renaissance poisson

4 other projects added to http://picasaweb.google.com/pleochroic/WorksInProgress

and here's today's bit of work.

torre del moro, costa blanca, spain somebody on renderosity asked what it would cost to create a model of this tower. i'm curious too. first i went on the net and found some more references, since his picture wasn't very good.

done in sketchup. this went a lot faster because i now know how to tackle the workflow, and also because i figured how to do object replication during rotate, which made the merlons a piece of cake. this is an extremely low poly model; if i were to actually sell this (or give it away), i'd do some smoothing in maya. the texturing will be more time-consuming than the modeling. depending on how realistic he wants it to be, much, much more time-consuming; i'd probably build a displacement map for the rockwalls.

bureaucracy muse close-up the *poing* wanted to see her face more closely, so here it is -- along with changed hair colour because i didn't like the red tape shader on the hair all that much. the hair needs a bit of extra postwork because there are a couple of angles where there should be curves.

i've taken a couple of days out from cloth modelling to dive a bit (a shallow dive) into texture mapping (which means the application of 2D images to 3D objects). this'll be part of the cloth modelling once i get beyond the stage in which i am now, the part where the boring lambert shaders turn into rich and decadent fabrics from the orient, *heh*.

and i did some thinking about it, being as i've been lately exposed to the poser community, which has become enamored with high-resolution, " ultra-realistic" textures. such textures are expensive in terms of processing power. and i am hard up for that. so i went through calculating just exactly what resolution i'd need my texture maps for those clothes to be. i know there will be about 2 of you who care, *snicker*, the rest can stop reading here. and if you care about the paramour's report (and a picture) of passport woes and our resultant trip to victoria earlier today, you can read that instead.

if i am rendering at, say, 1024x768 to make an image i can admire on my desktop, it's immediately obvious that i don't need a 3000x3000 texture for anything, including the background, right? ok, it's really that simple from there on: just about how large is any object proportionately to the entire frame -- that's the resolution its texture needs to be to show up at maximum detail (i am presuming that texture is already adjusted to the object in question). if i am rendering the figure fairly large within the frame, and the skirt takes up about a third of the screen, that comes to about 342x256.

a couple of maya specifics: it likes textures square (they don't have to be, but it uses the memory anyway), and it likes them in multiples of 64. so i'll up the 342 to 384, it'll look just as good, and my CPU will be a lot happier than with a higher resolution. and this one's quite hidden: there's a default value of which you should be aware if you've fine-tuned your texture well: in the attributes for the file texture, under "effects" turn the filter down. its default of 1 blurs the texture slightly, which generally is useful to reduce pixellation, but it can be counter-productive if you've worked things out precisely to show enough detail for your render resolution.