I wanted to add some smoke so I spent all night trying to use the smoke simulator and got horrible results that took way too long to render on my machine.
After some searching, I found this post by Scott Milner
Here is the result:
I did have to change some of his shader because I didn’t want the smoke to emit light and you could tell where the smoke hits the sides of the mesh so I just added a gradient that mixed the shader with a transparent shader. Thanks to this method i’m able to render that image in 5 seconds with GPU instead of the crappy looking one in 1 hour on CPU.
-retopo’d the gargoyle sculpt (still want to change wings then sculpt a bit more detail with multi res)
-Added background buildings
-appended blimp from earlier project
-changed direction of the main light source so it points up towards batman
i don’t know if it’s just me, but my eyes are directly drawn to the gargoyle statue, not batman himself. perhaps it’s because it is textured better than the main character. maybe some DOF would fix it, and perhaps work on the camera position, have you tried to position it by the rule of thirds? or maybe even the golden ratio?
I changed some of his materials and played around with the camera a bit. The img dimensions, focal length and position of the camera were changed to help give more emphasis on the character.
I did try to bake the model but the result wasn’t very good. The suit looked okay but the gauntlets, boots and cowl didn’t turn out that good. Those materials rely heavily on fresnel so I couldnt bake the reflections. I guess it was because fresnel determined by what the viewport/camera is looking at and since baking is done from all directions, it wouldn’t be able to replicate what I have in the render.
This might be my last post for about a bit. Today I took a break from the main scene and set up a turntable so I could make a animation showing the wireframe, viewport and render ready materials.The wireframe for the boot needs to be fixed and I would like to show less sub divisions for the chest emblem.
Its going to take a few days to render the frames then on Monday I’ll be going on vacation for a week and wont have access to blender.
I’ve been watching this for a little bit. I like the work you’ve done on the modeling/sculpting. It’s rather excellent. Something looks wrong with the overall feel of the final image, I couldn’t tell you what though. It might be lighting or texture related. I personally like the camera angle of your last wire-frame image. Very good work so far.
Didn’t have time to render all of the frames for the fully textured turntable but here is the OpenGL and wireframe animation.
Thanks victorkeyes, I also think something is off so im planning on making a new scene. Just got back from my trip and I took a bunch of pictures of buildings ranging from new to old and gothic. After I model some buildings I will work on the lighting and camera placement again.
Made some new buildings. Still have to add more to the roofs and more detail to the close up buildings.
I’m going to continue playing around with the layout city. I found these concepts from the new Arkham Knight game and arkham city cinematic and thought they were cool. The only thing I dont like is that the character is either too far away or has his back turned to the camera. I would like to incorporate some of the volumetric lighting and blurred light sources. Not sure if i want to add rain but it might be fun trying to make the character look wet.
-added some vents, antennas, water towers and cubed shaped objects to the roof
-added a couple of new buildings, most notable one is bottom right
-slight camera adjustments
Im not going to work on this much tonight but I might quickly model one of those window washing platforms for the skyscrappers or fire escapes for the foreground buildings.
There are some things that I’ve thought about adding but not sure like a billboard or neon sign somewhere. The bat signal or some bats in the sky. Should I add a train on one of the tracks? I might model some basic street lights so they can act as a light source even though they wont be seen.
Here’s the first try at lighting the scene.
Lights:
1 environment texture
2 spotlights pointed at batman
1 mesh light in each building, lighting up the interior
2 mesh lights at street level to make it look like the streets are busy
-Added rain
-played around with the pose
-changed the lighting on the foreground
-added some smoke/mist
I want to work on the buildings tomorrow by adding basic interiors, slight modifications to the exteriors and maybe start making the materials for the buildings. I think I’ll try to aim more cartoonish with the materials compared to last time. There will be less detail in the textures and more diffuse, maybe no bump at all.
I did have atmospheric perspective earlier but when I added the spotlight there was a lot of noise where the light beam was and I couldn’t think of a way to fix it. I did tackle that again today and I realized I could just use a mask and blur that part of the Z depth pass and it worked.
you might want to experiment with rim lighting for the batman model - I have a feeling it could work really well since it’d accentuate his silhouette
the highlights on the gargoyle kind of pull the viewer’s eye down and away from batman. Maybe reduce that light’s strength or change its angle?
-the spotlight on the right is a good decision composition wise because it leads the eye up towards batman…but on closer inspection it’s kind of confusing. At first glance I thought the spotlight was shining directly at him and kind of lighting up his chest. But I don’t think that’s really the case…it’s kind of hard to tell where this beam of light is spatially.
Just an idea - what if you moved the spotlight to the brown building on the far right and had it pointed in the sky towards the blimp?
Here is a previous render with the spotlight pointing at the sky. You were right about why I changed it to point at batman and that its current location is confusing. I guess the image looks a bit flat. I’ll move the spotlight over to the far right and point it back towards the blimp.
I’ll post something later tonight, once i implement your suggestions and do a bit more.
