Real inspiring work Manu. Thank you very much for the time-lapse. I’ve learned some very useful stuff from it.
I’ve analyzed your workflow very carefully . As mentioned before your texturing/shading is pretty awesome but here are some tips to make workflow a bit faster and more convenient:
Ctrl+Shift click to view-port render nodes with color outputs. Works the same as using the Emission node.
Ctrl+B and drag a border on view-port for a faster preview render.
Vertex colors (Dirty and worn edges) can be used directly in node editor when texturing/shading. No need to bake out textures just go to Input>Vertex Color>Col.
The compositing is particularlly interesting, I can see what you are doing but I’d love some explanation as to why / what the idea behind each step is and how you plan out this section. Does anyone know a tutorial on this kind of thing - not how to do compositing, but what the concepts are and what you are trying to achieve?
You can play it slowly in YouTube. Click the settings button and then 0.25.
I’ll try to answer that. Even though the main aspect of my compositing style is ‘Experimentation’ (not knowing what I’m doing :P)
So:
I render all kinds of passes that I think might be useful (like glossy, rust/grunge, ambient occlusion, singlematerial with different kind of light sources) and then try out different blending modes for them in Gimp, and also removing parts of the passes out with masks. Sometimes you get happy accidents by doing that.
I wanted a simple background, so nice complement color gradient and a little bit of texture will do the trick.
I also often want to add black and white radial gradient over the image with some layer blending mode to make the center point of image have most impact
I also like to constantly adjust curves and levels to have the colors and contrast in maximum. But also I’m careful of not overexposuring. That’s why I usually dim down the opacity and often collapse all the changes I’ve made and mix it with the original base layer to have as much detail and information in the image. Not just plain overblown processed look.
Then I went to Krita to overpaint all the mistakes I had from rendering and being sloppy with my UV mapping
After that I added some kind of bloom-effect that binds the bullodozer more nicely with the background
Then I put film grain and other stuff on top of the whole image that makes it even more consistent and unified. I also blurred everything just a touch, to give it more photographic look. I don’t like the sharp perfect 3D render look. Anyway there’s enough resolution to see lots of details in the image even though it is slightly blurred everywhere.
That’s about it
The main point for me is to just ‘boost’ the image as much as possible.
When you compare it with the beauty render out of the 3D program, you can see it will make a huge difference
That, is, Awesome!!! Really love the style, the colors, and the car under the wheel. The only thing that I don’t love is the floor: it is too straight. But overall, fantastic work.
. As mentioned before your texturing/shading is pretty awesome but here are some tips to make workflow a bit faster and more convenient:
