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Thank you so much, Wendy!
For me, a very nice aspect of this challenge is being able to compare my very first entry with my current entry. I can see progress.
So much credit goes to PhilW, MMoir, and the late Cripeman for their video tutorials, and to all you good folks on the Carrara forum for suggestions and answers.
My very first entry.
Looking great !!!
I love that first one too.
My first entry for Garden Category
Revisiting My First Ever Entry
The gardener is wearing the same bonnet and overalls as my first ever entry. Everything modeled, rigged, textured, and posed in Carrara, although many for prior challenges.
Looks great, Diomede! Masterful terrain work.
Thanks! You, it runs several GMIC filters.
I will need to tweak it later before entering.
Thanks, UB, Bunyip, and Dart for the nice comments. Much appreciated.
My second entry for the Garden Category
Vicky in a Garden With Some TreeMen
Treemen, plants, and walls are custom. Victoria 6, Actual Hair 2, Calidora Dress and Dragon Folk from Daz Store.
Ah Ted, your sense of humour shines through. This looks like a wonderful challenge - bringing out the best once more. Now to take a gander through the last six pages!!
I've been seeing what I can do with Philemeno's excellent blimp cutout program. Combined with his triplnar shader fixer
This first one the japanes bridge and the flat rocks in the foreground, the flowers and the leaves around the flowers were made with the cut out program - thanks Philemnon.
The greyish distant ground cover is a fountain particle thingy found in the drop down menu - I replicated that over the terrain.
The rocks are made with the organic modeller in the model room.
The distant trees are carrara trees that I render out with an alpha map and added to splats. Turned off the shadows as they can be weird.
I used the original displacement map for the terrain as a replicator map for the rocks to get the main rocks to hang around the creek.
early shot of the landscape with rock replicator in action
This second one the cutout plugin made the statue and the tree roots and the flowers and the leaves once more.
For the lighting setup I tried the classic setup. A main distant light at 120 power in a yellow colour combined with a lot of weaker lights to simulate ambient (blue) and reflected light - green. Shadows set to 12 percent on the ambient and zero on the reflector lights.
But when I set the main light to soft shadows it killed my machine.
The answer was to make four copies of the main light (the 'sun) and change their angles slightly and set them to the same yellow colour but only 30 percent power - that gave a reasonably soft main shadow - even though they all had hard shadows
Some of the grass is hair. I didnt have any trouble getting it to grow on a terrain primitif from memory
Presently renedring this scene out with the addition of ivy from Fenric's generous port of Lufts Ivy Generator - it's taking a while though.
This last one for the present has fountain preset for that greyish distance groundcover, I made the texture for the terrain by rendering out a replicated grass texture and using tht as the terrain texture.
Rocks via organic model tool, flowers by Philemnon,s cutout plugin. Rocks texture with his triplanar plugin.
Caustics added a weird glow to the water's edge but it's kinda of spooky so I left it
some of the alphas I used with philmenon's cutout plugin
it has plenty of uses - the disco man is from wikepeadia commons , other one's are hand drawn :) should render out a dragon etc for fun
plus example of a terrain texture rendered out in Carrara (useing replicated meshes) and then reused again in Carrara as a shader
Wow. Very cool stuff, Headwax! Gorgeous renders!
+1
He's back.
Another plus one.
Extremely impressive.
My 50th entry was Don Coyote. I will revisit Cervantes story of Don Quixote, my original inspiration.
I took my Don Coyote model and created some morphs for the head and body to make him thinner. Probably won't be noticeable when I complete the costume. I also added some more facial hair for the chin. As part of the facial morphs (eg. changed nose), I adjusted the polygons to make the eyebrow hair groups angle up at the top of the nose bridge. I mixed in some gray for the hair. It has been a very long time since I read the story, but I believe the character was in his fifties in the story.
Here is my original Don Coyote next to the new morph for Don Quixote.
Excellent as always !!!
Superb work !!!
Thanks, Bunyip, for the nice comment.
Tip - using the 3D paint tool as aid to clothing.
Rather than model full boots and "fitting to" Don Coyote or attaching the skeleton, I only modeled the boot cuffs. The cuffs can be merely parented to the shin bones. I then used 3d paint tools to paint a mask on the legs for the boots. By mask, I just mean white paint on a black background to separate the area of the legs covered by the boots. With symmetry on, just painted one side while could see the boot cuffs on other leg. Made sure mask separated in area covered by the boot. Then in shader for model, use a multichannel mixer and the painted mask will separate the boots.
*** DANGER *** - while in 3d paint, don't overwrite any texture files during 'save as.' Instead, change the textures of the model before beginning to paint. Remembeed the hard way.
thanks for the kind comments on the work everyone :)
Diomede, love your Characters , you;ve captured him very well, grey in the mo is a scintillating touch
I am in awe of how fast everyone is. I've spent two days lost in the plant room. Should have tried modelling a machete first, I guess.
I appreciate all the great tips and info everyone is providing. My brain explodes a little when I visit this thread.
I'm working on a Wintry Garden as the snow begins to accumulate here. That's my plan. So far all I've managed is paper birch.
I started with the basic plant aspen. Then in the shader room used transform to stretch the speckles into respectable streaking, then did the same to the bump to get the "open" streaks in the paper bark.
I always start challenges and run out of time, but love how much I learn anyway. Hopefully this time I make the finish line, more or less.
Diomede, your new Don morphs look great. I've never used the paint tool. Tempted to look up the tutorial. :)
Cbird, nice texture! Good luck on your winter scene. I will hold the Challenge open until you finish. No pressure.
@Diomede Love that workflow withnthe 3d paint tool. As odd as it can be to work with sometimes, I still really love that we have the ability to use it. Especially for making masks, as you've done here.
So I thought it my responsibility, after reading your full report, to provide a friendly FYI sort of thing that I use all the time, even with locked figures.
For places like the shin, especially if it will include the foot and everything that might be in between (Like nails), it even quicker to just hop into the vertex modeler and create a new shading domain. For Rosie, some of her extreme actions were causing poke-through issues around her elbows that were becoming difficult to cure via morphs, and if I tried to switch a whole shading domain to Invisible (via an invisible shader) it went beyond the problem area, making an even bigger problem!
I was so relieved when I experimented. Not only could I hide the problem area with my Invisible shader, but I could also just drop my Limbs shader back into the new domain if I needed the skin back - because it didn't change any UVs!
EDIT: Again, only meant as a friendly FYI. I love what you've done and how you did it! Bravo good Sir!
I know how you feel. Finding time is the hardest part for me.
That aside, I have to say that I love the shader you made! Quite inventive!
Early on, in my Carrara experiences, I just had to buy some of Howie Farkes amazing Carrara scenes. Back then we had ArtZone, and he had amazing details of 'behind the scenes' techniques and discoveries, etc., including rendering with vs without translucency, and how long it took at various settings, etc., etc.,
So when I wanted to make my first trees, I began by loading in his presets that he included for the plant editor and just looked at them and the parameters in the editor. I actually learned quite a bit just doing that.
Then I'd go back into the editor and just build one from scratch, trying to remember what I've learned from his - but I'd find myself going back to his and look more.
Eventually I just got to enjoy monkeying around with the various settings - clinging to many of my favorites - like trunk width vs height, etc., and then digging into the crazy advanced settings with curves and tapers and whatnot... it gets fun!
Speaking of trunk width vs height - is there a way to makes trunks even bigger? I want a huge trunk. The slider is set to 5, and that is the max.
You might have to convert to Vertex modeler and enlarge it further. Tree size combined with trunk controls can result in incredibly large trees, however. We can also make branches smaller if need be. It would be nice if we had a few more sliders for the trunk for adding bumps and bulges.
Calling UB
The above quote is from the Its Raining Men Challenge rules. Are we permitted to enter an image in both the Its Raining Men Challenge and in the current 50th anniversary challenge? I remember mention of the other challenge during formulation of the schedule, but I don't remember if there was any outcome.
Dart - excellent point about shading domains. I would often use that method myself. I should have stated what the problem was. My Don figure has hair. For some reason, when I created the new shading domain, his hairstyle got all funky. Painting an opacity mask allowed me to isolate part of the shin and foot without messing up the hair.
From page one of this thread:
2. Images must be new (previously unpublished).
So, the answer is no, as we have required unpublished inages for every Challenge (to the best of my knowledge). The previous discussion was about entering the Raining Men contest to bide time before starting the Challenge. I entered a new one over there also.