Niiicce love good big-scale Environment.
Are you planning some layers of stones. Since it’s a pile of stones that were sculpted. Could need some clear stone blocks pattern in there.
Love your Contsruction site
HCR MINI-Challenge #43: Magic Door - The Black Portal - World of Warcraft
NeonKnight
#14
Thanks guys, i really appreciate it!
Scote, yeah man, actually theres a bunch of stone piles there, but it seems that they are very subtle hahahahah
i’ll see if i add a bunch more, like some more evident piles or something like that 
Oh man, i’ve spent the last two days basically waiting the pc rendering test scenes, a bit frustrating working in a old core 2 duo, especially when you are dealing in a scene with like 3 million polygon 
Hopefully, i did a thing or two in this time
Still unsure about the composition/scene layout, i’ve tested like 20 different cameras w/ different light conditions, even washing carrots is less annoying than waiting a 1h20 test render that looks like shit 
I ended up choosing a wide shot, despite that i can change opinion in a split second and tomorrow come with a frontal orthographic render that i’ve think it looked cool
Well, who cares! lets start the today’s W.I.P:
Since i’ve decided to make a wide shot, i really wanted to put the more detail i could, this way we can force the scale of the portal (hopefully)
By the way, dealing with the scale issue its been the most challenging thing so far for now, in 3D things tend to look like miniature, even if you’ll be modeling a entire planet full of mutant dinosaurs
So i decided to model a bridge to link the top of the monument to the cliff, nothing fancy, actually my patience with this is bellow zero, so i just grabbed a bunch of boxes and stacked together, in final render this will looks like a pixel or two anyway :curious:
Oh wait, i don’t told about the cliffs yet!
Started to modeling the terrain today (or yesterday? i’m awake since i began), just did some random weird box and threw on mudbox, nothing fancy here
cute cliff
Since i’m lazy as hell i’ve just instanced that a bunch of times and made the whole island hahahah
Talking about shaders, i decided to make everything i can procedurally, as this get me rid of doing full UV mapped textures or dealing with tilling, (since the scale its brutally huge and the assets are repeated more than 200 times)
I think its enough of detail for today hahahah
NeonKnight
#15
note that the sculpted stuff actually is very low poly, i’ve decided to take that way since i really want to push this render forward, but i’m not sure if my pc can handle that/render in time, so normal maps are doing its way massively here
How lovely the scene is, special attention to the weird planes that looks like a bug, they are my light blockers (or shadow casters, whatever), i’ve wanted to emphasize the right spots (who said grainy renders???)
As for render times, i’m using Cycles renderer, which is a Unbiased renderer, because of that my render times will tend to be xXxinsanexXx, that lighting scheme/scene actually is one of the worst types to deal with unbiased engines, for make even better only if i put a roof on top of everything and throw water with caustics on
The final will be a 4K render @900 samples at least, otherwise will be noisier than death metal
The render, as for now
AO
Viewport
Still lacking many things, i don’t even like to think about that, don’t want to tell what since i want it to be surprise (aka don’t know if i’ll make in time so don’t want to commit myself hahah)
well, i think that’s it for now!
until next update
NeonKnight
#16
Passing here just to show a test i’ve did with Mist pass from last render:
:o
For control the density of mist/fog i’ve used levels in photoshop, that way you can control the falloff using the sliders, even if the fog was set differently in the render, you can almost redo a completely different mood with that
Just a quick tip, now i need to back to work, see ya!
Tombery
#17
As a matter of fact: You are a Blender Guru!
makes you fun to watching your Awesome progress.
NeonKnight
#18
Oh man, i’m flattered with your kind words!
But, i’m most to a “random button press guy” than a guru at all, maybe one day :o
Hope its being as good as yours, since i really enjoy to watch!
Back to Dark portals n’ stuff!
Sorry for the time off guys!
Actually, this month is my birthday, so i received a surprise vacation on the beach this weekend by the family, and yes 
(suppose I would rather not stay home ending the thousand things I should, but) hahahahah
As a good boy, we are encouraged to thanks and smile, so
but finally i’m back to my lovely sweet workstation:
<3
Sorry, i just needed to show it
Well, at least i took the time to take some references about large scale building & cliffs/lands
Back to home, just woke up earlier i could to catch up the deadline, and i think i’m finally (almost) done
Since i think my next post would be the last here, i mean, with the final render, i’m not going to show the actual progress of the render now, just for a bit of surprise
Instead, i took a bunch o screenshots from the scene, with funny things/details we never would see in final render
as are several images, i’ll post them in the next post, just wait a sec
NeonKnight
#19
So here we are!
Just look at the character poses and thinks what could been happen then hahahahah
OH WAIT A SEC
i don’t told nothing about characters yet??
Yea! thats one thing i’ve planned to do since start, but wasn’t sure if i’ll had time
Seems like i have, so i did a random crowd, very low poly & basic, just for a bit more color in the render~
Actually theres still a thing or two to do, like flags and stuff, that i’m not sure yet if will be cool, but, huh, lets see what i’ve got until now so far:
“YOU, did you eat my donut? watch your back, nigga”
“wheres the f**ing load??”
ï should have listened my dad"
“GO BACK TO WORK” “BUT SIR, I THINK I STEPPED IN SHIT WHY WE DONT USE SHOES??”
“f**k, i should drink whey protein”
Sorry for being stupid
NeonKnight
#20
As a bonus for all that bullshit, i’ll show a little test render that i’ve did earlier today:
the crowd position was not final in this render, was my first test;;
in the updated version i did a shader that randomizes a bit the saturation for the clothes, for they look a bit less like a satanic sect
The final model have a polycount rounding towards 7 million and half polys, so in the screenshots maybe not all layers can be seen
Honestly, i really wanted to detail a bit more the overall scene, but with the given time constraints, and specially my poor hardware, this is not possible
moving the viewport of this scene in my desktop is like playing crysis on a smartphone, so, yea
See you all some gigahertz later, will render that in 4K at 1024 samples, full global illumination
probably will take around 2 days to finish, hope before day 13 :G
The output will be a multilayer EXR file, this way i can tweak brutally the scene, with minimum loss, especially the mist pass, where the 32 bit floating point can really make a difference when adjusting in photoshop without clipping colors
cya!
NeonKnight
#21
Hey there, i’m back!
wanted to have more time to make it calmly but, whatever~
The render takes around 30 hours to be done, a bit noisy yet but, that’s the price when you have a 5y old computer, right?
Did two variations, one mainly for the Challenge, and another one kinda illustration like with some painting over and stuff
Hope you like it!
Beauty Render
“Opening the Dark Portal”
Orthographic Renders
Wireframe
I’ll do a little breakdown of this final piece/post-processing in just a sec;
Be right back
NeonKnight
#22
Here’s a little breakdown!
First, the Render Passes:
Ambient Occlusion
Mist Pass
Raw Render
Rendered in 32 Bits, so using Camera Raw Filter in Photoshop i could tweak the lighting until be happy with the results:
My main workflow for compositing in photoshop is basically doing adjustments using masks to selectively affect the way i want
For the fog for example, i’ve first blended the mist pass in screen mode, then tinted to a bluish tint, and masked them all, this way i could paint only the places i think it should be cool to have fog, like near the ground plane and etc
I also did a second layer of fog, this time to desaturate a bit at the distance
For this i’ve applied this same mist pass as a mask for the hue/saturation adjustment layer, this way, the farther come less saturated and also bluer (or the color you want for a haze effect)
Also painted some fog by hand, and some lens effects/light scatters
I also like to use AO pass to blend in the scene, can give some interesting results, i generally apply it using multiply or overlay, then mask it and paint the areas i liked
For the Mystic portal stuff on the second image, i’ve simply painted straight using the default brush, set the opacity to be controlled by the tablet and a hard edged brush, as this things are way random, you can just try experimenting things until you are happy with that
Some glows really help too
Aaaand i think thats it!
i really enjoyed doing this project in the company of all of you, really motivates me to finish that and not give up, so thanks very much to everyone who take a look or commented here, and sorry for my weird english, I barely know how to speak my own language, so i can only imagine the mess that i made here hahahah!
See you in the next opportunity, Cheers!
ps: hey Blizzard, i’m free!
JoshuaSander
#25
Surely it’s quite impressive, really good work from the modeling to the compositing !!
Btw: Blender Rocks !!
NeonKnight
#27
Hey, thanks man! glad you liked it!
and yeah, blender can do a bit more than monkeys and cubes hahahah
Hahahah You’re very kind!
But there’s unfortunately (or fortunately?) several other nice projects here, and you sir, are included in the list hahah
Cheers!
NeonKnight
#30
Thanks man, glad you liked it!
Hey Scote, thanks very much!
For a moment i’ve thought that my entry would be one of the few finished in the final thread, but seems like some other works are finishing up lately, especially with the time extension given by Roberto, hope you finish yours in time, looking forward for that!
Cheers!