Thanks!
Marc

http://www.four-hands.com/assassin_web/

I hate to say it, but I don't think you should change a thing! I for one would be interested in some of the technical details...how you set up the lighting, especially. In fact, I'd like to see that as a general thing here; to have people share technical background of the images they post. There's probably more of us modelling in Carrara then rendering and we could all learn from the pioneers.

I am pretty sure the arrow should be on the other side of the bow (at least all the recurves I have used (for right handed persons such as myself) have had the arrow rest on that side (if your using your left hand to hold the bow, drawing with your right, you always rotate it slightly clockwise (you can't really turn your left wrist counter clockwise and be comfortable). This also keeps you from skinning your left fore arm when you fire)). The two other things that I really notice are the flatness of the wall behind her (a more aggressive stucco bump map maybe), and the flatness of the roof above persons about to depart this life (perhaps model a Spanish tile roof (from one tile you can easily make a course and duplicate the course until it covers the roof)). A nice composition. Sorry if I got lost in parentheses, that happens with me.

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.

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

The arrow usually fits on a rest above the hand (though in older bows, there was no rest sometimes). In this case you should probably choose whichever of the rests looks better (the top one looks as if it would have some adverse effects on the arrows flight, though). Also the fletching maybe wrong, it should look something like this (from the shooters view):

-- /
O

|
|
|
|
|

(Sorry if it looks a bit wobbly, but you should get the idea)

With the odd fletching out (the odd fletching is usually now a different color from the other two (though it probably doesn't matter for this setting)). The arrow head also wants to be vertical I belive.

With the stucco, I think it may just need to be more dense, and not necessarily have a higher bump value, though using a terrain would be even better (or anything grooves).

Hope I haven't ranted on too long.

EMC

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

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

Yes, they do. I'd not like to carry a lump of clay that size up a scaffold. Sorry! Oh...and the stars are a little bright. That bright-lit building right next to them should make them seem rather dimmer by comparison. It looks like you darkened the whole thing instead of changing the contrast. I'm not sure I like it like this. Ah, so negative! Maybe the current murkiness would do well with more punch on just a few details on the assasin...maybe a gleam off the arrow tip or something. The differences in lighting were enough, before, to place them in two worlds and make it believable the guards couldn't see the assasin; it's similar to how we set up simultaneous scenes in theater. It wasn't really neccessary, at least in my eye, to make the assasin's world "darker" as well. Sorry for the essay. Hope I said something useful.

Useful stuff! The main darkness difference is I forgot to render with a gamma correct of 1.3 as I had previously. Otherwise, there was no attempt to darken. (My previous machine died but fortunately I'd saved all but my last tweaks to the above; missed the gamma correct though).

I tried a Bryce cloudy night sky last night but had a problem with how it was sized in the backdrop (not sure what that was and didn't feel like spending much time on it.)

I agree the roof tiles are too big and the stars are still off. But... I'm itching to get on to my next project so I think I'll leave it as is for now. It was my first exercise focusing on lighting and composition and useful for me for that.

I received Amapi7 this week and am working on a chalice as a prop for another scene. Amapi 7.03 is a bit unstable but I'm finding it very easy to use; much better than my experience with Amapi 5. Once I have some Carrara renders I'll post a WIP of it for kicks. It will use Mark D's iridescence shader and hopefully show it off well. Still doing the modeling now...

Thanks again for the comments.

Marc