An Old Dusty Road

What a day... Today was one of those days that I felt I worked and worked and barely accomplished anything.   I worked on re-making the ground plane wagon tracks today.   Still not sure I am happy with what I ended up with.  Will have to wait for some critique.  I need fresh eyes on it.

Adding the Horse and Rider.

Couple of things on this update
Threw in a quick rider and horse. Very basic texture - just some basic matte with multi-subobject material on character. Very basic pose and horse is not posed at all yet. I need to bring the horse's head to the camera left a bit and down as well as adjusting the legs some. No saddle has been added either. I just wanted to throw this up to see how the focus is looking. I think I may need to actually push the rider and horse back into the scene a bit more.

I don't think I will need much detail in the texture for the sunset shot, but the daylight one, I will need it more. I will also need more work on the modeling for the daylight scene.

I also dropped the light in the saloon another 30%.

Discussion of Style

On my posts at CGtalk.com [Link], there has been some differing opinions on the lighting of the scene and the style of the image.   My post in response follows:

My goal is a stylized realism.... Not sure that makes sense to anyone but me. Maybe 80-90 percent real looking with artistic license for the rest. The lighting of the interior of the saloon... I will probably drop that down a lot more.. right now it's at 66%, I will probably drop it to about 30% or so. I would like to end up with a colored old photo look. Sort of similar to the sepia photos of old, but with some color thrown in.

To me, the image is too saturated for my liking, but I will be fixing that in Pshop in post. I also plan on adding the dust and Depth of Field as in my test image above. I will play around with some glare around the church bell too. 

Horse - Maya UV mapping

Ok... Maya UV mapping is pretty old school.  No pelt mapping, No quick way to do an organic object.  It isn't hard, but it goes back to the initial Unwrap techniques of using cylinders, spheres and planar mapping.  In 3dsmax I could have unwrapped this horse in about 20 minutes easy.   In Maya, it took me about 2 hours... and I mostly knew what I was doing.

I have yet to come to something that in my opinion is easier to do in Maya than Max.

Texturing and Modeling Update

Added Texture to Church, Post Office, and Barber. Also added a few extra models to those 3 buildings. I still need to adjust the roofs.  The church has some gaps on it's upper edge.  The textures for the post office and barber, I just don't like once it was in the scene.  I will have to change those.

Over on cgtalk.com, it was suggested to add the extra wagon in the foreground.  I like what it does for the foreground, but I am not sure of it's placement.

I have 2 more buildings to texture and then I am going to start working on the lighting.

Texture WIP

New Trees!

So I came out the weekend with some great ideas.   I really liked the Mesquite Tree.

I found that the Mesquite was a native Arizona desert tree and that it often served as a nursey for new cactus, protecting them from the sun:

http://lowenddslr.com/photos/sabino-canyon-nursery-tree.php

I had also found some free script plugins that helped create the base tree shape.  One of them did not work well with 3dsmax 2012 and I had to adjust the script some.

Using the script, I was able to get the basic shape and branches of the tree complete very quickly.  The resulting mesh was a bit messy so I ended up doing a lot of editing and cleaning up.   Soon I had my mesquite tree, modeled and textured.  3 Hours!

I was on a roll, so I added some cacti and this is what I ended up with:

Cactus and Mesquite

Trees ... A tragedy

At first I wasn't going to work any more on the tree that I had in the scene.  But after some unwrapping and texturing difficulties in Mudbox, I decided to take the tree further and add leaves.

I had done some research and looked up Arizona Trees and had chosen a Black Walnut.  Using reference, I made my tree a black walnut.

This was the result of about 5-6 hours work.  A good portion of the branches were hand created and placed.   I placed about 80% of the leaves manually, with the last 20% I used particles to fill in the tree.  This was a crazy amount of work that was fairly tedious.  

I posted this tree on CGtalk and got some comments back:   'Wrong kind of tree!  Doesn't look like a desert."  It was suggested to make the tree look more scraggled and thin, less leaves and shorter.  Maybe swap out for cactus.

This was great criticism.  I can't believe I had missed it, but my heart dropped.... that was 6 hours of work!  I went into the weekend and did some research....