London scene around 1960-1970

[sdwhitton]

ah ok, cool!

you'll need one of these too..



http://humster3d.com/2012/09/25/ford-an ... loon-1967/

[ROUBAL]

As I use only my own models, made from photos (blue prints are rare and often wrong !), it takes much time !

So far, I have modelled the Routemaster bus, the Austin FX4 taxi, and four luxury cars : from left to right on the rough renders below : Bentley S2 1962, RollsRoyce Silver Cloud II 1959, Rolls Royce Phantom V 1960 and Rolls Royce Phantom V 1966.

I know that ID plates are wrong for years around 1970. I will have to make new textures for them.

I also have modelled two models of Land Rover 88 Serie II (one model before 1968 and one model after) shown in my other projects.

I may need some more simple and common cars, but first I have to make sure that I have enough room in memory for all the architecture and some vegetation !

[boeing727223]

As I use only my own models, made from photos (blue prints are rare and often wrong !), it takes much time !

So far, I have modelled the Routemaster bus, the Austin FX4 taxi, and four luxury cars : from left to right on the rough renders below : Bentley S2 1962, RollsRoyce Silver Cloud II 1959, Rolls Royce Phantom V 1960 and Rolls Royce Phantom V 1966.

I know that ID plates are wrong for years around 1970. I will have to make new textures for them.

I also have modelled two models of Land Rover 88 Serie II (one model before 1968 and one model after) shown in my other projects.

I may need some more simple and common cars, but first I have to make sure that I have enough room in memory for all the architecture and some vegetation !

Man, I do love your work Roubal!! Please keep this coming

[ROUBAL]

Thank you very much ! I am working on the simplification of the victorian buildings models I made for my Blenderton Hotel previous images.

I have applied all subdivision modifiers and simplified the models after subdivision in order to optimize the number of polygons. Subdivision modifiers subdivide in all X/Y/Z directions, and often it is only necessary in Z direction for example. The best examples in architecture are the moldings of the cornices. It is possible to save a lot of vertices by simplifying manually after subdivision, but it takes also much time !

I have found an interesting way of customizing buildings from one unique mesh, by applying different materials to several details (several kinds of window sills for example). I create several shapes of the architecture detail, with different materials, and I set the unused details with an alpha at 0.

I noticed that more transparent alpha objects mean a longer rendering time, but transparent surfaces are not very large, and it is valuable in term of memory saving, and not worse than using many different meshes. It also allows to customize very easily the buildings with instant feedback in the render window.

I am currently hesitating between a straight road and a curved one. I think that a curved one would allow more interesting perspective, and would allow a better sight of the buildings far from the camera. IMHO, a straight street would lead to a waste of detail hidden by the alignment of the building facades.

I am seriously worried by the few amount of available textures. My characters (policeman, bus driver and conductor) use for themselves many textures, allowing very few remaining images for the set. I use as many procedural textures as possible for the buildings, but I will not be able to avoid some bricks here and there and some other materials. I have tested textures against geometry, and used geometry for the chimneys bricks, but some things need textures.

I fear that I will have to remap my characters to save textures.

Octane seems to count two textures even if the same image is loaded as an image (color) and a floatimage (Greyscale)... it's a pity !

[ROUBAL]

Most recent test. Low samples capture during rendering.

Placing instances on an overcrowded screen becomes very hard. The setup in the node graph already takes the surface of around 6 screens... and I still have only a part of only one side of the street ! I fear that I will have to composite :

Sky and tree composited in background.

[matej]

It's coming out really nicely.

You mentioned problems with reaching texture limit in another post, but I don't see much textures here. Or need for them. Lots of objects don't need texture image-maps. You could try to use procedurals for the building facade and stuff like that, which wont get closeups. For starters you can browse the live db and see if there's some useful procedural only material.

The bus needs one diffuse texture map (or one for each version), the car needs one, the cop needs one... and that's mostly it. For the concrete / facade the same image can be reused over and over in different materials / mapping / mixed with procedurals. If you'll be having lots of people, you can put all their diffuse textures in one file, etc

If you plan to add even more stuff, then you will have to update your work-flow anyway (use the node graph more to re-use sour textures)

[sdwhitton]

Hi there

Yep it's coming on, and I agree about using a procedural noise texture to mix and match bitmaps for the stone, say

don't know if you read this recently, second page I think talks about that:

http://www.3dtotal.com/index_tutorial_d ... H5uLWlEQ3k

also, your bricks are too big - they would be about 3 inches - 75 mm high - a brick is just under 9 inches wide, by 3 inches high (and 4 inches thick, i.e. wall thickness)..

like all the glowy lighting, and then, being the UK, wouldn't it all be overcast!?

I'm finding the same thing with instances, would be good to get some tabs/ pages going, if that's possible - saving out geometry as macros, haven't tried that as yet

[ROUBAL]

@sdwhitton : Thanks for the bricks dimensions. I will have to make joints more visible, because at distance they may not be seen enough.

EDIT : I have checked the dimensions in Blender, and my bricks have almost the same dimensions as you mentionned at less than 1cm difference. The visual difference may be that I used narrow joints. Or maybe you are speaking about angle stones ?

Page 3 of your link shows what I am asking for ages for Octane : Background using non light blocking material (no shadow material). Allowing to use cylindrical or spherical background without blocking the light of the daylight system or the HDR or LDR environment.

As I said, all objects are very detailed. Each important one is imported as a macro ocm from its own file, and has 3 textures : Diffuse, RGB Normal, and Spec. Some have only one or two, but most have 3. In some cases, I Keep only the Diffuse one and use it for BUMP as well as a floatimage. I can also use it as image for BUMP instead of floatimage to save a greyscale slot.

As I plan to show the city from the point of view of a tourist, the city will be shown from inside the bus. So, the bus has to be seen from the inside and has four textures. Characters have at least two textures each, but some have more, as some props are separated and heads can be changed and require a texture as well. Putting both Diffuse, NRM and SPEC on the same images is not possible as only one UV system is allowed : it is not possible to shift the mapping to use the same image.

As inside and outside parts of the bus share the same images, I can't delete inside textures...

I have deleted image textures on unseen parts, like the cloth of the taxi drivers, but there are many objects really needing texture. All building share the same brick texture with different procedural modifications on color.

Tilable textures like bricks need their own image, even small, because it is not possible to tile from a texture on a shared image...

I could make a huge unique texture for a group of characters, but so far I have made 25 characters. This mean that if I need to use only one or two characters, they will carry with them a huge image used at 10% for example : it is a waste of memory.

So, even optimized, many textures are required. There is no perfect solution allowing both low memory usage and few textures. The same equilibrium problem is encountered for the choice of geometry versus texture in many situations.

I have saved few textures on objects that are at some places where the camera wil not be go very close : Victorian vases on balconies, for example.

Some images used as textures for characters heads have some unused areas where I can add some textures for other little objects.

[icelaglace]

Wow! The last one is very impressive; great progress on this project you made ! Excellent job!

[GeoPappas]

I really like the third image. Looks like a B&W photo from decades ago.

Keep up the great work.