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C3/DS Metaroom BG: Part 2
I didn't make any progress on the metaroom project over the week, but I planned this as a weekend project so that's fine! Here's my next batch of progress.
I toggled elements on and off throughout for this one to make the WIP renders faster, so it's less obviously linear visually than the last post was.
WIP 7: Backdrop progress - set up a material for the big window and made a space background. Window material is glossy mixed with transparent - it's meant to be glass, but since I don't want refraction for this, using the actual glass shader would just introduce noise and fireflies. The patterning on it is a voronoi texture hooked up to the material's displacement, I think with a color ramp to tweak the effect a bit.
The space background I just made in photoshop and set up as a low-strength emissive texture for a fullbright effect. (It's a few layers of generated stars with a recolored nasa photo added in.) Also I adjusted the lighting so it's a good bit brighter.
WIP 8: No changes except I toggled on all the stuff to see how it rendered out with the adjusted lighting.
WIP 9: Added particle system leaves to the placeholder shrubs - it looks okay at this scale, but ultimately I'm not happy with the quality so I'm going to redo these shrubs by hand. Applied this optimization trick to the water in order to reduce all the noise - worked very nicely!
WIP 10: Blocked in the waterfalls with a very ugly placeholder material.
WIP 11: Replaced the blocked-in stone placeholder with "real" rocks - they're all just subsurf'd cubes with cuts added as necessary to make funky shapes.
WIP 12: A few things going on here! I made another type of shrub: this one by hand, out of subdivided planes with an image texture. It's a little more fern-shaped and less round than I intended, but it works fine for variety. Added a couple rocks. I did a full-scale test render and threw some norn sprites on top, and realized I had enough space for an underground room and a lift, so I've blocked that in here.
WIP 13: Textures! I think the ones I'm using are all from textures.com mostly. I've just thrown a few dirt textures on the, uh, dirt. The interior dirt and the top dirt are probably fine; the cutaway dirt is (especially at full-scale) kinda weird and I'll likely change it later.
WIP 14: Texturing on the back wall- I think it's a patinaed brass texture that I just kind of muddled a bit with nodes so it's lower-contrast and has another voronoi displacement on it, to make it sort of match the window.
WIP 15: It occurred to me that I could probably fake caustics in the pond so I immediately did that. They're a little too bright in this render, but: the pond bottom was previously the same texture as the other top soil. I copied that material and then set it up with the following nodes:
So the caustics are just a voronoi texture I've set up to a color ramp (which I've done a lot for this project so far...), hooked up to an emission shader that's added to the regular diffuse image texture. Nice and cheap and it looks exactly how I wanted it to!
Here's another angle on it for fun.
WIP 16: I've adjusted the caustics brightness down to about half of what it was before and have added what will be the walkable surface into the underground room.
I'm unsure what I'm actually going to do with the lower room- now that I look at it again the thinness of the dirt there is bugging me, so maybe I'll add another barrier (like the exterior rim of the room) to make that less obvious. Maybe a mushroom garden would be cute in there.
general thoughts: I will need to redo the foliage on the big tree and the round shrubs by hand, I think. The particle system set-up they currently have is alright for these tiny renders but they look quite bad at full-scale. The tree especially deserves a more careful approach since it's the room's focal point. Will be fixing up the waterfalls in photoshop when this is all otherwise done, I think, so I think they're good enough for now.
The big tree could also serve as a good opportunity to have a room with seasonal changes. Maybe I make it a plum tree? Flowers in spring, leaves (and fruit) in summer and fall, and bare branches in winter.
... also, someone wanted me to hide something in the waterfall, so I obliged.
(suzanne is sadly too visible through the waterfall so she won't be appearing in the finished background - or at least not there...)
I toggled elements on and off throughout for this one to make the WIP renders faster, so it's less obviously linear visually than the last post was.
WIP 7: Backdrop progress - set up a material for the big window and made a space background. Window material is glossy mixed with transparent - it's meant to be glass, but since I don't want refraction for this, using the actual glass shader would just introduce noise and fireflies. The patterning on it is a voronoi texture hooked up to the material's displacement, I think with a color ramp to tweak the effect a bit.
The space background I just made in photoshop and set up as a low-strength emissive texture for a fullbright effect. (It's a few layers of generated stars with a recolored nasa photo added in.) Also I adjusted the lighting so it's a good bit brighter.
WIP 8: No changes except I toggled on all the stuff to see how it rendered out with the adjusted lighting.
WIP 9: Added particle system leaves to the placeholder shrubs - it looks okay at this scale, but ultimately I'm not happy with the quality so I'm going to redo these shrubs by hand. Applied this optimization trick to the water in order to reduce all the noise - worked very nicely!
WIP 10: Blocked in the waterfalls with a very ugly placeholder material.
WIP 11: Replaced the blocked-in stone placeholder with "real" rocks - they're all just subsurf'd cubes with cuts added as necessary to make funky shapes.
WIP 12: A few things going on here! I made another type of shrub: this one by hand, out of subdivided planes with an image texture. It's a little more fern-shaped and less round than I intended, but it works fine for variety. Added a couple rocks. I did a full-scale test render and threw some norn sprites on top, and realized I had enough space for an underground room and a lift, so I've blocked that in here.
WIP 13: Textures! I think the ones I'm using are all from textures.com mostly. I've just thrown a few dirt textures on the, uh, dirt. The interior dirt and the top dirt are probably fine; the cutaway dirt is (especially at full-scale) kinda weird and I'll likely change it later.
WIP 14: Texturing on the back wall- I think it's a patinaed brass texture that I just kind of muddled a bit with nodes so it's lower-contrast and has another voronoi displacement on it, to make it sort of match the window.
WIP 15: It occurred to me that I could probably fake caustics in the pond so I immediately did that. They're a little too bright in this render, but: the pond bottom was previously the same texture as the other top soil. I copied that material and then set it up with the following nodes:
So the caustics are just a voronoi texture I've set up to a color ramp (which I've done a lot for this project so far...), hooked up to an emission shader that's added to the regular diffuse image texture. Nice and cheap and it looks exactly how I wanted it to!
Here's another angle on it for fun.
WIP 16: I've adjusted the caustics brightness down to about half of what it was before and have added what will be the walkable surface into the underground room.
I'm unsure what I'm actually going to do with the lower room- now that I look at it again the thinness of the dirt there is bugging me, so maybe I'll add another barrier (like the exterior rim of the room) to make that less obvious. Maybe a mushroom garden would be cute in there.
general thoughts: I will need to redo the foliage on the big tree and the round shrubs by hand, I think. The particle system set-up they currently have is alright for these tiny renders but they look quite bad at full-scale. The tree especially deserves a more careful approach since it's the room's focal point. Will be fixing up the waterfalls in photoshop when this is all otherwise done, I think, so I think they're good enough for now.
The big tree could also serve as a good opportunity to have a room with seasonal changes. Maybe I make it a plum tree? Flowers in spring, leaves (and fruit) in summer and fall, and bare branches in winter.
... also, someone wanted me to hide something in the waterfall, so I obliged.
(suzanne is sadly too visible through the waterfall so she won't be appearing in the finished background - or at least not there...)