Dry Grass WIP - Shag Fur

[DaForce]

Heya CT,

Its based off a picture i got from tweed heads main beach.

The pine fencing still needs work, it has to have some randomness introduced into it. As well as the material needs abit of displacment just to finished it off. And i still gotta make all the metal straps to hold all the logs together.

Hehehe the meshing was fun to make i searched all over the net for a decent texture and i ended up find one that wasnt too bad, then it was just a matter of making it tileable in photoshop and its appropriate opacity map. I reckon it looks really good!

The animation could be a fair way off as i only get a small amount of time to work on this, so far i have only done about 3-4 hours work on it (by it i mean the actual scene no the animation) . But i think its coming along nicely, dont you?

[CT]

Mate,

Looks like Greenmount Beach to me. You can see some of the buildings of Surfers Paradise in the background on the horizon, am I right?

The scene is coming along very well. I'll require a 1280x1024 still for my new wallpaper.

Good Luck,

CT.

[DaForce]

Yeah im pretty sure thats surfers, it was a while since that photo was taken.

hehehe you can really tell its not finished now ahh well it will tie you over until i can finish the rest of the scene off.

Here ya go
http://www.apex.net.au/~daforce/vray...oth-1280_2.jpg

You will notice that the ground kinda stops in the distance, this is one of the many thing i will be fixing.

Please throw come C&C my way.

[CT]

C & C's

I think you'll address most of these anyway but here goes.

Sand: The sand on the beaches here is really light (almost white) and a fine grain compared to the one you are using. I would also try to add some displacement along the track to represent people's foot prints. Maybe use a large noise map for displacement.

Mesh: The texture looks great. You'll just need to go for some irregularity. I'd say you would be doing this when you add your wire pieces and reactor/simcloth.

Grass: Looks great! The only thing I would change is to try and taper it to a point maybe. I'm not sure if this is possible or not. I haven't used Shag Fur yet. It's only really noticable in the wallpaper image (and you won't be rendering the animation at that size anyway).

You probably have thought of these points, after all you have the reference photo.
Look forward to seeing the rest of the scene come together. Great idea for a project. When it's cold in Canberra you'll be able to watch your animation and feel like your here at the warm and sunny Gold Coast.

CT.

[DaForce]

Right you are

Sand: At the moment its just using a placeholder texture, i have a bunch of others i need to test out...will happen over time And i will make a nice displacement map so it represents what the picture looks like. So that too will happen in time.

Mesh: Yeah i will eventually use reactor/simcloth, at the moment its just a dodge modelling job to test the material out. I will be adding some dirt maps onto it as well because the bottoms are always dirty with sand and mud.

Grass: Yeah i need to introduce some tapering and bending, i just need to figure it out so the poly count doesnt skyrocket

I will hopefully get some more done on it tonight. hehehe its always cold in Canberra

Thanks for you help and kinda words ^_^

[percydaman]

you can taper in shag pretty easy. made this with it:



percy

[DaForce]

Coool, yeah i figured the taper part out, its the bending i am having problems with, it seems that it only works if you use model hairs/furs to make it work, otherwise change the bend amount does nothing (from my experience)

And also bending requires more polys to bend smoothly, and im close to pushing the limits at the moment.

UPDATE
Is the lighting and sand any better?

[natty]

your sand is really good DaForce...

[DaForce]

Thanks Mate.

The scene is slowly getting there. As you know i dont get much time...about 5 hours on it so far.

[CT]

Sand and Lighting look perfect DaForce.....keep those updates coming..

[DaForce]

Thanks Mate,

Will do

[Trapezium]

Really looking great. Mind giving more specifics on the sand and wood materials? They look just right!

[DaForce]

Thanks

Well for the sand i search around the net and found quite a few nice sand textures. But they were either too small or the wrong sort of sand for this scene.
I eventually found one that was quite good, but it had lots of wave marks on it where the waves have come up and gone. So i chose a 1024x1024 piece of that texture, and in photoshop i mad eit tileable and took out the wave lines. So i had a nice big clear sand texture that could be tiled without and obvious repetitiveness. I then made an appropriate bump map, slapped them both together on a standard max material and then put it on the sand mesh. Quite simple.

As for the wood. well that was a 2 second job...hahhahaha
Basically the texture for the wood is the default max DRIFTWD.JPG texture. I plan on doing alot more work to the wood to make it less repetitive but at the moment it looks quite nice, for the fact that it was a quite bodge job. hehehe

I have added a couple of beach signs in there (no dogs..etc) but nothing major so i wont post an update just yet.

[percydaman]

hehe... I was going to ask you to share the wood texture just to be a smart ass but decided not to...

[DaForce]

HAHAHAHA that would have a got a few laughs hehehe

ahh well it did anyway