Charrette #5 - The Tower texturing challenge

[TheAllusionist]

Start Your Render Engines!
To keep the momentum of the Challenges going we decided to throw something a little different into the mix. Instead of getting a beautiful model to start with, we are providing a mass and lighting study model of a hi-rise tower in a greeble like city setting. It is up to you to use the existing models and your texturing skills to add detail to the scene. This is a texturing excercise, we want you to use the base geometry and 'allude' to actual detail through texturing. The majority of your work will need to be using textures, shaders, bump maps and displacement maps to make the scene look more detailed than it actually is. You may move around buildings and add some new items (Heck you can throw 'King Kong' on the tower with little b--planes circling above!) to the scene, but the detail will be achieved through texturing techniques. We will also be looking for creative mood through the use of mass and lighting. This exercise will be similar to the techniques used by the gaming community to fake detail through texture, baked on textures and normal mapping may be used. In addition this exercise could be a great project for a fly around animation. We will provide initial models and if improved versions become available we will make them available as well.

Rules and criteria:
1. You can use any software you like and any type of light setup. You can change time of day, make a night scene, change a mood, whatever you like. However, main structure and composition should remain, scattered buildings can be reorganized and some additional items can be added to the scene, but we want to be able compare results. Do not change physical geometry of the existing tower itself except for repair of bad geometry translation.

2. Submission to be one money shot, additional views and even a presentation composition is acceptable, but the main goal is to provide an image with mood through lighting and POV to capitalize on the masses and of course detail through texturing techniques. In addition we will investigate, if participants are interested, to have an additional catagory for a quick fly bye animation.

3. Deadline will be discussed later, we want to attract as many participants as possible and gain as many great images as possible while providing a time line that is casual and works with peoples schedules.

4. Awards - We will work out some sort of prize for a winner and try to figure a way to showcase the entries, with this challenge our goal will be to have public voting as part of the selection process and get your work shown to the public....

OK, the following is something I am throwing on all the challenges, I have seen some renderings from models provided here on sites with no credit to the modeler, we are providing this model, so I am not so worried about it, but with our contest and challenges we always try to protect the artist's rights, the diclaimer is an effort to make people aware of this and ask that they share credit where credit is due.

Admin Note: The scene remains the property of the original artist and credit to the original artist must be included with any rendered output posted outside the site. In addition the original artist and 3DAllusions for the purpose of the challenge are the only parties authorized to distribute said material without the consent of the original artist. If you do not agree to these terms do not download the afore mentioned material.

Images of the base model:

[TheAllusionist]

Reserved for additional resources and instructions:

Attached MooseDogs consolidated LWO file for your use. In addition I have included a TrueSpace version for my old buddy Hugh!

[pradipta]

Thanks Russell for starting yet another challenge. This will be quite interesting. Texturing and rendering skyscrappers are always fun as well as challenging.
I would like all our existing and new members to take part in this challenge and support our forum.

I have some good links to skyscrapper reefrencr pictures. If anybody needs it I will be glad to post here.

Excited to see some awesome renders!!!

[Director Bob]

This Looks Interesting. I didn’t have much of an imagination on this tell I looked at it. I have some thing to do in UVMapper. Some polygons seem to be inverted No big problem easy fixes. Looks Good in
Bryce 5.5 just out of the Zip. Shade 8 Had a fit I think it didn’t like my new Upgrade I just did. “Surprise Shade did crash the system with Bryce rendering in the background.” Poser 6 is not Inverted poly friendly. Looks like the work will by done in UVMapper Pro and Bryce 5.5. I don’t know if I’m Going to keep the DAZ millennium Dragon. “I was just Playing Don’t have a Ape in my folders.”

I’m Looking forward to what other’s in the community do. I learn a lot by just looking and reading and just drinking my morning coffee and going wow.



Ps. Inverted Polygons Show up as black In UVMapper.

[TheAllusionist]

Hey, I like the dragon silouetted ub the moon and the foggy lighting! The 'King Kong' statement was to let people know that they could have fun with it, not a requirement by any means! LOL

P.S. Fixing bad geometery is fine, I imagine some will provide better models, I don't have a way to check a lot of them after exporting them through PolyTrans, so I am not sure if some of them are OK

[WDA]

Here's a lighting test in C4D, kind of like getting the feel/mood & light contribution to the raw geometry first. Makes color correction / color temps of matte images easier to work with, imho.

Not sure how I'm going to map; camera, uvw unwrap or planar, lol maybe all of them. Will have to see how the hunt for reference/matte pics goes

WDA

BTW working on a parrallel kind of training for another group, maybe a couple of the group members come and play

[TheAllusionist]

WDA, the more the merrier! I love the volumetric lighting, looking cool. UV Mapper Pro in Director Bob's post looks like it handles the unwrapping pretty well, I will have to check out the program. Great to see you participating!

[WDA]

A web link to some nice generic building pics, good for-inspiration-matte textures
http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/mpls/

[speedline]

Cool challenge Russell!
WDA, I like the volumetric lights too, want to see how well far you go, as always!
Good luck to everyone.