Ride the Ox (Patreon)

The last few days have been pretty wild here in the US, so I kind of intentionally let myself check out to greeble city for a bit (between checking twitter every few minutes).

Oldton (and Waterworks Market) are separated from the rest of the city by some industrial areas, so most folks take the train, but I wanted a more touristy method, so there's THE OX, a leisurely paddlewheel boat that makes the twice-daily trip down the coast from a northern neighborhood.

I figured it was mostly an old barge that folks had built a steamboat-esque superstructure on top of. I was going to add a huge gaudy neon sign on the very top (I still probably should have), so I was modeling the supports, but I figured I'd gone far enough down the rabbit hole, and I liked the idea that the same thing happened in-world, and either they'd dismantled some old sign, or never raised enough money to get a proper one. 

I was trying to hit an aesthetic mix somewhere between a Hong Kong Junk ship and a Mississippi Steamboat, and I sort of got it? I like a lot of the pieces, but the whole boat looks a bit more incongruous than I would have liked (there's no real big bold shapes/asymmetry, which was something I really wanted).  That said, I do enjoy that you can't even get a sense of the shape of the ship, because there's so much sticking off of it. I kind of which I'd done even MORE banners, and played it up with the physics sim. I want to incorporate more cloth into some designs, if possible. 

This was the initial render of the shot. And I'm not mad at it, but it's the same issue I had with the blender splash screen, where I have both bright areas and dark areas on the ship, with a really convoluted silhouette, so it's really hard to immediately get a sense of what's going on.

I loaded in a few HDRIs from HDRI haven, and I found one that worked better as a starting point, and I liked the shot a lot better.

I ended up raiding a bunch of old scenes to finish this shot, which I really try not to do, since stuff starts feeling homogenous really quick, but since I'd already modeled the boat I figured that was enough for one shot. 

The final shot is still convoluted, but that's kind of what I want as an intro to the market scene; just a bit too much happening everywhere. That said, I had a pretty aggressive camera move going, and the parallax helps convey the layout really well.

Here's the shot, if you want to see (the brick wall at the end will be darker)

The parallax also is going to help me blend this shot into the rest of the scene. I've been redoing a couple of the early Waterworks shots, and I'm trying to set them all up as if they're being seen from a moving vehicle- a trolly or a bus/train thing as it moves through the city. I just want to see if I can capture that feeling of looking out the window of a moving bus in an unknown city (actually- there's a lot of that in this episode, come to think of it). Ideally this shot feels filmed out of a car window, instead of the camera just randomly flying around.  

For a different shot, I actually added the bus window with stickers and all that on there. Mostly I was trying to hide the fact that nobody was animated, but it's still pretty obvious, so I might give it some love.

A few things I like:

The "flickering neon" trick is continuing to delight me (the chasing bulbs on the signs are a bit fast, but I still think it adds a lot). It's been really useful for giving the shot a bit of a buzzing/living feeling.

I was able to use the waterfall textures for the boat's wake. Honestly I could have spent a bunch more time on that (I think it'd be great to really try to capture that boat wake feeling some day), but I think it works alright.

I used the steam textures mapped onto a plane as the mix factor between a transparent and a translucent shader, and that made some volumetric looking steam, but any shadows falling on it immediately gave it away (shadows should be a volumetric effect passing through the steam, but instead it was very obviously a flat plane), so I turned to the opacity and stacked a bunch of the planes together to form a cloud/sandwich, which worked okay (still falls apart a little if you look too close). I want to see if I could offset each texture by a little bit, and maybe the opacity, and create an actual 3d cloud based off of video textures, but my guess is that might become real RAM intensive real quick?? And also take forever to render... but it could be a lifesaver in certain scenarios.

I'm definitely pushing the limits of acceptable usage for my photoscanned folks (both in how often I'm re-using the same people, and in how few I can get away with animating (I think 13 out of the hundred folks are animated?)).


SO! I've been pushing the limits recently of how far I can just kind of jump from thing to thing without any particular gameplan, and I think I really do want to focus on wrapping up some stuff. 1.) HyperBole: it's so close to done. I should just Done it.  2.) Robot Theater: I've done all the set-up, now I just need to actually finish designing it and cut it out. 3.) Robot Arm tutorial: lost in the weeds a little on that one. I keep recording cast-steel modeling tutorials, but not really digging the final results. I'll figure it out. 4.) Dynamo Dream!

Gonna sleep now!