Take 3: Diamond Love

Blender 2.5 Alpha 0

I guess I'm too happy to stay quiet... Blender 2.5 Alpha 0 is out!

It's an alpha... it means it can crash but so far, for modeling purposes, it looks nice and the interface is so clean. Don't use it in your production pipeline for the moment.

Too bad I have to wait until alpha 2 (Spring 2010) to use N-Gones. Well, I have so much to learn in this new version that I don't care.

Project: Small house in Quebec

During the last three days, I was modeling a very small house the ones you can see in the woods near Quebec city. I did this work based on a beautiful watercolor painting by Henri Colombani, a french architect and a talented artist.



Of course, a photo realistic image looks probably a bit colder than an image based on imagination and artistic know-how. However, it was a very interesting project because I could learn more about Blender's particle engine to make the grass.

TIP: Blender particle engine allows you to convert the created object to a mesh. However, at least a "hair" object, the mesh has no face (only vertices and edges): it's invisible! To fix that, edit the mesh, select all, extrude on a 0.005 distance on X or Y axis. Then export to Maxwell or your favorite render engine (like V-Ray, Mental Ray,...).

From a non-photo realistic work, you may use FreeStyle. It's a very nice open-source project bundled in Blender 2.5. It renders models like drawings.

Render comparison

I've finished rendering an old project I did in July. I rendered it with Maxwell 1.7 at the time. Now I have rendered the same views with Maxwell 2 and adjusted the light warmth. I'm amazed by the difference. Judge it by yourself:

Tower project: bottom to top

The terrain of the house measures 1517 square meters and from the lowest point to the highest point, there's 20m difference. This is a nice perspective I rendered in this image.

The door (bottom of the image) gives access to a storage room where the mower and garden tools can be found.

Tomorrow, I will add another view of this project.

Tower project: north entry view (+)

I'll be adding different renders of my project all week long. Some pictures look the same because I'll also working on the environment. Therefore, perspective may be the same but lighting will differ.

First, you can see the "backyard entry" or north entry. As we are facing South-West, we are almost facing the sun... which is not ideal, from a photographic point of view but I wanted the other side of the house to face South.





Now, in the next image, I created a 13:30, May 20th, lighting and rotated 180º degrees the sun.



Finally, this is another view of the main entry. The difference consists in the sky illumination, the tower wall texture and the old iron texture.

Tower project: main entry view

I still have a few details to fix and the project will be done.

In this render, the gate texture is a little too "bumped" and the sky may be too dramatic for a commercial use (it's almost like a horror movie sky!). So, this week I plan to fix this and take a few shots the show off all the details.

That's just CG

5 Smarts, 5 stars

Just finished a fun image with 5 Smarts.

I really enjoyed creating these car textures because a Smart can handle almost any color. You can make it look traditional (red, blue) or more funky: it always looks nice! Imagine a pink BMW: you can't imagine one because it does not look natural. With a Smart, it just looks right.

Well, I just quickly did this image and must go back to work. Enjoy!

Phalaenopsis: close-up

This weekend I did a phalaenopsis, which is an orchid. I spend sometime playing with the camera. Although there are still a few details that I do not like, I find the result quite impressive.

The blur effect is wanted. This image is a camera exercise and I wanted to produce a narrow depth-of-field (dof). I did like this view so I then played with the lights (intensity+color).

Finally, a lot of work was done on the SSS+ThinSSS textures. It adds a little softness to the petals.