Cerbera

Well, part 8 of this excellent series has dropped, and at the beginning it contains a very interesting insight into the problems we might get while trying to bake our procedural textures. Long story short, after a fair bit of running round the houses, Adam gets it sorted in the end, but it's not immediately obvious what was going wrong in the first place, and I wondered if anyone here could shed any light on the following... In his landscape material, he has a colour, diffusion, bump and displacement going on, and makes use of the terrain mask in several of those channels, which is why he needs to bake the textures, as it is impossible to bend (or otherwise deform) the landscape without breaking those height-based terrain masks, and possibly also the displacement (which continues to give him spurious errors and weird angular polygons right til the end !). So, when baking, in particular: 1. Why does a bake of his colour channel give that horrible washed-out result ? I would expect this to be a linear workflow issue if anything, but it isn't ! 2. Why does the bake of his bump channel give a radically coarser and different noise result to what is shown in viewport and render when making that material ? 3. Is there a problem or bug with baking displacement, that gives him the weird angular polygons in certain places ? or if not, what else might have caused this ? Very interested to hear from anyone who might know why these things might be the case... Cheers CBR

Good share - thanks :) CBR

Yep, always use standard renderer, more than 2 lights, and soft shadows on all of them for anything with this much hair on it :) CBR

Very cool. Unlike nearly everyone else who has modelled this, nice to see you got the visor / eyes exactly right :) CBR

Yes that's excellent :) Lovely job ! CBR

Hey Cafe I'm a big fan of 3D mountain ranges and epic landscapes, so I keep a special eye out for any resources that help us do that sort of thing really well in Cinema. Last time I posted about this, I was sharing the excellent Nikolaus Schatz tut on making mountains with the landscape primitive, but now, with the release of the IBC rewinds, I was very pleased to see this lecture by landscape master Eric Smit, the man behind one of my favourite C4D add-ons, the Landscape Shading Kit. Here, he breaks down all the ways he uses displacement, layers, noises, distorters and terrain shaders, physical sky and atmosphere to produce probably the most realistic landscapes that Cinema can (without recourse to DEM earth etc), with a particular emphasis on the different noise types, why and when to use them, and some very helpful techniques for making noise-based terrain look more natural and less noise-based ! So if that's the sort of thing that interests you, you'll probably enjoy this as much as I did :) CBR

Coool. In both senses ;) Will do that in another post at some point...

Thank you guys for all the nice comments :) Tbh, I wonder if I would have done, had it not been a job for a client ! Ha - if I'm honest, I will need another couple of hours at the end to go round and finally eliminate them all - there are few shameful intersections remaining :) Thank you buddy. But it's just standard SDS modelling techniques + time - I have every confidence you could do this sort of thing. The initial reference pics were pretty scary looking at them as whole, but once you start breaking it down into manageable sections it becomes less daunting, and plans start to form. Oh excellent - can I show them the fridge ?! :) Thank you dude. Can I convert those to cash ? What are they - £100 each ? ;) CBR

I do like your sand texture as well :) CBR

Alas - no - client work has been keeping me mega busy ever since then. But it's still on my list of things to finish on a rainy day :) CBR

Just close the sticky note with the little cross. I don't know if this message only gets sent to those with it still turned on - it might just go to everyone -we'll have to ask @Igor. CBR

Hey Cafe I've been on some pretty epic modelling adventures recently for an upcoming film project. My producer has kindly allowed me to post some WiP shots of the base model for our close up hot air balloon. This is the first round model, enough to begin simulations on the envelope, so there are still details and additional ropework to add / refine, but we are most of the way there. *Vital Stats* Objects: 940 Polys: 80,218 (100% quads) Subdivided Polys: 6.75 million Modelling Hours so far: 32 The wicker work was certainly an interesting one, as were the tie lines, and various bits of rope style business, and the burner shrouds. All in all a very rewarding thing to model ! Here's some wires and clays... CBR

We could do with a link to the file ! CBR

Yep, lovely job, top topology :) IQP Gold star for you.

Yes but look at her ! Could you get cross with that ? Sorry - didn't mean to turn your thread into cat posts, although there can never be enough of those on the internet ;)

Oh no, the cat is far too sweet and fluffy to suffer repercussions ! (see double standards). It was only a 36 channel production mixing console that could never be used again ! :/

I would have thrown HIS toys out of the pram, and possibly into the fire. This is why I'm not suitable to raise children :) "Now son, I need to teach you what may seem a rather brutal lesson about the concept of loss"...

Sorry - I shouldn't laugh :) But I have already PM'd my condolences to Vecs for his loss...

That is quite a typical thing for large cartoon style eyes, though isn't it ? You know, the Pixar way and all that :)

He hasn't got any poles on his eyes, @Visionnext he's quad-patched at the very center :)

Ah yes, that's dealt with in the second volume, chapter 888, 'Why can't all characters be cubes?'

Well yes, but then you've got character topology unsuitable for animation, so we're stuck with it :)

I admire your dedication, but no there isn't. Wherever a circular loop joins a patch, there will be a 5 point pole. That's on Page 8412 of the IQP Quadratic Grimoire.

Yes, but as you know, 5 point poles are totally fine - there's pride in your work, and there's just too bloody fussy :) PS - was tempted to mark this 'solved' as a testament to your modelling prowess :)

Keep those cheekbones nice and high ;) Lovely topology, as usual, GI vector !