August/September 2017 Challenge: Revealing Dido

[Redrobes]

Although the creating the 3D bit is a bit time consuming the texturing side of doing the sea is not all that hard. You get a lot of result for not a lot of effort building the shader. It looks like its more work than it really is. If you can get something like Wilbur or your Vue to generate the terrain including the subsea bathymetry then doing the texturing this way is a good call. The main thing I like about doing it this procedural way without manually touching the bitmap with a pen is that if I move a rock then I can rebuild the image. If that rock is moved so it pokes thought the surface then it shades up all the foam on it. So all the late stage fiddling gets done for you. The artistic side of it is limited to the heightmap and perhaps not even that.

So late last evening I took my mosaic photo and squared it up using Gimps perspective tool which is a pretty cool function. I clipped the centre panel out which is the one of Dido and two cohorts. I was originally going to use the one with the Roman soldier Aenius in it but the centre panel seemed to fit better. Again, I made a mask for it and put it into the layer for the texture engine. It shades the mosaic after the sand but before all the sea so that the caustics get applied to it. Talking of which I decided to increase the strength of that texture and I made the sea darker. I added a second foam texture since the first one was pattern repeating a bit and I also increased the height of the villa walls because they didn't seem very prominent.

I went back and referenced my photo which I took this summer of underwater rocks like this and noticed that rocks that were underwater or partially out of the water had a greenish tint from the barnacles and other organisms that live in the sea. Those that dry out and get sun seem to turn white from the suns bleaching rays killing it off and also lichens. Not sure what its like in the rest of the world but in the UK we have this white splats of lichen which form on rocks by the sea. I have added a green patina to the rocks which are below a certain height of about a couple of metres.

At this point I dont really have a sense of scale to the image. I will be putting a boat on the top with a diver but I could make the diver half the size of the mosaic or a tenth of it. If anyone wants to comment whether they think the villa should be large or small or have more walls and be more complex than this single room then I would be keen to know. Its sort of turning into a diorama rather than a map.

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[Mouse]

That's looking pretty great, Red

Are you planning to do the beach up with any sand/gravel/rock pool textures?

[- JO -]

Wow ! That's really nice ! The water effects are just perfect !!!!

looking forward to see the next step !

[Redrobes]

Thanks to you both ! The beach is a cliff face but at the mo its not too steep and I think it needs to be steeper. But I like the idea of rock pools. They were in the story but in my head I had this part as the cliff to the side and out to sea a bit more. But why not ! I'll go through my old photos as I know I have some with some muscles I took on some rock pools so I bet I took some rock pool photos there too. I dont think I can be bothered to model the whole rock pool in 3D, ill just make a depression and let the texture do some work.

I havent had a lot of time today. But I fiddled about with the underwater bit some more adding some plant life. It hasnt turned out all that well and its barely noticeable. I also looked at my reference pics and noticed that the rocks were lighter and the sea did not get so dark so I lightened it back up again. I also didnt like the really crisp edge to the water so faded it down a bit and I added some wet line to the dry rocks and dry cliff.

I will be working my way up the cliff face with the textures and then at the end ill have to find or model up a boat and a diver.

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[Mouse]

The water line looks a lot better. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong before, but now I can see it was too crisp

Looking forward to the rock pools

[Redrobes]

Found them and made some seamless (I hope) textures from it. So will have a go at getting this into the image over weekend.

Edit: Yikes - a lot of sharp edges on that Rockpool tex. May have to clean that one up a bit.

[Redrobes]

I have had some fun remodelling the cliff face raising it up including a part on the left side where I made it protrude out of the water a bit more. I moved that pesky rock that was on top of another because it looked unrealistic. Then I made some depressions into those new flatter areas for the rock pools and kept the mask for that depression. Then I have painted some muscle masks by hand and used the rock pool mask to texture in the pool life.

I'll have to work on the cliff a bit more and try to get some rocky areas and plant life into that next.

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[Redrobes]

Got some rock face and vegetation going on the cliff now. Not sure that I will spend a huge amount of effort tweaking it because the interest is next to the mosaic. I will need some gold stuff just starting to become exposed on the cliff face at the level of the mosaic to meet the challenge criteria - perhaps a statue or a jug or something. Have to see what I can find or rustle up in 3D. A jug would be easy but a statue not so much ! I was thinking of putting more gold on the boat - after all, its not going to stay lying about on the sea bed if its being excavated.

If anyone is following this in 3D then ill drop in the new height HF2 file. A 3D view is below to show what the cliff looks like as from above its not so obvious.

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[Mouse]

The rock pool is lovely!

Would it look even better if the mussel beds were more irregular in shape?

[Redrobes]

Yes your probably right. To be honest when I have seen mussels they have kind of taken over and pretty much all of the rocks are full of them. I will have a look online at some coast pics and see what they do. I certainly dont think they form splats like this tho.

I thought about building a boat in 3D but I could not be bothered. So I looked online and I couldnt find a nice boat looking from above with no copyright issues online either. So I grabbed a free 3D model and did a basic render of it and captured the image and used that instead. So the model is not in 3D in my project. In any case my 3D bit uses a height map and thats no good for normal 3D models but it is good for terrain.

I needed the chap, the diver, the unnamed archaeologist. I thought that would be easy to find a nice image online but I was wrong. Swimmers, Scuba, snorklers, you name it nothing I searched for came up trumps... until whoever this chap is:

https://pxhere.com/en/photo/700689

Whoever you are, your now my archaeologist ! Public domain image, I cut him out and made a mask that set him into the water.

I got a 3D model of a sculpture, coloured it up gold and masked it in. So the archaeologist is working against the tide to get the statue out and back to the boat.

There may be some more items that I could put in but its mostly there. I know I have a few weeks to go but normally I am up to my eyeballs in stuff I have to do so this needs to be nearly in the bag before the end of today.

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