As a matter of fact: You are a Blender Guru!
makes you fun to watching your Awesome progress.
HCR MINI-Challenge #43: Magic Door - The Black Portal - World of Warcraft
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!
Ayreon
#33
Amazing work! Thanks for sharing your workflow and taking the time to post all the progress.
You really inspired me to do more with Blender!
NeonKnight
#34
Hey, you’re welcome!
Thanks mate, glad you liked it, really happy to know that i’ve inspired you to use Blender!
Cheers!
HogtheComputer
#35
Hi, I don’t know whether you’d be willing to but if its not to complicated could you post a screen shot of the wood shader it looks amazing!
NeonKnight
#36
Hey, of course!
Since my shader tree is very cluttered, i will try to explain briefly the main things of it:
The separate XYZ node is used to separate individual coordinates, that way, you can manipulate them and then merge together to use, as UV coordinates are basically horizontal and vertical coordinates (the V is for vertical, now you’ll remember that ;), you can manipulate that as well
So i used a math node with add to combine Y values to a random value give by Object info node
This way, every new instanced object will come with a random Y offset in UV
(as the barks only tile in that direction)
Then, the rest is basically mixing different textures using a procedural noise as a factor, and putting that noise to the displacement channel, to give the impression that one of the textures is underneath
Layer weight plays a big role to add some glossiness in the outer edges too
The remaining is using random value from object info node to give some random variation in saturation and texture distribution, assigning that information to the contrast input and scale of the musgrave texture
I always use some math nodes to tweak these random values, this way you can manage to have a certain control where the values should be.
Hope i could help a bit, anything just ask me!
Cheers!