[env] Realistic Lighthouse Scene

This is a 3D recreation of a pencil sketch by the massively talented person here; [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

And here's my progress on it;
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What's done;
-the modeling on the lighthouse and shack.

What needs to be done;
-need to create a good water shader.

-Skin the lighthouse, shack, and pier.

- create a texture and shader for the sand.

-Improve the procedural rock shader.

-Figure out the best way to add clouds that will appear in the ocean's reflection. (I'm thinking custom billboards)

-Tweak particle heat groups so that the transitions between grass and sand aren't so sudden.

-Improve upon the improvement!

Details and WIP imagines;

The clapboards and slates are all procedural with carefully setup world-space displacements and vertex groups so that each single item is different each time I create a new linked copy and move it.
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The circular floor boards were all parallel, before I warped them around a circle object with the curve mod.
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Nice stuff. I really like the randomisation on the building roof and walls. Serious attention to detail considering it's a pretty small part of the scene. Warping the planks as well, I wouldn't have thought of that. I'll make a mental note in case I ever need to do something like that.

Just one suggestion, I know you said you are going to play with the weight painting of the grass, you might want to try randomising it a bit more. It looks like it's in rows, especially at the edges where it thins out. I think the Randomise setting in the emitter panel of the particle system will sort that out if you haven't already got it set. The default is jitter which produces the rows and regular patterns.

Give it a try and you may not need to do so much with the weight painting.

Wow, very nice indeed! Love the detail. Some day, some day... *shakes head*

this is great.

i was going to comment on attention to detail and see that i've been beaten to it.....but still....that's what separates good renders from GREAT ones.

really looking forward to this.


(i'm on vacation this week, there's a lighthouse near here, i'm gonna go check it out)

Thanks for the encouraging input guys! It means a lot to me.

I'm currently working on making the sand look better, but I haven't had much headway so no render for now. Hopefully I'll have some free time tomorrow after work.

On another note, This scene is getting rather heavy unfortunately. The grass is all mesh, and the clapboards and slates all have at least a bit of subsurfacing so all told, the scene has 2.5mil rendered vertices at this point. I can only render the scene one time before I have to restart Blender to prevent it from crashing. (memory error)

zyzzy wrote:
(i'm on vacation this week, there's a lighthouse near here, i'm gonna go check it out)

Cool! I hope you have a great time!

Hey you're welcome that's why this place is here And credit where it's due, that's great stuff.

If you want to reduce your poly count, try changing the grass using hair particle system and using children particles with clumping. You can get a very similair effect to what you have now but turn on strand rendering and it will really help your render times. Drops the used memory a ton.

Strangebloke wrote:
If you want to reduce your poly count, try changing the grass using hair particle system and using children particles with clumping. You can get a very similar effect to what you have now but turn on strand rendering and it will really help your render times. Drops the used memory a ton.

I already use pSys grouping and children for the grass, but I prefer mesh grasses for their ease of use and flexibility.

The sand still needs work, but I'm out of time for now.

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OK fair enough. Keep going it's looking great.

Still looking great... one tiny crit though. It could be me, but does it look like there's a bit of a scale thing going on between the posts in the foreground and the dock and small building. There just doesn't look like enough distance for that kind of effect.

So you're saying the posts are too big? Now that you mention it, I think you're right. Shall fix immediately.

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I really don't know why that is... But wow!, this thing looks better every time I see it! What happened to the roof?

Xraygunner wrote:What happened to the roof?

It happens to be several million polygons so I tossed it on another layer for now.

Ahhh, good call... lol!!

Yep, saves on RAM usage, and even saves a bit of render time, so yay!

I'm currently playing around with completely changing the look of the scene. I've never done any cloudy/stormy scenes so I decided to give that a go.

I'm not making a lot of headway with this unfortunately.
Still struggling with the water. For this render I enabled raytraced refraction for the water which... rather bumped up the render time a bit. I'm going to play around with the 'falloff' values, and the diffusion and reflection colors a bit as right now the water looks oil-polluted. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

(fullsize for nice res. this time)
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I also can NOT figure out why the grass in the forground looks different from the rest. It's all the same particles and materials and yet it looks darker. Anyone ever experience something like that?


Main things to do;
Get that water looking right.. *grips head in hands*
Troubleshoot and fix that pesky grass problem.

Hi

Looking better each time. Keep going.

I think your main problem with the sea is the sky. Try putting a real sky photo with clouds in the background on a plane and let the sea reflect it. It'll break up the surface more and help with the realism. Play with the fresnel seetings under mirror as well.

As for the grass I'm not sure. Not seen that particular problem. Have you tried changing the angle of your lighting to see if that helps? Or maybe try translucency if you haven't already got it set on Let a bit more light pass through it and see if that helps.

I'm definitely no expert, but when I looked at the grass issue my mind went straight to "ramp". Looks like there's a falloff there... could this be the case somewhere in your settings?

Did you forget to map the ramp to the particles by some far-flung chance?