Aston-Martin DBS

Hi all :slight_smile:

Here are two versions of the same scene - my first real attempt of making a scene in Blender, plus my first Blender model. Scaled down for the fourm.



I do intend doing a motion blur on the wheels, I know how to, just having some issues with getting the pivot points correct for animation.

In two minds about whether to blur the background, also whether dusty sunbeams help or detract from the scene.

Would very much appreciate any and all critique to help me improve the image :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:

looks cool: I like the second picture much more than the first one.It has more atmosphere than the first one. The lighting is beter and also the trees at the horizont add some more atmosphere. I think you could work more with depth of field. Just render out the zDetph pass and use it to the zDepth Texture it in post production to add it afterwards.

A thing that you definitly need is more resolution for the floor textures. That pixeld something at the right bottom looks horrible like this. You should also try to improve the apperiance of the leaves. I don’t have enough experiences with leaves to really help you with that but you could try to add some translucence to them.

Thank you - I appreciate your advice and will take it on board for the next render:)

Here’s the final - unless someone would like to suggest improvements :slight_smile:

Thanks to Carl Irwin for the GL Flares, obtained from Blendswap.

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As mentioned on the compositing sub-board, I think that your lens flare is a bit strong. Of course its fine to have one, I’ll not argue the artistic merits, but I would grade the contrast back into the image away from the sun flare. Heres a quick test I made to demonstrate.


Thanks for the assist - yes, it does remove the misty effect from the foreground, makes the colours clearer and shifts focus to where it should be.

The dusty, mistiness, without any apparent source is what bothered me most in my second pic above.

Thanks for the assist - yes, it does remove the misty effect from the foreground, makes the colours clearer and shifts focus to where it should be.

The dusty, mistiness, without any apparent source is what bothered me most in my second pic above.

What I’m really aiming for is to have the type of atmospheric effect in the first pic of the truck in the featured panel, with some distance fog in the background and the sun off-screen, just being hinted at by the branches on the right.

You can adjust camera focal size for better view angle and add depth of field option. Good luck!

As someone that has always struggled to make ground, I can see all of my problems in this picture.

  1. way more resolution for the ground texture (even use displacement maps).
  2. ground clutter if this is a dirt road (rocks, pebbles, patches of weeds/grass. The particle system is magnificently efficient for this)
  3. a clearer distinction where the dirt road stops and the “forest” starts. f.ex. it needs to fade into some sort of darker ground texture with way more clutter

Additional pro tips:

You dont need that many model trees. Make like 6 high poly ones in the foreground, then bake the other ones into planes for the ones further out. It will make the render drastically more efficient while filling the scene up and making the forest seem lush.

The motion blur on the wheels currently makes no sense in correlation to the rest of the scene.
If the car is in motion and your shutter is slow enough to blur the wheels spinning, there should be some motion blur to the close up scenery as well. References:


http://digital-photography-school.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/car-photography-tips-S3-driving-shot.jpg
You have a great car model here, it would be a shame to not showcase it nicely.

Thank you AdamTM - all very good points - I’ll certainly try them in the next iteration :slight_smile:

It is really difficult to get a high definition pic of a dirt road surface taken from above without perspective - I’ll try painting my own next. It really needs the tracks made by passing traffic. I did intend using stones and leaves on the road, but after arm-wrestling the particle emitter for a few weeks to get a decent result, gave up on that.

In the meantime I’ve got the idea of making a few domains by duplicating parts of the road to emit and giving the domain a transparent texture. That way I should be able to put each domain in its own layer without Z-fighting?

My though process in deciding whether or not to blur the wheels, right or wrong, was that blur is caused by something - either the camera or the subject, moving and the shutter speed not being set high enough to freeze the action. This would happen in the case where the subject was being panned, so the background would blur. In this case, with the car moving towards the camera, there would be no need to pan, so the background would not blur, but the wheels are turning, so they would blur. Not disputing the point, just explaining. I’ll go test this theory later today and hope not to get run over in the process :slight_smile:

Thanks so much for your advice - really appreciated.

I think that you could get a long way with a procedural textured road material. Then just spread some stones and leaves in the foreground, with some leaves swirling behind the car as it passes (vortex).

This tutorial has many elements that you are trying to reproduce. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzbE7tN_YIY

That is the very same tutorial I’ve been following - got it downloaded and watch it over and over - amazing how I can copy click-for-click and get a different result.

I tried the fallen leaves and stones - only 3 000 each, very low poly. A 25% size render took 3 hours and the improvement was barely noticeable. Removed the particle generators and the same render, with all those trees, took 5 mins! So, the swirling leaves will have to wait until I can afford a Cray computer :slight_smile:

Anyhow, it’s good to bang up against the limitations, I’ll learn to be more economical.

So, back to the drawing-board.

Cheers:)

Here is the final - what I have been guilty of is trying to do too much in one scene, showcase the car and produce a moody pic, without achieving either.

So, I’ll say this was a nice sunny day for going for a ride in the country and call it a day!

Thanks to all who helped me along the way :slight_smile:

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Road looks great but the car material looks odd. Almost like its in a studio (big white slabs reflected on bonnet etc.). So close… do try to improve it, its a winner!

Thanks for the encouragement:)

I guess after rendering the same thing 100 times, one can get crosseyed and stop looking for the small telltale signs… Thanks for picking up on that…found that when I eventually caught on that the blue cast in the road was caused by the HDRI sky, I put in an overhead emitter plane to counteract that and forgot about it when doing the car layer render. So, yes, it did have a great big slab of overhead light on it!

Since doing that render, I had an accidental movement of the camera, so when I rendered only the car layer for this one, it was slightly out of place and I’ve done a “best fit” in Gimp - not great, but I won’t have any time to play with it for the next few days, so will post to hear whether this is an improvement?

Cheers

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i would lower the cam more and looking more upwards then. but nice shot :slight_smile:

Thank you - I’ve since learned a lot more about Blender and will revisit this scene to make the improvements:)