Smoke and Materials

After fawning over the Bathhouse, I got back to work on my environment. A coursemate told me also that my environment lacks specular highlights, so I will focus on tweaking specular and gloss maps from now on.

I added the textures for the two blankets today as I felt the environment needed more colour overall. Sculpting them presented an interesting new exercise for me, as the cloth was draped over a surface and not hanging like the others in the scene. As a result, the surface of the bunched cloth looked as follows:

Perhaps a bit to aggressive for the material, which looks like wool when the sculpt looks like silk. That's a mistake on my part in retrospect.

For the diffuse, I decided a neat addition would be some melted candle wax that was stuck to the cloth, so I added it in photoshop and then used Ndo to generate the normal map. I also learned here that adding gaussian blur to a Gloss map is great for liquid gloss like this! Here's a render of the cloth(s) in Marmoset (if you couldn't already tell, I like Marmoset);

And here's the scene. Studying Jordan Walker's bathhouse gave me the idea for planes on the ceiling to represent smoke layers, rather than particle systems. The only problem is that they move too fast, so will have to slow their panning a bit.

I've also been making lens flares as a test for final rendering. These ones are just placeholders for now.

Here's a shot of the concept part of the scene:

I may actually be bold enough to try the scene in daylight for my next post, so stay tuned for that :)

Thanks for reading :)