This one uses a terrain for the wall behind the assassin, tiles on the far-building roof, more stars in the sky and I've fiddled with the arrow per EMC's helpful suggestions.

At the risk of drawing attention to it, do the tiles on the back building roof seem too large?

Thanks,
Marc

Cute little fellow ;-)

The AGr bark looks great. Might want to vary the leaf transparency a bit; it seems like there is the same notch on each leaf. Guess the leaves don't do all that much for me; if you are going to do a final render at this level of closeup, you might want to try to give them more texture. Marc

Thanks, EMC! Appreciate the info. An update will be some time in coming. Upon return from vacation,, I found out my hard disk is most unhappy. Fortunately I made a backup before leaving but if I complete wipe fails, I'llprobably spring for that machine upgrade I've been pining for ;-) Marc

Hi, EMC,

Arrgh! You are correct about the arrow. I'll look at putting it behind the bow. Since you seem to know something about bows, where is the arrow supposed to fit with respect to that flange above the grip?

I agree the roof would be better with a spainish tile. I had tried to use a formula shader on the roof to bump it that way only to discover one of several C2 bump channel bugs (formulas don't work in the bump channel). Eovia is aware of this and others and hopefully have corrected in C3.

That roof is currently 800+ distinct planes to give it what texture it has. I went with planes rather than half cylinders to keep the poly count low. I guess if I fold the plane, it shouldn't bump the poly count too high and I did lay them down in rows so it might be easy enough to convert to arc'd tiles. I'll try it out.

On the stucco, if you try the link above and look at the uncropped image you will see some nasty dark splotches on the stucco on the right house wall (not visible in the cropped image above). That is what I get if I turn the bump up just a little.

I agree the wall is a bit flat. I'll try using a thin terrain for the wall and see if I can get a mesa thing going on the terrain so it looks like stucco. The assassin and wall are separately rendered and have a much lower poly count. Render time there is 4 minutes instead of 30+ minutes. I can affored a mondo terrain for a wall there ;-)

Appreciate the comments!

Marc

Hi, nomuse, thanks for the kind comments!

This scene was my attempt to focus on lighting and scene composition.

I think in many ways, lighting and composition is more important than modeling. Without the right colors, illumination and composition, a viewer isn't going to spend the time on the picture necessary to notice the nice modeling. And with the right color and comp, you might not care about the poor modeling. In the painting world, you wouldn't consider the expressionist good 'modelers', it was the other stuff they made work. Of course, many viewers past and present knock them for that so one rule is you will never satisfy all viewers.

In my case, I'm a rank neophyte in these matters but I have been reading up on color and composition. The reason I have been reading up on such things is frustration with my pictures not really captiving viewers (either in the galleries or with friends.) They were neat scenes with interesting modeling in some cases. Why didn't people spend the time on them to notice the neat stuff?

I think it was lack of attention to color and composition. With the right color and composition, the artist guides your eye to the interesting stuff and the whole thing is 'easy' on the eye. With the wrong choices, the eye gets lost, the brain doesn't take in the picture and the viewer moves onto the next image in the gallery without posting a comment. It's as simple as that.

I can't claim to have mastered color and composition, only to begin to appreciate the need for it. Only today, while reading a new book on the subject I was chagrined to realize that the pigment (paint) and monitor (video display) primary colors and color complements are not the same. Note the orange/blue lighting on the assassin. It should probably be red/blue (although that orange looks pretty reddish anyway ;-).

The scene composition was inspired by a picture I saw in Newsweek from a famous photographer. In that picture there were two roads, not the canal and road. I think the picture worked because the edge of the higher road formed a path that drew the eye into the picture. That was originally the heart of my picture however, with a comment from a friend, I realized that the path thing doesn't work well with a significant object on the side because with the side object (the assassin) the path tends to lead to the center of the image which makes for an unbalanced picture. So I cropped the path out. I don't think it is necessary to guide the eye in this case because the door and the yellow light both frame the victim.

On the lighting, one key point is I rendered the assassin and her wall separate from the rest of the scene so that I could light her without worrying about the rest of the scene. In the earlier WIPs on the other WIP thread, you'll notice that I only recently changed the rest of the scene lighting to magenta to match the assassin's wall. Of course, the other reason I rendered the scene in two pieces is that back scene is 120MB and takes about 30 minutes to render without the assassin!

Why magenta? It plays well with the yellow of the torch, the neutral colors looked dull and magenta itself came about from the mixing of the orange and blue light on the assassin.

In the back scene, rather than a single magenta light, I actually replaced the single moonlight with a red and orange light at slightly different angles. This was partly so that I could exactly match the magenta in the assassin foreground (which was mixed from orange and blue) but I thought the offset would be interesting to mix in a little direct blue and orange in addition to the magenta. Leaving both lights casting shadows made it look like I had a terrible registration problem so I made the blue light not cast shadows (leaving blue in the orange light's shadows. Maybe the other way would have looked more interesting. I also turned off the orange and blue light shadows on the assassin render leaving only the moonlight shadow.)

Anyway, as you can see I'm not a composition or lighting expert but after trying to figure out what is missing in my scenes, it is the lighting and composition more than the modeling. I could spend all my effort on modeling, become an outrageous modeler and still not get much notice in my pictures if I didn't work on the color/comp as well. It's not that I don't like modeling (just ordered Amapai7!), I just think the main thing missing for my work was the comp and color.

Hope this was of interest.

Marc

PS I'll be traveling for some time and not able to respond for a while.

Marc

My reply seems to have gone missing... Thanks for the comments! No backstory yet but as I run an rpg game it might come to pass. I often use these pictures in the game. I've been thinking the right building needs more detail as well. I've been thinking of adding discrete blocks for the left edge and between floors stones and something under the windows. I like the falling stucco idea and will do that as well. I've also been experimenting with the lighting on the assassin. Appreciate the comments! Marc

Lighting and wall texture looks nice. Overall room composition looks good. The drapes seem a little off. The billow should be more irregular and the amount of cloth over the top seems odd: seems to be floating above the bar. Marc

I've come across the "disappearing in some views flame" effect discussed above on C2.1. I take it, this is still a problem? This thread was posted nearly two years ago; I'd've hoped something as basic as this would have been corrected by now... Anyone know of any work arounds other than to just not use the flame primitive? Thanks, Marc

Indeed! Very nice looking!

Nice picture! One of my own set-aside projects is an airship. I've got the engines, the airbag, a cool rudder, a nice mermaid figurehead (the ship is the "Flying mermaid") but I've been stumped on the gondola. I'm having trouble creating both something I like and something I can model without a herculean effort. I might go with something like you have here except maybe more 'victorian' and with bubble windows ;-) Thanks for posting. Marc

Fixed the roof problem by just placing a bunch of one polymesh roof tiles on the roof. Darkened the railing a tad.

Next step is to put a guard/torch bearer in front of her with the light coming from his torch.

As always, comments, suggestions for improvements, etc. appreciated.

Marc