Carrara Challenge #37 - Dungeons Deep - WIP Thread

namtar3d

Hi everybody, great challenge!

This time im starting my project since scratch. Will gonna be an enviroment from my own epic fantasy story, from a chapter called: "Journey to the Land of the Eternal Night"

First WIP pic, just the base primitives of my enviroment: 

 

Jonstark

 

Looks intriguing so far, I'm very interested to see where you take this and what it develops into. 

Jonstark

 

So, did a bit more work on my Christmas-themed dungeon.  It's not coming together exactly like I pictured (nothing ever does though), but it's getting closer.  Trying to strike a balance between hiding the monster in the darkness and not making it totally invisible, it's tough to find the right balance though and I'm not there yet.

 

 

Diomede

UB - I hope modeling isn't an undisclosed requirement.  I didn't model anything new for my "babysitter with a hockey stick" project.  In my case, I was just doodling with various ways to make dark places.  I'm confident your dark place will blow us away.  I mean your project, not your id.

Jonstark - thanks for the comments on my sci-fi scene.  The flashlight will be addressed in my next WIP.  ​   And I think some metaball drool may be in order.

Jonstark2 - great looking tree.  Did you use the Cripeman tutorial?  Are those two eyes in the fireplace Satan Claws?  I wouldn't come down that chimney.

Namtar3D - "Journey to the Land of the Eternal Night" - now that sounds intriguing!  I want to see where you take this.

 

 

Mistara

i don't have a single idea yet  ... ... 

would a snowglobe count as a deep dungeon?
want to play with surface emits

Jonstark

 

 

 

Mistara said:

i don't have a single idea yet  ... ... 

would a snowglobe count as a deep dungeon?
want to play with surface emits

I don't see why not, that actually seems like a fun approach  :)

One of the great Carrara renders of all time could be described as a 'dungeon in a glass' by Dustrider, check it out:  

 

Jonstark

Diomede said:

 

Jonstark - thanks for the comments on my sci-fi scene.  The flashlight will be addressed in my next WIP.  ​   And I think some metaball drool may be in order.

Jonstark2 - great looking tree.  Did you use the Cripeman tutorial?  Are those two eyes in the fireplace Satan Claws?  I wouldn't come down that chimney.

Metaball drool sounds so cool it makes me drool a little just thinking about it   

Yup, leaned heavily on Cripeman's work to help guide me, but it still took a while to come up with an actual christmas tree shaped tree.  Lol, gotta watch out for Satan Claws, he doesn't care if you've been naughty or nice, he's just hungry.  That's why kids should always wait to Christmas morning to open presents and not try to sneak in to the living room to try to open the presents early  

WendyLuvsCatz

I did metaball drool once

TangoAlpha

Oh wait, not meatballs!

WsCG

So, unfortunately I think I'm going to have to restart the dragon den/cave. I somehow managed to lose track of my geometry and my face loops/flow got pooched, making it very difficult to get a good UV-Unwrap done, esp with how I want the environment textured.

Not a huge deal. I'll be more careful about it next time, and will likely get back to where I am now in relatively less time... but I dont' think I'll have time to enter the project in the current challenge.  Sucks, but I also didn't leave myself that much time to begin with, especially as someone still rather inexperienced with Carrara for the things I'm trying to do :p.

I will finish the scene and post it regardless! Might start a new WIP thread for it. I have the final image stuck in my head and so now I'm determined to make it happen.

Looking forward to see what others come up with!

Headwax

Jonstark said:

 

So, did a bit more work on my Christmas-themed dungeon.  It's not coming together exactly like I pictured (nothing ever does though), but it's getting closer.  Trying to strike a balance between hiding the monster in the darkness and not making it totally invisible, it's tough to find the right balance though and I'm not there yet.

 

 

santa needs to be dangling from the wall in manacles :) lovely glow

oh I started mine this morning - sorry I have been doing a website for my wife's business last week or two

 

Stezza

Just threw a few things in the scene used two globes for lighting... created a sailor morph  with Genesis and applied 50% of it to Genesis.

Modeled the lamp and pipe

namtar3d

Well, i'm starting now with Zbrush, modeling the enviroment. Carrara's Terrain Editor image maps makes awesome alphas for creating stones and rocks! 

 

 

TangoAlpha

Be careful with the verticals when you're using terrains - there's no resolution in them. It's very much a 2d 3d terrrain editor! For cliffs (or the sides of mesas etc) I find you effectively need to make another terrain and turn it sideways.

shlomi laszlo

a primivol trick:

1. load a model, a bulky one as you need a thick volume, with a single mesh, if the eyes are stand alone spheres you won't see them.

2. give it it's final shape morphs pose & location, so no animation.

3. add a primivol object and give it the same location size& rotation as the model.

4. use the model for the shape of the primivol object, in primivol's ramp off tab - 3d mesh.

5. make the model invisible, in the general tab.

6. if the primivol is a fire make it don't receive & cast shadows, in the genral tab too.

7. if a fire add a bulb with soft shadows at the center the primivol / model. 

 

 

shlomi laszlo

move things around.

like the camera.

changed the light into a fireball with a primivol objsect.

used the "primivol trick" to add eastren dragon's firey ghost.

 https://www.daz3d.com/eastern-dragon

 

 

 

shlomi laszlo

a setup with the top terrain invisible & dragon visible.

and the render of the ghost dragon.

 

namtar3d

 

 

TangoAlpha said:

Be careful with the verticals when you're using terrains - there's no resolution in them. It's very much a 2d 3d terrrain editor! For cliffs (or the sides of mesas etc) I find you effectively need to make another terrain and turn it sideways.

That's true, i use "round mountain" filter at low levels, then i use it as alpha to fix that issue.  

Diomede

For shear cliffs, I sometimes duplicate the terrain, reduce the height of the duplicate, apply fractal advanced filter at low height, and then slide the duplicate in X or Y just a smidge.  Can rough up the cliff wall without requiring a different shader.

Similarly, to have patches of snow, I sometimes duplicate, apply a smoothing or water erosion filter and slide in the dirction of the wind.  Change the shader of the duplicate towhite.  Sharp rocky areas sheltered from wind still show through, but more smooth patches of snow still cover the landscape.

 

Shlomi - thanks for the tip!

DustRider

Love the theme this time, but haven't come up with any concrete ideas yet. If RL gives me a break (and I can get an idea), I may actually enter, so here is the start of what hopefully will be a entry.

I'll be using Octane, so I'll show a little bit of what I typically do. For me, the first step is to get the base charater designed and surfaces prepared. So attached are renders of the original base character with no additional morphs or shader enhancements, and the modified character with additional morphs and and approximation of the skin shader setup I will use. The skin shaders will probably need to be adjusted based on lighting used, but they are at a good base staring point now. The skin shaders are a mix of Octane Glossy and Specular. The base character and texture set is Ember for G2F, the lighting is exactly the same in both images (please zoom in to full resolution to see the dramatic difference shaders can make.

Note: This definitely isn't the scene I will use, it's just an HDRI I grabbed to work on the shaders. Both renders used the Octane path tracing kernel.

Base Character

Character with morphs and glossy/specular shaders

DustRider

Jonstark said:

 

 

 

Mistara said:

i don't have a single idea yet  ... ... 

would a snowglobe count as a deep dungeon?
want to play with surface emits

I don't see why not, that actually seems like a fun approach  :)

One of the great Carrara renders of all time could be described as a 'dungeon in a glass' by Dustrider, check it out:  

 

Wow ...... thanks Jonstark! Note that it was done with Carrara's renderer.too!

I agree, something snow globe like could be great!!

Stezza

In the modeling room I created a tube and a globe for an ant hole.. joined & resized it to suit the cut it in half and used the displacement brush to rough it up..
used the one default light and set the camera to 35 with depth of field turned on.
Added some ants and duplicated them from Ken Gilliland over at Hivewire3D and then surface replicated them to the ant hole I modeled. Used a skull from them bones.

Title - Ant Nest

Dartanbeck

Diomede said:

Stezza, those cucumbers have gotten themselves in quite a pickle!  ​  Looks great.

Shlomi, excellent looking cave.  Thanks for the step-by-step.  Saw your indirect light comment and decided to see what difference it would make for my project before it got too engrossed.

So I have added some of the greebles and shaders to my space ship section.  The section has two blue-tinted tube lights in the roof.  No other lights.  I then duplicated the section (including tube lights) back toward the horizon.  I did put a negative light in the last duplicated seciton.

Here is a test with and without indirect light.  The advantage of indirect light seems minimal to me.  The main drawback for the indirect light was the render time, which is signifiant.  

So Cool! This reminds me of when I was experimenting with Carrara's 3D Paint facilities

...and back then I also created a Carrara product for making D&D (or other RPG) dungeon tiles to print out. It works great for my own use even though I never finished it as a product. But with this one I made the textures using Genetica. Each square of the grid as well as the walls of this example are a cube in Carrara - each side has a different texture, so they can be easily rotated to change the individual tile. Each cube is named according to the grid space it occupies, so we can easily bring in a treasure or trap tile and align it with the cube in question. The border of the tile and the door with v-lighting are masked on top to enable the tile to look like a tile.

Dartanbeck

Dartanbeck said:

Diomede said:

Stezza, those cucumbers have gotten themselves in quite a pickle!  ​  Looks great.

Shlomi, excellent looking cave.  Thanks for the step-by-step.  Saw your indirect light comment and decided to see what difference it would make for my project before it got too engrossed.

So I have added some of the greebles and shaders to my space ship section.  The section has two blue-tinted tube lights in the roof.  No other lights.  I then duplicated the section (including tube lights) back toward the horizon.  I did put a negative light in the last duplicated seciton.

Here is a test with and without indirect light.  The advantage of indirect light seems minimal to me.  The main drawback for the indirect light was the render time, which is signifiant.  

So Cool! This reminds me of when I was experimenting with Carrara's 3D Paint facilities

Forgot to add:

I don't have the test renders I did on this machine, but when I fleshed out this element with the room and other stuff I was making and painting, it looked pretty similar to the images you posted. Sorry for the confusion!

The 3D Paint in Carrara is very cool. It takes practice, like anything in Carrara, but it's really cool!

Dartanbeck

Wow! Bravo everyone! Very cool stuff going on!

Dartanbeck

shlomi laszlo said:

a primivol trick:

1. load a model, a bulky one as you need a thick volume, with a single mesh, if the eyes are stand alone spheres you won't see them.

2. give it it's final shape morphs pose & location, so no animation.

3. add a primivol object and give it the same location size& rotation as the model.

4. use the model for the shape of the primivol object, in primivol's ramp off tab - 3d mesh.

5. make the model invisible, in the general tab.

6. if the primivol is a fire make it don't receive & cast shadows, in the genral tab too.

7. if a fire add a bulb with soft shadows at the center the primivol / model. 

 

Very frakkin' cool!

Dartanbeck

Stezza said:

In the modeling room I created a tube and a globe for an ant hole.. joined & resized it to suit the cut it in half and used the displacement brush to rough it up..
used the one default light and set the camera to 35 with depth of field turned on.
Added some ants and duplicated them from Ken Gilliland over at Hivewire3D and then surface replicated them to the ant hole I modeled. Used a skull from them bones.

Title - Ant Nest

Just WOW!!!

Dartanbeck

DustRider said:

Love the theme this time, but haven't come up with any concrete ideas yet. If RL gives me a break (and I can get an idea), I may actually enter, so here is the start of what hopefully will be a entry.

I'll be using Octane, so I'll show a little bit of what I typically do. For me, the first step is to get the base charater designed and surfaces prepared. So attached are renders of the original base character with no additional morphs or shader enhancements, and the modified character with additional morphs and and approximation of the skin shader setup I will use. The skin shaders will probably need to be adjusted based on lighting used, but they are at a good base staring point now. The skin shaders are a mix of Octane Glossy and Specular. The base character and texture set is Ember for G2F, the lighting is exactly the same in both images (please zoom in to full resolution to see the dramatic difference shaders can make.

Note: This definitely isn't the scene I will use, it's just an HDRI I grabbed to work on the shaders. Both renders used the Octane path tracing kernel.

 

Ouch!!!

Dartanbeck

namtar3d said:

Well, i'm starting now with Zbrush, modeling the enviroment. Carrara's Terrain Editor image maps makes awesome alphas for creating stones and rocks! 

Very cool workflow plan! Looks awesome!

Headwax

Stezza said:

In the modeling room I created a tube and a globe for an ant hole.. joined & resized it to suit the cut it in half and used the displacement brush to rough it up..
used the one default light and set the camera to 35 with depth of field turned on.
Added some ants and duplicated them from Ken Gilliland over at Hivewire3D and then surface replicated them to the ant hole I modeled. Used a skull from them bones.

Title - Ant Nest

wow, what a terrific image Stezza