Windmill Valley

[photoman]

Hello y'all! Been inspired recently to pickup an old project of mine. So imagine a summer day, a breeze whispering to the trees and creating paths through the grass on the hills, gently spinning the windmill that time and nature have left behind. Thats my scene in a sentence. Ive gotten started on the modeling of the windmill. I plan to "try" and create my own procedural rusty metal shaders but may resort to decals or a darktree shader. I will also use hair for the golden grass and leaves on the oaktrees. I may model a barn or some other point of interest too.

 

 

More coming

 

Photoman

[KenH]

Great start. Why is there a patch out on it's own?

[TheSpleen]

Great start. Why is there a patch out on it's own?

one of those UFO's?

[photoman]

That patch was the blade I used for sweeping the other ones. I'll remove it when Im done. I finished the modelling aspect late last night and set a couple renders and here they are:

More comming, still have to texture the windmill, then model other points of interest.

 

Photoman

[agep]

Nice and clean model

[TheSpleen]

very nice

[photoman]

Thanks for the feedback , I just checked the patch count and there is only 1906 patches! For the texture Im going to probably use a bitmapped based procedural texture using a lot of GIMP work and tweeking in A:M.

Just noticed, Should I add a pipe or something coming from the top?

As well for another point of interest, what about a water tower and a small shack of some kind?

Just brainstorming

 

Photoman

[TheSpleen]

[phatso]

I was gonna say, if you do a material for the windmill plus all those leaves and grass, by the time you get a sequence rendered you'll be old enough to go and celebrate at a bar. Use decals, for gossakes.

 

More info than you want, probably: if this is an old U.S. farm, the windmill would have been used to pump water. There was either a crank at the top and a straight pipe down the middle of the tower, which went up and down to pump water - or a gearbox and a turning pipe to accomplish the same thing a different way. Visually the same I guess.

 

In Canada, electricity didn't come to the prairie until the early 1960s. Windmills had generators attached, and buildings had large batteries in the basement. Entire farms were wired with 32V DC lights and appliances. So no central pipe.

 

There, aren't you sorry you asked?

 

A water tower with maybe a wooden tank and shallow conical roof would be appropriate. Since all the farmer needed was flow, not pressure, the tower would be short, maybe 10 feet at the base of the tank, and squat.

 

Shack? Sure. Every old farm has at least one. (Mine has two.) Also a barn, a shed with sliding doors (big enough to get horse and carriage in and out, mine is 20'x40') and granary. The granary would have slats with 1" spaces between, so moisture wouldn't collect and rot the corn. Rectangular, maybe 6' x 8'. If the farm wasn't extremely old, a concrete silo.

 

Oh - most necessary of all: don't forget the outhouse!

[phatso]

Those are cool, spleen, did you make them?

[photoman]

Update, finished modeling the water tower as well. Connected the two models in a action and rendered them. The ambience occ./wireframe render is slightly not right, the water tower is now at a different scale but the splines are the same. I also textured using darktrees. I tried using bitmapps but wasnt getting the right look.

More on the way,

 

Photoman

[phatso]

I doubt if the tank's tower would have been splayed that much, if at all. Splay is for when the primary force to be resisted is wind. When the primary force is weight, supports are vertical or slightly splayed.

 

Other than that, these models "ring true." My grandparents had a windmill on their farm on the Canadian prairie, and your model could pass as a photograph of it (other than surfaces, but you'll get those).

[TheSpleen]

nailed it!

[itsjustme]

Looks great so far, Josh!

[photoman]

Update! Modelled the barn. Very basic, no interior at all just the roof and walls. I plan to decal texture it all so that'll be easy to render.

Im thought that I should rig the windmill so that it can turn and spin. So.. theres going to be a lot undo'ing and cursing for I have never ever rigged!!

 

More off the machine soon.

 

Photoman

[steve392]

Good looking barn ,will be good to decal

[photoman]

Quick Update

Rigged the windmill (Yes it was a hard task for me so go ahead and laugh).Took me about 5 minutes surpisingly, I even managed to add constraints on the rotators.

Windmill_Rigtesta.mov

 

Texture Time for the Barn!

 

Photoman

[matt_stanford]

Lookin good!

[photoman]

Update!

First off, THANKS! for the feedback, it expands my knowledge and gives me a better perspective on what I am doing!!

 

Textured the Barn, all using 2 different textures with a bump map for each and a displacement map on the roof (Still tweaking all of them).

I dont know what else to model right now. I have been enjoying the modeling for I rarely ever model.

The next step (if the modeling is finished) is to create the terrain (Valley) and set the scene and atmosphere. Add some grass and misc textures in there and Im done. The hard part though is getting everthing to feel in scale. Im going to spend a lot of time with the skydome and fog settings as well as using a single sun light w/ shadows and the global ambience settings.

 

More coming!

 

Photoman

 

PS Please C&C

[TheSpleen]

fenceline

[agep]

Very nice job on the texturing of the building

[dre4mer]

Yeah, I really like the board texturing too! Good work.

 

-Ethan

[photoman]

Update!

Modeled a fence (Took all of 3 minutes including the texture).

I also created the terrain and a *quick* ground texture that will be improved later. I set the scene together too. Then I played god and made hair umm grass grow on the scene. After applying the color decal I checked the hair count and found it to be:

Not very surprised but to put it into comparison one of my previous scenes which was hair/grass intensive had only 23k hairs. So I tweaked and created several seperate hair materials at different densitys which decreased with distance from the camera. I check again and it was at:

That is a much better number, it will actually not cripple my computer and leave it bleeding.

Now all I have to do is tweak and tweak and tweak! I plan to experiment with different lighting scenarios and skydomes. Hmmm just imagine a AO render!

Anyway more coming.

 

Photoman

 

PS Thanks for the comments!

[photoman]

Quick Update.

Adjusted the atmosphere to dusk to see if it would look any good. The sky is actually the MultiSky material plugin. I also redid the grass so its now at 100k hairs.

Took 37minutes @ 750x400 4pass. I can only imagine the final render (3000x1600!*)

 

More coming

 

Photoman

 

* I know the whole discussion on resolution and Im willing to deal with the render times.

[TheSpleen]

looks excellent! Love it all!

[Paul Forwood]

This is coming on in leaps and bounds. Well done!

One thing to be careful of when texturing wooden surfaces is the grain. Wood grain runs the length of the timber, like very tiny, tightly packed straws which draw water up into every part of the tree. In the attached image I have roughly marked the areas that need some attention. The facia boards that run along the edges of the roof and the braces on the doors should be retextured so that the grain runs along their length rather than across it. Other than that it is all coming together beautifully. Nice subtle use of fog.

[photoman]

Update!

I fixed the barn a bit. (Changed the door decal so its physical correct now)

You will probably notice I did not change the roof edge to match the top. The reason for that is that it follows the "grain" of the steel slates on the under side. Though part of it is me being lazy , though chances are that I will fix it as well as making the roof a bit thinner.

I need to run more passes to get rid of the pixelly hills, the grass needs more passes to be able to look its best. I also picked the day/afternoon atmosphere, it brought out more details in the scene than the dusk. Im fiddling with the sun and ambient light amounts to get the right shadows, theyre at (Sun 150%, ambience 20%). I want to have those defined shadows as well as the slight lighting of the barn roof.

 

I did a bunch of tweaks to the whole scene as well. I feel like it needs something more though, I dont want to add trees because that will kill my render time (Still reasonable (Reasonable as in it can render in one night at my full res according to my calculations which I proved accurate)). Though if I dont find anything else I will have to throw some in. The amount of trees I would have to add to comply with the scale would be VERY high say at least 20,nall with a probable patch count of 1-2k and a DarkTree Texture. I would not be leaves on them though, that would make the render even longer. (Right now its at 18minutes passes at 1500x800 which is very reasonable.)

 

I also readjusted the hair again, I made it more dense and longer (The far hair/grass is 3 times as long as the foregrounds as the foreground is 4 times more dense). I did many render tests today (at 750x400) and figured out using some basic algebra that my final render at (3000x1600 9pass) settings would be around 12 hours pessimistically.

Time to tweak everything again and again.

 

Photoman

 

PS look at the windmill.

 

EDIT: Clarity and Grammer

[Eric2575]

Very nice work and project. Doing something like this really helps hone your skills and imagination. Try giving a taper to the grass and using some other vegetation like random bushes or tumbleweeds to break up the scenery a bit. It might also help if you did not do the grass so uniformly all over the landscape. Have some barren areas with gravel or rocks - pretty easy to simulate using decals. Looks great, keep it up.

 

-E

[photoman]

Update.

Another quick update of tweaks.

I tapered the grass and did a few adjustments on the lighting as well.

I also grabbed a horse model of the A:M CD and posed it in. The model has tons of deadend splines and folds/creases. It looks ok but not great, after this render I adjusted the model a little bit and adding some bumps maps to it to at least simulate fur without using particle hair.

More off the machine as it gets done

 

Photoman

 

Thanks for the C&C !!! It helps!

[TheSpleen]

looks great! How about a log cabin?

[Rodney]

Looking great!

 

No real crits from me except to say the camera angle seems to make the image pretty linear overall whereas I think you have some nice opportunity to play the manmade features against the natural elements of the scene a little more. A the mountains seem a little too symmetrical and make me think the camera being a little farther over to the right looking over at the left mountain range might make for nice contrast.

 

Nice work!

[DarkLimit]

-Nice work so far, I like the windmill.

 

-The sky compared to the rest of the scene looks a bit off, it looks flat..

 

-The barn is good but I would suggest changing the angle of some of the wood, have some that are broken or completely removed, adding randomness to the walls...

 

-Add holes in the roof and have rays of light shine through.

[TheSpleen]

-Nice work so far, I like the windmill.

 

-The sky compared to the rest of the scene looks a bit off, it looks flat..

 

-The barn is good but I would suggest changing the angle of some of the wood, have some that are broken or completely removed, adding randomness to the walls...

 

-Add holes in the roof and have rays of light shine through.

good ideas here!

[phatso]

Also, depending on the story you're trying to tell, you may want the barn to lean a bit, and make the roof sag. My barn does.

[Eric2575]

For more variation in the grass, do a search in the forum on using grass with decals. In my July '08' contest entry I used that technique pretty effectively, although mine was easier to do since it was set in the desert. I used a tga with a transparent background to do grasses and dried up bushes. I attached one of the grasses for you to examine and or use if you would like to experiment with it.

Grass_test.zip

[photoman]

Update.

Did a test final render and Composite. Unfortunelty I didnt see this posts till after the render....

Busy right now so Ill update more later.

 

Photoman

 

Yes that render only took 10 hours at 6000x3200 16 passes

[Kelley]

Looking realy good, but I'd work on that fence if you want to keep the horse in.

[photoman]

Been busy as I always am... so progress is minimal right now. I plan to get a high res picture of a weed to use as the hair/grass though it still is spring here and the golden hills next to my house are a mix of greens and light yellows.

I did start on some different type of lighting schemes to get indirect lighting. Im settling with radiosity! Yes I know that is asking for long rendertimes but I like the challenge. Ive read all about how to use it from Yves site and here is a test. Still tweaking the exact settings before I try it on the whole scene.

Here is a just for fun caustic test too :

More whenever I can.

 

Photoman

[Fuchur]

Been busy as I always am... so progress is minimal right now. I plan to get a high res picture of a weed to use as the hair/grass though it still is spring here and the golden hills next to my house are a mix of greens and light yellows.

I did start on some different type of lighting schemes to get indirect lighting. Im settling with radiosity! Yes I know that is asking for long rendertimes but I like the challenge. Ive read all about how to use it from Yves site and here is a test. Still tweaking the exact settings before I try it on the whole scene.

Here is a just for fun caustic test too :

More whenever I can.

 

Photoman

 

I hope we are talking about a Still image here not a short, because Radiosity on a short is still an overkill.

 

*Fuchur*

[nino banano]

Hi photoman, very nice work, the textures are great

[Eric2575]

I really dig the mostly white render, it's a chilling, spooky render. Something John Carpenter might use in one of his movies.