Moria, there will be gifts, if you’ve been a bad boy.

3D Work done in Blender, Rendered in Cycles, post production in Photoshop.
No elves injured in this render.



Hey guys! New render this week!
After seeing The Hobbit movie (trilogy) i was forced to force me to do something related to it (despite third movie being a bit “different”)
Since it’s almost christmas, it seemed a good idea to mix all that stuff fairly similar to each other and do an nice render of it

I’ve tried to replicate the mood from the films (also all that odd glow and bloom that looks like the film was directed by Michael Bay) -but in (much) smaller scale

Soon i’ll do a little breakdown/making of this piece, as always, wait a sec :wink:

Well, this was an interesting project, since i’ve lost about 2 days of sleep figuring out how to render this in my humble desktop that always crashed after happily almost 2 hours of caching/BVH Building :smiley:

The inicial idea was to model something organic to sculpt in mudbox, and so i did it. But after sculpt the majority of details, i’ve decided to redo all the work in blender, (and also make a better topology, tsc)

So here we are:


(dont laught. its pure motherfucking art)

(nope)

Thanks god we have sculpting, so we can build less horrible models

after some love (and handpainted textures) that’s what you’d get:


So its time to make some bizarre shading, right?


Yea, i know what you’re thinking: WHAT THE HELL
I accidentally did this shader while playing with the roughness of a glossy node, its weird but yeah deal with it

Wait for next episode :o
~~>

Previous in this post:


This is what looks like in cycles render;
My initial idea was to make some fur on it, but i really like the ~illustration feel~ on this shading, so, go for it

i skipped the “lets make a screenshot of everything” in this stage, sorry :frowning:

But, i have something anyway, heres the not-so-fatty Santa:


Not that pretty, i know, but at this stage i really was tired of this project (really), i was not even specting finishing it, my motivation was a friend that suddenly calls me for a beer to talk about CG etc, so i figured that would need something to show for him, so, heroically i modeled that in the past night couple hours before the hangout (thats why it looks like shit) :yes:

And an early render with some nice silky straight shaders:


Next on this series: (nothing that worths your time)

The terrain was perhaps the best and worst thing to do in this project, since i have a old core 2 duo w/ 4 holy shit motherfuckering gigabytes of memory, and a quadro card that is less powerfull than my cellphone graphics card, doing it was really funny, but working at about 3 frames per second isnt.

Each terrain has a displacement map attached to it, (or 2, 3, who knows), and a series of particle scatters, from grass to rocks, snowflakes, ice and whatever

To make that i’ve started with a plane, subdivided few times with some fractal turbulence, then subsurf and displacements, no secret here

the magic was to layer various terrains to create interesting shapes, thing that can be seen in the next images:




tip: don’t waste your time putting details in things that you will not even render

the detail work/particles are only in the visible areas, as far the view goes, less detail the models have

(its almost ending, c’mon, you stand it until here)
(ps2: srry for bad english, i need to sleep)

Aw, i forgot to mention that the scene was being lit by a HDR Map of around 50mb, also i’ve spotted two sun lights, one for a kind of rim light, and other for a, well, fuck, i dont know, for a “pretty effect”

This is what looks like the viewport:


Since my computer dont costs as much as a house, i had to split the scene in few layers to get this finished :frowning:

The best way i figured to do that in my -tired mood- was hide the multi million particle systems in santa and render it later

Something like that:


I have to admit that the real magic was really in the post production, i’ve rendered 3 different scenarios w/ arguably different particle and shader configurations (in reality, this was because i was trying to find a way to render all that at once)

So in photoshop i compose all that renders together, picking the best of each, i’ve also rendered 3 different mist passes to accomplishes my vision in the “fog” section

This is what my comp looks like:


Briefly explanation:

-Misc folder is where i put the vignette effect, and painted some light scatters to obtain this orangish color near the sun)

-Fog/Comp is where all the fog/air layers are, i’ve painted some fog with custom brushes, added other bunch using smoke pictures under a black background, compositing with “screen” in blending modes

-Ambient Occlusion, well, you know what it is, i’ve used to bring some contrast using it in overlay mode

-Mist Layers is where all that mist passes are, i’ve blended them using masks to grade softly the foreground to background

-Foreground, Here i’ve painted some snow in the reindeers, added some fancy lens effects, dust and glow, thanks to peter jackson (also is where i’ve putted the previous render, to isolate that from the rest)

-Sky Misc is where i’ve painted the dark clouds, fading trough the scene

-Background is where i’ve added some “atmospheric haze” with fog layers and gave some love to the simple meshs of the background with proper texturing

-Renders is where i’ve putted all 3 renders and compose then all using masks

-Sky is where the rest is.

Each folder have around six to nine layers each, if u are used to compositing in programs like nuke or fusion, you know that this is not a high number, and the more control the better, dont? :wink:

I’m just finishing it, one more last!

Here we are in the last post!

For those who might be interested, this is the ambient occlusion render:


Also, i know certainly someone will ask the shader tree os something of the snow, so i’ll be one step ahead and try to explain it:

Since my deadline to this project was today, and i’ve decided to put snow on this only in this last week, i dont have time to proper make a nice shader from scratch, so the shader that i run is heavy based on a really good one from Blendswap™

heres the link to it: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/66029

and if you still want to see my shader, here we are:


Dont try to understand, just accept it.

its fucking messy and i’m really sorry about that, i not had time to snap all the nodes using a ruler to the apreciation of all obsessive compulsive out there (including me)

I’ll try to explain the basis from it:

i have two main textures of snow blended by a noise texture, these main textures are blended with some bluish colors using a layer weight and a color ramp guided by a noise texture (thanks to “Kaluura” from blendswap for this), then blend it with an emission shader controled by another noise texture to create some kind of a “glitter” effect that snow has, also i’ve added a subtle glossy shader in the end, controled by a layer weight to give that rim light effect on the displacements, and set the roughness to be controled by the first noise texture, this way we can have spots that are more or less reflective than others, and the rest is history

I guess it is it!
Any questions or whatever, feel free?
(feel free!)

I’m going to sleep like a fucking king right now, excuse me :wink:

haha, this is fantastic! Awesome concept you’ve got here…
Santa looks badass in that pose with those chains, and those reindeer beasts look terrifying

I’m really impressed with the compositing too, the background looks beautiful.
Well done!

It reminds me of Family Guy’s Christmas special where Santa’s reindeer are flesh-eating monsters :slight_smile:

Every creature is dangerous and wanting to eat you in Mordor, very nice work and very fitting for coming out of a place crawling with ferocious beasts and savage beings.

I see you worked rather hard to make sure everything was done right, and I think you pulled it off.

Hey, thanks man, glad you liked it!

I have to admit that compositing can REALLY save a really bad render to turn into a interesting to even a amazing one, the downside of it is that knowing this you may up being some kind of sloppy in the 3D field, hoping to have all that “fixed later in pos”

HAHA aww how can i forget that?!
I bet those red eyes in reindeer were indirectly influenced by this episode without me even knowing

Thanks for the kind words, Ace!

We always go find something that could have been done way better (especially the other day after finishing it), but most important is to finish what you’ve started (so that way you can do other projects that lead to the same feeling hahahah)

Glad you liked it! :wink:

Great work, all looks very nice .
good models the ground and background ambient ver y well too. And fun workflow.
Regards!

Thanks man, glad you liked it! :wink:

Wonderful work. The hardware constraints you’re working under mean that you may be one of the most patient people in the world!

hahahah! For sure, rendering in a department store PC is an patience exercice better than Yoga, over time you get used to it and things like imagining a render looking to a wireframe become fairly normal hahahah

Thanks for the kind words, glad you liked!

just a side note:


Cheers :wink: hahahah

(edit: i dont even have all that memory!)
mysteries of deep pagefile systems :o

you know something is way wrong when you’re using your HD as a memory slot

Outstanding! Congrats, this render is awesome! I love the little details and how it gives you an impact!
Keep up your good job, um abraço amigo.

Whoa, someone else from my country!
Thanks mate! um abraço, broder! :wink:

Very nice. The creatures are completely unrealistic for their size, of course, but it looks very good.

I love this image ! Textures looks great and great modeling, everything is just super !

I also love it although it did remind me of something i seen in an anime, Sword Art Online. The character/boos/season events name is Nicholas The Renegade. He would have loved those reindeer.

Well done! Very interesting work. Merry Christmas!