Well Martin's been pestering me to continue. It's far from done, I only have one tree in the scene. I sure I'll need help texturing the buildings.

Hi Mark,

I think it's a good start. I advise you to increase the lighting of the scene. Ambiance appears too yellow to me. But Perhaps you want to represent the scene when the sun lies down or when it rises ?
You can also add shrubs, ferns and other forest plants.

At the beginning of the next week I start to make glamour shots of Winkee Village. I think I can improve the houses texturing by painting some details. If you need help for the buildings I could make that with you.

No real comment other than it looks great even at this stage.

Thanks guys.

Fab, thanks for the offer on the buildings, right now they have darktree materials on them.

I see what you mean about being too yellow, I rendered this on my laptop which the pic looks more orange than yellow. I just looked at it on my desktop computer and it looks yellow alright. I'm using Ives' proxy light rig that's on the svn, it uses an orange sun and a blue sky light. I don't want to use the full light rig because I don't want to be rendering all day.

Now with that said, should I render these gamma corrected?

I would like to paint something like ivy, pieces of stone and wood on the houses. I will add these maps in the svn and you will be able to use them to put them on your building.



Yes I understand, rendering with all the lights take a lot of time!

I saw in a Yves tutorial that 2.2 is a good choice for the gamma.

Boy, what a pain in the butt.

I don't know how many renders I did today, lost count. Gamma correcting washes out an image.

Changed light direction and intensity, the higher the intensity, the better it looked (more contrast) but too high and you lose the detail. Well this was the best I could get so far with a 2.2 gamma correction.

How would I go about darkening the shadow areas, they look too bright to me. What do you think?

C'mon....you just went out and built a house under a big tree. That's a photo....we need virtual 3D sets for this movie.

Even better than the last one. It probably seems a little cold but nothing a light color change wouldn't fix. Love all the flowers too....it must take an age to render.

Thanks Ken, the render times aren't too bad, about 30 min, but with Ives' full light rig, you're talking hours and hours. Plus, once I start adding more trees and foliage, the render times will go up, too.

This is looking really good. Your skills with vegetation amazes me.

I still need to tweak the rig so the sun light gets less yellow at different times of the day. Currently, the light color balance is setup for low sun angle. I had plan to adjust the sun color in the pose as the sun angle raises but didn't find time for that yet.

Rendered images should be gamma corrected. But I'd say don't bother too much about gamma correction for now. More on that topic in a week or two.

Yes.

The best way to adjust the light parameters for a gamma corrected render is currently to adjust your monitor gamma to 2.2 so you can see the result as you adjust the lights.

This is looking quite good on my monitor.

They don't look too bright on my monitor. There is a catch 22 on this gamma issue and this is why I say, don't bother for now. We will come up with a solution in a few weeks.

The catch 22 is that in order to interactively be able to adjust the lights and colors for a gamma of 2.2, you need a monitor that is corrected to gamma 2.2 while you do your progressive or quick renders. But, if you look an an image that is gamma corected to 2.2 on a monitor that is already gamma corrected to 2.2, you are actually looking at a final image that is gamma corrected to 4.8, thus an image that looks way too bright.

Whew I'm glad you said that - because it looks waaayyy tooo bright on my monitor. But I don't know how my monitor got gamma corrected ? I have done adobe calibration (some time ago, PC)

And don't you mean it's catch 2.2? (slaps knee...yuk yuk...guffaw guffaw...giggle giggle)

Very nice! The grass in the foreground is very realistic.
About the lighting, It looks a bit too bright on my monitor. But like Nancy, I don't know if my monitor is calibrated for 2.2

First: If you are using a laptop, don't even attempt to gamma calibrate it unless it is a high quality monitor designed for graphics design. If it is not a high quality LCD screenmodel, then calibrating it is impossible since it changes gamma according to viewing angle and even change gamma from top to bottom even you you look at it from a fixed position.

I was trying to get the Web page from Norman Koren who have a nice Gamma chart that can be used to figure the current monitor gamma as well as calibrating it. But it appears the site is down. So here is an alternative.

Before continuing, though, note that there is a confusion as to what "monitor gamma" means. Some authors, such as the one I link above, mean the actual electronic gamma of the monitor, while most other authors mean the necessary correction to display an image with a given gamma correction in it.

Using the charts provided above, an uncalibrated monitor should display the chart for gamma 2.5 as almost regular gray gradients.

Don't try to use those charts to adjust the monitor to, let's say gamma 2.2 by using the gamma 2.2 chart that is on this site though. That will not work as the charts found on this site use a sort of reverse logic. But you can still find if your monitor was gamma corrected or not.

Thanks Ives.

Well there's not much skill involved with the vegetation, it's just a hair material with images from the Marlin Studio image folder on the svn, not that difficult.

I have the light position at 15 percent in the pose sliders, so it is a fairly low light angle, but a pretty high sun intensity, 70 percent in the pose sliders.

Here's the same image above without gamma correction.

Wowser. What a difference.

I thought by way of saying 'outstanding image' I would post a variation on the theme.
I haven't done any computer related art in entirely too long. (not saying this really counts mind you)

Just messed with some shading and color.
Never really did get the steps working right.

Outstanding work Mark!

Thanks Rodney.

Your image looks very dark, but if I gamma correct my monitor it looks alot better.

Don't worry about the steps, I'm going to rework them anyway and they need texturing still. This was a proxy set that I'm reworking.

I'm pretty sure I'm on a monitor that was Gamma'd to 2.2 a long time ago.
The other images in this topic are entirely too light (for this monitor).
I've given up being precise these days with gamma correction even though I know I need to find a happy medium. Mostly I just find what look right on my monitors and go with that.

My image isn't meant to be anything but another version of yours.
Just thought it was a cool image and started messin'.
I'm not touching any models... just tweakin' pixels.

You guys (all of you working on TWO) continually impress me with your talent.

Actually, that does look better (richer colour) on my monitor Mark.....though the shadows are very dark. I can hardly see the house. More of a head on sun but still at an angel to the face of the house would be perfect IMO.

Edit: Also, I had a thought....what about more bits and pieces built into the hill at the top. Perhaps a chimney flu for the furnace.

Good idea Ken, just haven't gotten to that part yet. Here's some minor updates, barely noticable. Added more brush to the front of the house, changed lighting (again) rebuilding railings for the porch and removed steps for remodelling.

Any suggestions on the looks for the steps and railings?

There's also a rendering problem with using images for hair, shadow problem that I reported. I feel like I'm going backwards on this set.

Finish the couple things you got on your list, do a "glamour shot" render, and move onto the next thing. We'll come back to this if we need to.

you just keep making it better

Thanks Ryan.

Here's another update.

Added: windmill, fence (thanks Ken), added new stairs, reworked the railings and a few things here and there.

Getting close.

Sure is.

Great looking set!

I recall looking at a "HUD Home" here in dallas some years ago that actually had tree growing in through a wall and out the roof, broken 2x4's and shingles and everything. It must have taken years for it to do that but no one ever bothered to just cut it down. A bargain at $8,000, though.

Anyway, I notice the door to the front of KuKlip's house doesn't have a bone so it can be animated open and it also doesn't have a door knob (that will also need a bone so it can jiggle and turn).