Carrara Challenge #50 - A Special Carrara Anniversary Celebration - WIP thread

Diomede

Headwax said:

Diomede that's one sexy cake , love the drips, I think I like vanilla bests :)

.

UnifiedBrain said:

I have to admit, I like the white cake better.  The chocolate is very well done, but somehow I associate a "girl popping out of a cake" scene with a white frosted cake.

 

The people have spoken!  LOL.  I will go back to white frosting as the main color for the cake.  I will add a few more decorative flourishes to satisfy my own need for color.  

My second "50" project is Don Quixote, which was my 50th entry.  

My final entry is for the "wildcard" category.  Thought I would do a space scene.  I've done plenty of "toon" scifi with Brash and Moxie, but not very many traditional.  I think I am going to go for an inter-stellar spaceship conflict - sort of like Spanish Galleons vs privateers in the age of wooden ships and iron men.  Going to model some imaginary spaceships loosely inspired by warships from 1600-1900.  Did some background research (googled spanish galleon, privateer, vintage battleship, and that sort of thing).  Thinking one of the fleets can have fifty ships, or one of the ships can have a crew of 50.

 

Using the polyline tool, I drew a cross section in the vertex modeler.  Using snap to grid, I duplicated the cross section, translated and X-scaled, and repeated.  Then I used the ruled surfaces tool to get the basic mesh of the hull.  I chose the back portion, duplicated with symmetry vertically and bridged to get the oval rear of the ship (aft?).  Repeated for a section of the middle.

This is the very beginning stage.

 

Diomede

Headwax said:

 

Cbird said:

I think I've finally completed my entry just in time to have to go back to work, lol.

The cattails have leaves made with hair. I modelled the little brown fuzzy tops and grew hair on them.

The red dogwoods are one of my favourite winter plants. It took me forever to get something bush-like out the of the plant room, but I'm actually happy with these.

The staghorn sumacs are from the plant room, with a vertex top. I used Wendy's raspberry tip to replicate little spheres all over the shape. Exported as obj, then decimated the crap out of it because my aged laptop started to whine. I used fake fresnel for the fuzziness.

These are the birches with the procedural texture I mentioned earlier.

The Eastern Hemlock (particularly dramatically weeping ones) are my favourite conifer. Trying to get this tree is struck me that we have control of gravity on the tree and separately on the leaves. We could do much more with separate gravity control for each generation of branches. Would be very cool to play with.

The lone White Pine I was wrestling with is back left.

The background terrain has a replicator for the black spruce (far easier shape to work out).

The deer is Tane for Daz horse 2 and I've used Ron's steam for his breath. The snow is also Ron's. I played with particle snow, but again the laptop whimpered.

Please feel free to skate on the pond :)

 

Getting my skates for the pond!  The deer is a very convincing morph, and the breath is a perfect touch.  I also like the happy accident.  May try to recreate that effect sometime.

Excellent entry.  Did I read the word "first"?  Looking forward to more.

 

UnifiedBrain

In The Beginning

 

Went for a 3d toon look in category 1 (garden).

The characters are V3, M3, and Toon Snake.  The food trailer is a kitbash of Taco Van, Tractor F9N, some Moonshine Drive In interior items, and some modeling.

The tree is done using the Carrara plant modeler, adding a vertex sphere for the apples.  The trunk was converted to vertex and expanded.  The branches are just smaller trunks.  Trunk texture is a combination of a 3rd party bark texture and a rock texture..  Apple texture is from TA's Tangy Apple Orchard.  Used hair for grass.  There is no actual terrain.

Flowers were modeled in Carrara. :)  No postwork.

Diomede

UnifiedBrain said:

In The Beginning

 

 

Went for a 3d toon look in category 1 (garden).

The characters are V3, M3, and Toon Snake.  The food trailer is a kitbash of Taco Van, Tractor F9N, some Moonshine Drive In interior items, and some modeling.

The tree is done using the Carrara plant modeler, adding a vertex sphere for the apples.  The trunk was converted to vertex and expanded.  The branches are just smaller trunks.  Trunk texture is a combination of a 3rd party bark texture and a rock texture..  Apple texture is from TA's Tangy Apple Orchard.  Used hair for grass.  There is no actual terrain.

Flowers were modeled in Carrara. :)  No postwork.

TangoAlpha's orchard props  texture is why we got kicked out of paradise!  Drat.

Looking good.

Cbird

UnifiedBrain said:

In The Beginning

 

Went for a 3d toon look in category 1 (garden).

The characters are V3, M3, and Toon Snake.  The food trailer is a kitbash of Taco Van, Tractor F9N, some Moonshine Drive In interior items, and some modeling.

The tree is done using the Carrara plant modeler, adding a vertex sphere for the apples.  The trunk was converted to vertex and expanded.  The branches are just smaller trunks.  Trunk texture is a combination of a 3rd party bark texture and a rock texture..  Apple texture is from TA's Tangy Apple Orchard.  Used hair for grass.  There is no actual terrain.

Flowers were modeled in Carrara. :)  No postwork.

The hat on the snake is hilarious. At least he was concerned about food safety! lol

UnifiedBrain

Cbird said:

 

I think I've finally completed my entry just in time to have to go back to work, lol.

The cattails have leaves made with hair. I modelled the little brown fuzzy tops and grew hair on them.

The red dogwoods are one of my favourite winter plants. It took me forever to get something bush-like out the of the plant room, but I'm actually happy with these.

The staghorn sumacs are from the plant room, with a vertex top. I used Wendy's raspberry tip to replicate little spheres all over the shape. Exported as obj, then decimated the crap out of it because my aged laptop started to whine. I used fake fresnel for the fuzziness.

These are the birches with the procedural texture I mentioned earlier.

The Eastern Hemlock (particularly dramatically weeping ones) are my favourite conifer. Trying to get this tree is struck me that we have control of gravity on the tree and separately on the leaves. We could do much more with separate gravity control for each generation of branches. Would be very cool to play with.

The lone White Pine I was wrestling with is back left.

The background terrain has a replicator for the black spruce (far easier shape to work out).

The deer is Tane for Daz horse 2 and I've used Ron's steam for his breath. The snow is also Ron's. I played with particle snow, but again the laptop whimpered.

Please feel free to skate on the pond :)

Gorgeous!  Kind of ethereal.  Killer birch. :)

UnifiedBrain

Diomede said:

UnifiedBrain said:

In The Beginning

 

 

Went for a 3d toon look in category 1 (garden).

The characters are V3, M3, and Toon Snake.  The food trailer is a kitbash of Taco Van, Tractor F9N, some Moonshine Drive In interior items, and some modeling.

The tree is done using the Carrara plant modeler, adding a vertex sphere for the apples.  The trunk was converted to vertex and expanded.  The branches are just smaller trunks.  Trunk texture is a combination of a 3rd party bark texture and a rock texture..  Apple texture is from TA's Tangy Apple Orchard.  Used hair for grass.  There is no actual terrain.

Flowers were modeled in Carrara. :)  No postwork.

TangoAlpha's orchard props  texture is why we got kicked out of paradise!  Drat.

Looking good.

Diomede, thanks for the comment ...and clarification. :) 

 

 

Cbird said:

The hat on the snake is hilarious. At least he was concerned about food safety! lol

Thanks Cbird!  Gotta be careful dealing with good and evil. 

Dartanbeck

Cbird, That's a beatiful image!

Dartanbeck

@UnifiedBrain LOL!!!

Varsel

Since it's the 50th challenge, I had to create something for it.

Still a wip. Using Lorenzo just for reference..

The background forrest is all HowieFarkes

The rest is all homemade in Carrara.

UnifiedBrain

Varsel, it looks great.  However, if this is for category 1 (garden), you can't use Howie premade plants.  Per the rules, "plants and terrain must be created using a Carrara function, and not imported from a premade product or other source outside of Carrara ("basic plants" and "basic leaves" premade content within Carrara is OK to use)."

But if you don't want to change it (as it looks very cool) you can always enter it in category 3 (wild card).

Cbird

Thank you for the encouragement, guys. It's appreciated.

Varsel, I would live there in a minute. The hedge is impressive.

Dartanbeck

Cbird said:

Thank you for the encouragement, guys. It's appreciated.

Varsel, I would live there in a minute. The hedge is impressive.

I was just gazing - thinking: I wanna live there! ;)

Mistara

rendering now,  rendering slow, might not make it

wip  50 Bottles on the Wall

using grid replication to go up, never tried that before

spotlight lighting trickier than the bulb. 

 

Dartanbeck

For me, lighting was one of the hardest things to nail down - and it took me the longest to realize how bad I was before, until I finally started improving. Without seeing your final result, but seeing the lights in your scene, it looks to me that, Iike I have always done, you might be over-thinking your lighting.

I could be wrong though. Hard to say - there are so many ways to get results. 

It was when I finally started using really simple lighting when my images started looking a lot better. Like this for example. Just a few simple shape lights to cast light (but going more for shadows) just enough to illuminate enough of the detail of the room to see it. Then create the effect that the illumination is actually coming from the Glow Channel light sources by adding a subtle aura and then dropping on a couple of cone lights with a simple gel (for fog) to add a bit of drama and depth.

I'm still not great at this part, but it's a LOT bettwr than what I was doing when I was trying to light everything up by putting lights in, then adding more and more to remove shadows where I didn't want them. Now I want shadows and welcome them... design them into the scene.

 

Dartanbeck

Another hard thing for me to learn was knowing when I actually NEED reflections, or do I just want a shiny surface. If I do need reflections, how deeply do I need them. Reflections in ray trace can keep reflecting and reflecting and reflecting as many times as we allow via render/shader settings. If I don't need to just reflections within reflections within an entire scene, I might crank the Maximum Ray Depth (Render room, first tab) down to, say 2. Just know that, if you do that and the reflections look funny or wrong, try bringing that back up a bit. My default that I use is 4 and never felt the need to increase it.

Dartanbeck

Oh... and with my new Win 10 machine, I noticed that the default Advanced Power Setting (Settings > System > Power) was set up so that Windows wouldn't allow the cores to run wide open to save power and resources. I changed that to either Advanced or Ultimate (using this one now), my cpu cores now run wide open when I render. Just make sure you have decent cooling if you do this.

Mistara

my big mistake was turning on caustics with 50 bottles on the wall.

buckets are creeeeping slow

wip  50 Bottles on the Wall

 

Varsel

Sorry UnifiedBrain. Guess I hadn't read the rules good enough.

So here is take 2. All built in Carrara. Trees and shrubs are all created from scratch in the Plant Editor.

UnifiedBrain

Nicely done there Varsel!  Both images are excellent.  Like I said, if you decide to go with the first one, there is a category for it (#3).

Hope you have time to do more renders.  Always enjoy your work.

 

Misty, looking forward to those bottles. :)  Hope you get the problems resolved.  Nevermind, I see that it is done.  Very interesting!

UnifiedBrain

Dart, thanks for the LOL and the lighting/render tips.

Dartanbeck

UnifiedBrain said:

Dart, thanks for the LOL and the lighting/render tips.

Sorry. I get carried away late at night when I should be sleeping! LOL

Mystarra said:

my big mistake was turning on caustics with 50 bottles on the wall.

buckets are creeeeping slow

wip  50 Bottles on the Wall

 

Cool Render!

Dartanbeck

@Varsel I love it!!! Looks totally awesome!

Headwax

Diomede said:

Headwax said:

Diomede that's one sexy cake , love the drips, I think I like vanilla bests :)

.

UnifiedBrain said:

I have to admit, I like the white cake better.  The chocolate is very well done, but somehow I associate a "girl popping out of a cake" scene with a white frosted cake.

 

The people have spoken!  LOL.  I will go back to white frosting as the main color for the cake.  I will add a few more decorative flourishes to satisfy my own need for color.  

My second "50" project is Don Quixote, which was my 50th entry.  

My final entry is for the "wildcard" category.  Thought I would do a space scene.  I've done plenty of "toon" scifi with Brash and Moxie, but not very many traditional.  I think I am going to go for an inter-stellar spaceship conflict - sort of like Spanish Galleons vs privateers in the age of wooden ships and iron men.  Going to model some imaginary spaceships loosely inspired by warships from 1600-1900.  Did some background research (googled spanish galleon, privateer, vintage battleship, and that sort of thing).  Thinking one of the fleets can have fifty ships, or one of the ships can have a crew of 50.

 

Using the polyline tool, I drew a cross section in the vertex modeler.  Using snap to grid, I duplicated the cross section, translated and X-scaled, and repeated.  Then I used the ruled surfaces tool to get the basic mesh of the hull.  I chose the back portion, duplicated with symmetry vertically and bridged to get the oval rear of the ship (aft?).  Repeated for a section of the middle.

 

 

 

This is the very beginning stage.

 

TRuled surfaces? Love it when you talk dirty Ted!! But seriously, wish more people would demonstrate the modelling rooms lesser used tools, thanks!

 

Headwax

UnifiedBrain said:

In The Beginning

 

Went for a 3d toon look in category 1 (garden).

The characters are V3, M3, and Toon Snake.  The food trailer is a kitbash of Taco Van, Tractor F9N, some Moonshine Drive In interior items, and some modeling.

The tree is done using the Carrara plant modeler, adding a vertex sphere for the apples.  The trunk was converted to vertex and expanded.  The branches are just smaller trunks.  Trunk texture is a combination of a 3rd party bark texture and a rock texture..  Apple texture is from TA's Tangy Apple Orchard.  Used hair for grass.  There is no actual terrain.

Flowers were modeled in Carrara. :)  No postwork.

Ha ha very smooth, great sense of humour - plus an eggcellent choice of subject - so well suited to the theme

 

Headwax

Varsel said:

Since it's the 50th challenge, I had to create something for it.

Still a wip. Using Lorenzo just for reference..

The background forrest is all HowieFarkes

The rest is all homemade in Carrara.

Great to see you entering Varsel - terrific scene - yes I'd live there too, but it sounds like its getting crowded :)

 

Headwax

Mystarra said:

rendering now,  rendering slow, might not make it

wip  50 Bottles on the Wall

using grid replication to go up, never tried that before

spotlight lighting trickier than the bulb. 

ah they say pateince is a virtue - dont believe them! Looking forward to seeing what pops out of this one. 

Mystarra said:

 

 

Headwax

Dartanbeck said:

For me, lighting was one of the hardest things to nail down - and it took me the longest to realize how bad I was before, until I finally started improving. Without seeing your final result, but seeing the lights in your scene, it looks to me that, Iike I have always done, you might be over-thinking your lighting.

I could be wrong though. Hard to say - there are so many ways to get results. 

It was when I finally started using really simple lighting when my images started looking a lot better. Like this for example. Just a few simple shape lights to cast light (but going more for shadows) just enough to illuminate enough of the detail of the room to see it. Then create the effect that the illumination is actually coming from the Glow Channel light sources by adding a subtle aura and then dropping on a couple of cone lights with a simple gel (for fog) to add a bit of drama and depth.

I'm still not great at this part, but it's a LOT bettwr than what I was doing when I was trying to light everything up by putting lights in, then adding more and more to remove shadows where I didn't want them. Now I want shadows and welcome them... design them into the scene.

 

Just beautiful Dart - you are indede the master of atmopsheric lighting. I'm lazy I do it in post!

 

Headwax

Oh thanks UB Dart et Diomede for commenting on my works!

Headwax

Cbird said:

Beautiful and evocative - considering we had 45 degrees here the other day. Thanks for the explications on the method - that's what we need, to learn from others

Cbird said:

 

I think I've finally completed my entry just in time to have to go back to work, lol.

The cattails have leaves made with hair. I modelled the little brown fuzzy tops and grew hair on them.

The red dogwoods are one of my favourite winter plants. It took me forever to get something bush-like out the of the plant room, but I'm actually happy with these.

The staghorn sumacs are from the plant room, with a vertex top. I used Wendy's raspberry tip to replicate little spheres all over the shape. Exported as obj, then decimated the crap out of it because my aged laptop started to whine. I used fake fresnel for the fuzziness.

These are the birches with the procedural texture I mentioned earlier.

The Eastern Hemlock (particularly dramatically weeping ones) are my favourite conifer. Trying to get this tree is struck me that we have control of gravity on the tree and separately on the leaves. We could do much more with separate gravity control for each generation of branches. Would be very cool to play with.

The lone White Pine I was wrestling with is back left.

The background terrain has a replicator for the black spruce (far easier shape to work out).

The deer is Tane for Daz horse 2 and I've used Ron's steam for his breath. The snow is also Ron's. I played with particle snow, but again the laptop whimpered.

Please feel free to skate on the pond :)