August/September 2017 Challenge: O'Gray's Pearls

[Mouse]

Thank you, Meshon

I'm hoping to be able to work on it fast enough to complete it by the end of the challenge

[Redrobes]

Did the job thing go well ?

Was looking at your last WIP and are you ever a masochist ! The pearls you have done are exquisit. But you have a whole city to map and then after that only another dozen+ more to do... Some seem to be doable like the underwater one, some quite hard like the marshy one or the bridge and then you have some like the waterfall one which sounds like a lot of work !!!

You have laid out the pattern of jumps between them and they seem to form a loop. But you have said that noone has ever returned from the first one. Has nobody made it through all of them - did I miss the explaination. I bet its the bridge. I bet theres a chap on there that says "What.... is your favourite colour ?"

[Mouse]

Thank you, Red

I think I might be pushing it a bit to get it finished, but at least the smaller pearls are... small

The city is a worry, but I have done quite a bit of preparation for it, and at least part of the plan is set by the pattern of the Urban theme. I just have to work out the rest. I'm not going to do a Vue or Blender scene for that one - just a flat cityscape in Sketchup, with maybe a bit of touching up in GIMP afterwards.

'The Tour' is a circular route.

There are 9 portals in Nexus, and they are all under the control of the ruling council. In order to leave the city through one of the portals you must leave a hostage in Nexus - a guarantee that if you find the way home you must then come back to rescue your friend - come back and tell the council how you made it home, because they all want to go home.

Life in Nexus isn't much fun. There's a government, and a social structure. They even have plumbing, electricity and sewerage treatment, but there aren't many humans who can settle and live happily in a prison, even if that prison is the size of a city.

Many have tried to escape the portal trap, but only a few have returned, and all the survivors so far have followed this same circular tour.

Freddie and Greg decide to follow the tour, so that they can at the very least learn more about the pearls - maybe even work out some kind of theory about how to get home. There's only one snag. The council have grown wise to the way that in any small group of people like theirs, the person offered as a 'voluntary' hostage is usually the one they are least likely to come back for, so they reject the offered prisoner and choose one of the key members of the group instead. In this case they choose Greg. So Freddie sets of with Professor Longcroft instead.

Well... things could be better, but they could also be worse. Longcroft might not be a natural born He-man, and he might not even have a very good instinctive sense of self preservation (which Freddie discovers the moment they step through the first portal into Mesa), but he has an incredible mind and is most likely of all of them to be able to work out exactly how they can get home - if only Freddie can bring him back to Nexus again in one piece at the end of this field trip from hell....

I think I may need to re-write the log entries to make it a bit clearer

....

I can never tell how well/terribly I did in an interview. I've been told that there is another candidate to be interviewed tomorrow, so I probably won't be told anything till the day after that Thanks for asking

[Mouse]

Does this look like water to you?

(Its far too large scale for the little pearls, but if I was wondering if the texture was basically right)

[Falconius]

It's pretty good. I suggest working the texture at the resolution you want at the end because, it's harder to get water right at an up close level, but much easier to get it looking right from airplane hight. Then the problem becomes pattern repetition, which may be more difficult to solve in any case.

[Redrobes]

I like the hostage thing and thats a sneaky move about picking one - glad your not my GM !!!

The water looks great IMO. If you want to make textures not repeat then apply them several times on top of one another and use prime numbers as the repeat size - thats assuming that layering up a texture still looks good, but usually it does. Had a friend that built this 4 different colour light bulb disco light box thing then wrote some software to fade each bulb in and out in prime number durations. He reckoned it would take years to repeat the pattern on them. So I thought thats cool and gave me a very good idea for textures ! So credit to him for that one.

[Mouse]

It's pretty good. I suggest working the texture at the resolution you want at the end because, it's harder to get water right at an up close level, but much easier to get it looking right from airplane hight. Then the problem becomes pattern repetition, which may be more difficult to solve in any case.

I like the hostage thing and thats a sneaky move about picking one - glad your not my GM !!!

The water looks great IMO. If you want to make textures not repeat then apply them several times on top of one another and use prime numbers as the repeat size - thats assuming that layering up a texture still looks good, but usually it does. Had a friend that built this 4 different colour light bulb disco light box thing then wrote some software to fade each bulb in and out in prime number durations. He reckoned it would take years to repeat the pattern on them. So I thought thats cool and gave me a very good idea for textures ! So credit to him for that one.

Thank you

The plot is shaped around what my own darker side would do if I was the very secretly desperate leader of that council

I think, because of the way Cycles seems to work, and because of the way that Blender's Ocean works, it may be a case of pushing my laptop to the limit and increasing the resolution of the ocean effect. According to this video, and this video (which is where I learned how to do it), increasing the resolution does 3 things: It increases the amount of foam, the number of small waves, and... crashes your machine

Here is my own modified node setup for the texture. I'm not sure how to modify it again to make the small scale version (if I need to).



The four nodes that are selected in the middle of the graph (orange outline) are what creates the water colour - two glass shaders (dark and white) that are mixed together using a Fresnel (pronounced Fray-nel) pattern of distribution, so that the darker glass is visible on parts of the water that are facing you, and the whiter glass is what you see at an oblique angle, or a tangent - like the reflectivity of water, which increases with angle of incidence.

The very complicated looking set of nodes above that central group of 4 are simply modifying the foam that Blender automatically generates on the ocean by breaking up its rather pixelated raw appearance with a couple of noise patterns. And that's all it does.

The bottom three nodes are making the foam whiter than white.

I think the secret of making this relatively small patch of water into a much larger area may lie partly in increasing the resolution, and partly by increasing the scale of the ocean effect (those attributes appearing on the left of the screen.

(I hope you can understand all of that, since I only just grasp it myself right now)

EDIT: Falconius? Please can you tell me how to UN-split a screen in Bender?

[Voolf]

What a nice bubbly world Mouse
The water texture is good. It looks totally like a water to me.

[Mouse]

Thank you, Voolf

I couldn't have done it without those two video's though! LOL!

[Voolf]

Well we all have to learn new things if we want to make some progress, there is nothing wrong in watching how to's, it is actually the fastest way to learn i think.