August/September 2017 Challenge: O'Gray's Pearls

[- JO -]

Wow! It's amazing this rendering! We could almost touch those mountains! What a great job!

And you really have some merit: the software screenshot shows a program that seems really complicated!

[Mouse]

Wow! It's amazing this rendering! We could almost touch those mountains! What a great job!

And you really have some merit: the software screenshot shows a program that seems really complicated!

Thank you, Jo

The software looks complicated, but once you grasp what all the different types of node do its not so difficult to make a texture from scratch like that

The hardest part wasn't the textures. It was forcing the non-orthographic camera to take a more or less parallel perspective shot, which entailed backing it away from the terrain by about 10 miles (to scale) and vastly increasing the focal length from the normal 35mm to about 500mm. This in turn meant the entire atmosphere got in the way, and all I could see was a hazy white-out. So I had to create a new atmosphere that had no decay, fog, or mist, but which retained enough scattering to fill the shaded areas with sufficient reflected and refracted light, or they would just have been black.

The state-of-the art default photometric Vue atmosphere is designed to behave as realistically as possible, but it really gets in the way if you want to do something a bit odd like this

[- JO -]

Thank you, Jo

The software looks complicated, but once you grasp what all the different types of node do its not so difficult to make a texture from scratch like that

The hardest part wasn't the textures. It was forcing the non-orthographic camera to take a more or less parallel perspective shot, which entailed backing it away from the terrain by about 10 miles (to scale) and vastly increasing the focal length from the normal 35mm to about 500mm. This in turn meant the entire atmosphere got in the way, and all I could see was a hazy white-out. So I had to create a new atmosphere that had no decay, fog, or mist, but which retained enough scattering to fill the shaded areas with sufficient reflected and refracted light, or they would just have been black.

The state-of-the art default photometric Vue atmosphere is designed to behave as realistically as possible, but it really gets in the way if you want to do something a bit odd like this

I have to take your words for the software ... The maneuver you describe seems to me already quite complicated ... In any case, it takes a lot of work and this work pays! The picture is beautiful

[Mouse]

Thanks again, Jo

Between you and me, if Sketchup did landscape forms as well as it does buildings (without any unnatural pointy bits and without crashing on the smaller machine all the time that is), there'd be no contest from a purely mapping point of view - it would be Sketchup every time. The desert sand and the grass on the green landscape might be procedural textures, but the rock texture wrapped around the desert mesa is a textures.com texture, which could be used in Sketchup just as easily as it is in Vue

[Ilanthar]

Impressive landscapes, Mouse! Very lively.

[Mouse]

Aw thanks Ilanthar

I've a long way to go with the space background, though

EDIT: And now for something completely different.

I've been working on these onion domes for my Urban theme - first in Blender, and then in Sketchup where the rest of the city is. I needed something really different, but at the scale I'll be doing the city (each pearl is about 2-3 miles in diameter), they probably won't be all that noticeable. In fact the city itself will just really be textured greyish blocks at that scale.

Never mind! I can use them for something else I expect

Domes.jpg

[Mouse]

I've had a bit of a rethink about the layout, and refined the overall style just a bit. Didn't like the way the pearls were being half filled with rock, so I lowered the land level to about a third instead of a half. The text was an accident of layer ordering, and is very, ummm.... colourful! Please let me know if it hurts your eyes.

### Latest WIP ###

OGrays Pearls 04.jpg

The reason I'm being a bit quiet about the backstory is that its become something of a novel at this end - one that I might end up publishing. Thanks for the 'boot up the inspiration', Straf, Diamond and ChickPea. I think my imagination was beginning to fall asleep just a bit till you got me thinking on this one

[Tonnichiwa]

I like it! This is turning out to be my favorite entry so far!

[Mouse]

Thank you, Tony

There is still a long way to go, and I am being distracted by an urge to write!

How is your entry going?

....

EDIT: btw - if anyone else is experiencing problems with double posting accidents where you end up posting the same comment twice, I believe it might be connected with broadband issues. Even though I have decent speed with my mobile connection, my reception is fluctuating wildly between 0 and 3 bars right at the moment:

one bar.JPG

The way I deal with it is to ignore the feeling that it hasn't worked when the page that follows says 'do you wish to leave this page' just after you hit the 'Post quick reply' button. In other words I click 'yes' to leave the page. Almost invariably the post has already been made. Saying 'no' to that question, and then hitting 'Post quick reply' button a second time usually ends up with a double post.

If you have just written War and Peace, and you are a bit nervous of losing all your hard work, copy the entire comment before you hit the Post quick reply button. You can do this by highlighting the comment box contents and pressing CTRL+C on your keyboard. Then if you do lose everything you can just paste it into the blank comment box (CTRL+V).

[Mouse]

I think I may just have set myself a totally unachievable target by redesigning this map to include 17 individual portal maps - one of them an isometric city map (the biggest one), but it should be fun trying

### Latest WIP ###
OGrays Pearls 05.jpg

There's a bit of backstory included in the map this time, but not enough to really give the game away as far as the novel goes