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I made part of the campanile tower, the part that is symmetrical. It's not properly uv mapped as yet, but I added some colour.
thats great modeling
Thanks Wendy. There are a lot of compromises, I'm trying to keep it as low resource hungry as I can since it will be in scenes with trees etc. Currently the model is just under 1Mb.
Apologies to Clough Williams-Ellis for photobombing his original tower.
I think this will do for the top of the tower, It's still not UV mapped but I don't think it needs it since the original is plaster/stucco and at this sort of distance it's just a smooth matt surface. We probably won't get his close in the story. If I need to get in closer I guess I could make a 'hero' version with details on the shutters etc, but I really need to get on, and stop adding things that will never be seen. The interior stairway in the lower part of the tower is a case in point, even if I do model it I would never be able to get a camera in there.
Thanks barbult, I'm a lot more comfortable making things like this than struggling with the finer points of renders, but if I don't render them it's kind of pointless making them. The tower is doing ok so far it's a pity that the stone texture repeats ( and it looks worse if I try to match the size of the original stones ). I wish we had something like the old 'Merco' building paper from the 1950's. It was large sheets of paper printed with a texture pattern, such as bricks. The printing itself wasn't anything special, the trick was that they used marbled coloured paper to print it on. Not sure how the marbled paper was made, but effectively there were no repeats of patterns, even across a huge sheet.
If the whole environment was simple buildings like the tower it would be a lot easier project. I dug out my Canoma files so maybe I can make some of the less important buildings that way, at least well enough for distance views.
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there are tricks one can use in shadermixer to fix that but sadly I am not the one to ask about that, another option is indeed complex UV mapping where sections are jumbled around so the brick pattern is not tiled, rather the UV itself is a jumbled pattern of bricks.
to put it simply, if the mesh is a grid of quads
sets of 2 adjacent quads, staggered each row like bricks are, are each separate islands moved around all over the UV square in different positions than next to each other and they overlap but not the same ones as the previous set did, the texture ithemselves are just a marbled pattern and there are several and adjacent bricks are different surfaces using different ones.
that's probably more confusing
AI Overview (blame Mr Google for this word salad)
To create a jumbled or "procedural-style" brick pattern without relying solely on manual UV mapping, you can use a Shader/Material Node Graph (like those in Blender or Unreal Engine). This approach uses math to map, scale, and randomize coordinates per individual brick, allowing you to easily adjust mortar widths and brick rotations.
1. Setting up the UV/Grid Coordinates
Instead of unwrapping your 3D mesh traditionally, you can tell the rendering engine to project the bricks using math.
To distort or "jumble" the bricks, you need to tell the engine to alter the coordinates of every individual brickuniquely rather than stretching the whole texture.
3. Applying the Texture
Once the unique UV space for each brick is established, apply your actual texture maps:
4. Bumping the Mortar
To ensure the gaps between the bricks react correctly to lighting, use a Math Node (Less Than) to compare the brick and mortar heights. Plug this result into the Normal or Height/Displacement inputs so the mortar sits recessed behind the randomly jumbled bricks.
Thanks Wendy, that's useful information. I must admit i tend to go for as simple a solution as I can find, partly because I will often approach making a model from one direction, and then switch if it's not working out. Since i've been making 3D models for years I find I can visualise how an object might be split up, and which steps need to be done before others, to minimise the work. For UV mapping and textures I try to keep things simple. The base of the tower here is slightly wider at the bottom, so rather than make the shape and then struggle with uvmapping and cutting up a texture, I uvmapped it as a straightforward box, and then scaled the bottom a bit larger ( and accept the minor distortion for the sake of an easier life). That then means I have to delay making any cuts in the box, for windows etc, until the uvmapping and base scaling is completed, otherwise it's very difficult to scale the base and keep the sides flat, if they have divisions. So basically I like to keep the uvmap as simple as possible, I'm sure the way I do it is not ideal, but it's what I'm comfortable with, and I'm getting a bit old to start doing things differently.
I have another model in-work which has a roof which is partly peaked and partly conical, that's proving to be a challenge and I haven't yet found a good solution. Since the roof tiles texture is a plain rectangle, somehow I need to make it into a semicircle, without ( and this is the tricky part ) making the tiles in the centre of the circle smaller that the ones at the outer edge.
This was my first attempt. The conical part is uvmapped as a rectangle, but as you can see the tiles get much smaller at the peak.
I think I might experiment with long thin strips, one 'tile' high, which maybe I can subdivide and twist to make the half cone shape from these thin strips, as if they were paper.
I think I improved it, might be acceptable from a distance. There's some fracturing but maybe I can tweak it. ( This is typical of me btw. part way through one job ( the tower ) and I break off to do something else ( the roundhouse roof ).
yep
Thanks, I thought there was room for improvement, so I tweaked a few things and now we have this. I think a man on a galloping horse riding past it wouldn't see anything amis.
My dad used to say when I asked him if things I made were any good "If it's as good as one you could buy in a shop, then it's ok, otherwise try harder."
I think one of the problems with making 3D stuff is that there is no limit on how much you can put into a model ( apart from system resources ) but there comes a point where you have to ask yourself 'is this ever going to be seen, or will anyone notice that it's there?'. One extreme example I read about from the model railway side was a guy who put a figure of a man sitting on the toilet into the toilet compartment of a railway coach, where this compartment had white glass in the window, so he would never be seen again once the roof was fixed onto the coach. He wasn't crazy, it was a joke, he said the figure respresented one of his school teachers who would never let anyone leave the class to go to the toilet, so now he's locked in a toilet with no door for eternity, even if only in model form.
But you make useful stuff. Did you notice that the kitchen scenes in the latest Richard Haseltine story used your cat food bowl?
Here's where the campanile tower is now. Still some bits untextured, and I know there should be another door at the bottom left ( which we might never see in the story.) I added a guy for scale. I scaledf the tower up a bit after this render. Wiki says it's about 90 feet, so a bit short as shown here. Also the two doorways should have arched tops, it never ends, and there's a statue on a spiral plinth set into the wall opposite the clock ( blue circle here ). Not sure if that's worth adding, there has to be a compromise between accurate and good-enough..
Just to show a bit of progress, here is the current state of the tower here is a view that shows the sense of scale. I have been working on the small yellow structure to the right of the tower, it's like part of an Escher maze. The blue circle is the clock. I have given up trying to find a decent image of it, so instead I shelled out on some Roman clock numerals, and have started making the clock face.
That is a beautiful model of a Toyota 2000GT. Is this model available at the Daz shop?
It's from Renderhub, 'Toyota 2000Gt 1969 for DAZ Studio' by Nerdadantes. It is a very nice model, I changed the bodywork colour.
You sure are putting a lot of work to support your story. I hope to see it appear in many episodes.
"Number 17 is skilled in the art of lucid dreaming, He and the patient will experience a shared dream during which , the patient will see number 17 as his head of department. Number 2, you will be able to give instructions to number 17, but he can only reply within the dream."
This is getting out of hand because the dream episode was supposed to happen a lot later in the story. Suffice it to say Number 17 is the guy laying on the bed on this side of the curtain, Number 2 is the older guy who is standing, and he is the chief administrator ( for the moment ). The girl ( Number 42 ) is a doctor who understands the technical side of the procedure. I will have to have a word with Number 2, he's standing there like a tailors dummy, and it looks like his suit hasn't been pressed for some time.
Here is a close-up of Number 17, but he won't look like this in the dream, at least not to start with...
The buildings are driving me slowly crazy. I have the 'map' which I showed earlier, but I now find that the angles between building on the map don't match photos. I struggled for nearly a day trying to balance the height of the steps on the yellow structure with the overall height of the building as seen from eyelevel photos, and the number of steps as seen from an aerial view, and it just wouldn't work. Finally I found a screenshot which shows the steps on one side are each about 18" high, so much higher than normal. I do know that Clough-Ellis played a lot of tricks with the architecture, so far the following details have emerged from various sources:-
The buildings are about four fifths the size they would normally be.
A lot of windows are 'Trompe-l'œil', ie fake windows painted on the walls. Some of the 'buildings' are just a wall, with these windows painted on them. Many building are painted different colours on each side, so it's not always clear that you are looking at the same building in different photos. ( or if you were walking around ).
Many buildings are painted with washes of darker colour on the lower part of the wall, and lighter colour toward the top, this is deliberate to give the effect of weathered plaster..
The trickery extends to the tower, there is no access to the upper levels from the base of the tower, access is via the yellow structure alongside.
looking good
... but you can do your own interpretation, after all remakes are often quite different in the world of TV and movies
You are right Wendy, I probably should make my own interpretation.but I tried that earlier in the story, and struggled to make something workable, I'll have another try. Strangely it doesn't bother me that the characters look nothing like the originals, in fact i prefer it that way.
I Ideally what I would like, is a set of landscape sections, which can be connected together to make parts of a much larger scene, each section having a building or other feature on it, sort of like a jigsaw. ( kind of like the way wargamers buid a landscape ).That would allow me to put some sections into a scene, where a part of the story takes place, without having to have one huge scene with all the sections together. Kind of like a render plane but for scenes. That's what I was working towards.... a scenery tile with just the tower and it's base, another tile for the yellow structure etc so if I'm using the tower viewed behind a large building I can leave the yellow structure out of the scene.
"This device will enable us to monitor the patient's dream"
"And we can visualise it on the screen here"
It's way too hot for renders here, I did make a start on a simplified 'green dome' ...