Old Dock

[jimtuv]

I know it's part of the boat. But this is a completely different scene file with all it's own intricacies so I figured I would use a separate WIP to work on it.

I am still in the early stages of development. I have blocked out the major shapes and am starting a little more detail on the dock. Here I added some reference people to make sure the scale isn't odd. The figures are 6 feet tall. The boat 27 feet long and 8 foot wide. The back building right now is 25 foot wide and about 9 foot at the edge of the roof.

Testscene7.jpg

[jimtuv]

I have been playing with fog today and some on the water (I still hate the water) I got the fog idea from this thread over at blenderartist.org

You mix a sky color with the render layer using a mix node but use the render layers z output put through a normalize and RGB curve for the mix factor.

3 Landscapes

So here is what the node setup looks like and the result.

Testscene11.jpg

Moving the RGB curve controls the distance of the fog. It has very fine control and pretty good results

Testscene9.jpg

[radialronnie]

The fog is very nice! But eew the character!

[jimtuv]

Couldn't help myself. Saw him standing there and tutu just hit my mind.

Well worked a little today. I didn't have much time so I just added some test materials to the dock and modeled the planks.

Testscene12.jpg

[jimtuv]

I am trying me best to do believable water About ready to pull my hair out. Here is my latest attempt. I modeled the water using a super high poly mesh then baked a normal map onto a low poly plane for this one. Better but not perfect yet.

Testscene14.jpg

There are some strange lines and shapes showing up. They are the underwater stuff I haven't modeled yet so there is some geometry under there that won't be in the fished model. If I can't pull off the water the rest just wont work.

[zyzzy]

the water looks pretty good to me, but it seems it needs to be more reflective, maybe.

[chapel]

I think this will turn out really nice.
The stones on the peer seems to be out of scale compared to the boat.
And the water is too clear. Maybe turn down the alpha some. Do you have a color set for the water, cause it seems to me that the sky isn't reflected that much (this is really what gives water it's color - unless it's mud-filled waters).

The texture for the wood looks really great.

[jimtuv]

I think this will turn out really nice.
The stones on the peer seems to be out of scale compared to the boat.
And the water is too clear. Maybe turn down the alpha some. Do you have a color set for the water, cause it seems to me that the sky isn't reflected that much (this is really what gives water it's color - unless it's mud-filled waters).

The texture for the wood looks really great.

The stone I just threw in to see if I even want a wall at all. I will scale it right and put some decent materials on it if I decided to keep the wall.

I did forget to turn down the diffuse reflection to 0.

Here I threw in a high poly plane that has a displacement modifier applied to it.

Materialtest2.jpg

Here is a test I did with Suzanne. First a High poly plane.

Materialtest.jpg

Now exactly the same set up only difference is a low poly plane with normals baked on it from the high poly plane.

Materialtest1.jpg

Unfortunatly it will not work this way.

I will have to use a High poly plane because of the lack of waves at the model surface. It looks really strange to have a wave and straight line on the model like it was a completely still water surface.

So now the major problem is compositing all this together. I have to have the entire boat in reflection and most of the dock. There is no way to have that many vertices in one file. The plane itself has 1.5 million faces. The boat has about the same.

[zyzzy]

I would think that you could use a very low poly plane and textues applied to the normals to achieve a very similar effect.

You could have more verts very close to the camera and around the boat and dock, but significantly fewer verts farther away.

[Nixon]

maybe u could fake it by attatching a decent lil wave plane on the boat...maybe when layered upon each other ppl. wont be able to notice... (maybe it could blend out in a radial pattern..those are hard to identify
just an idea...might be a crappy one tho..but whenever one encounters such probs there might be a trick to make it seem just like 'as if'...

maybe an empty parented to the boat that drives the displacement at the place where the boat is..increasing it only in that spot
it could be rocking back and forth just like real waves would do when breaking on the hull of the ship..
strange thoughts i get now and then dont bother if they are bs...
looking cool the dock scene, water looks awesome and the compostion will work great i bet

[Unhurdof]

The water looks quite convincing to me. Nice technique too. As for the issues with compositing, I wish I could offer more help. The only thing I could think of would be to composite everything as a post process effect which would mean nothing would be in the same scene together. I'm not sure how practical that would be for your needs, but it'd work in a crunch.

[BnBGobo99]

They had this issue on pirates o' carabian during worldpool scene and they solved it by applying a displacement modifier from the waves applied--get this--to the boat. It deformed the boat pretty badly, but I'm pulling up that episode of "science of the movies" now to find out exacly what they did next.

[BnBGobo99]

Ok, I watched the segment and it didn't make a lot of sense as to why they applied the deform to the boat. The wakes from the boat were applied as a deformation to a flat plane, then that plane had an animated normal map baked that was then set as the displacement modifier to the boat itself... But they never explained why.
But I seem to remember there was a chapter on this in the book bounce, tumble and splash using a lifesaver donut on an ocean surface. That might be worth a look into on tony mullins website.

[chapel]

Hey B!
How do you know all these things You seem to know about the strangest things!

[jimtuv]

I made a little progress today. I remodeled a bunch of stuff and started to refine the buildings a bit. I am slowly getting the water under control. I need only now I think to bump up the mirror and change the Fresnel fall off a bit.
I will have quite a task ahead unwrapping all of this and texturing everything.

Here is the update.

Testscene17.jpg