Hi folks,
Here's an update on my works on colne_be3, before I'm off for 2 weeks of vacations.
Since last time, progress can be summarized by:
- Addition of populations of fine gravel (particle systems). However most of this detail is barely pixel-sized.
- Texturing of the posters
- Addition of a few ladder bars to make the whole scene a bit more sensible (it matches the walkmesh besides).
- Addition of many trash objects: 3 plastic bags, 1 large folded tarp, 3 soda bottles, one empty gallon of milk (not clearly visible because that's where my render is noisy.
- Fluid simulation: I had some trouble with it initially, because the scene needed to be scaled down for the fluid sim to work, despite the scale of the fluid sim is not supposed to be dependent on the scene scale (normally, a parameter within the Fluid Domain properties should take care of that). Thus my notice on SpooX's stickied thread. I made a long bake (750 frames) that took about 11 hours, so that it'd correspond to 30 seconds of flow.
- I tried to do some texturing, with the idea of modelling a muddy flow with a bit of foam on the surface. I fiddled with this for a couple of hours, I believe it can be improved. If you have ideas about how to improve it, be my guest. At the moment: the mud-flow texture is basically an arrangement of a diffuse shader with a glass shader (with IOR set to water properties). The Diffuse/Glass overlay is controlled by a noise-like (cloud-like) texture and color ramps, so that white areas would show white froth and almost purely diffuse shading, and the dark areas would show glass (water) in majority with a tint of brown mud (via diffuse shader) in approx. 75/25 glass-to-diffuse ratio.
Some comments about this render (obviously not final):
- Rendered with a "fill light" with only 50 samples. For final renders, I'll use the yellowish small lamps (missing on this render) but it will take ungodly amounts of samples to make it noise-free (I'm guessing about 5000, at least).
- I will have to re-run my fluid simulation. As it was set up, I originally placed a volume of liquid to make a "pre-filling" of the canal, but this "pre-filling wasn't very useful and built up too much water in the bottom of the canal (as you can see, for one thing, one of the steps of the stairs is submerged, and some debris/trash is submerged as well while I would like them to poke through the water surface).
- I will have to devise of a trick regarding my foam on the mud flow surface. As it is now, the noise-like (cloud-like) texture which controls the presence of the foam is based on overall object generated coordinates. Given this setting, this texture will be static. However, eventually I will want to make several renders to animate the flow (thanks to Palmer, I know the original version had 8 frames to animate the flow). Therefore, I would very much prefer to have a noise texture whose input is based on the object geometry (normals?) which would evolve with each frame. I have pretty much no idea about how to do that (never used the "Geometry" nodes), so again suggestions are welcome. If you wish to tinker with this texture, you can find the node setup here (texture images referenced at
cgtextures.com):
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/96/95fv.png/.
So, that's it for now, I hope you like it.
[EDIT]: Just before I go (my flight's in a couple of hours), I think I solved the issue about generating foam depending on the geometry. Basically, I placed a Geometry node and connected the "Normal" value to the input of the noise-like (cloud-like) texture. I made a small animated gif that shows how it looks, and I'm quite happy with it. I hope you'll enjoy.