Finally finished...

Some of you may know that I've been working on a scene for quite awhile now. I've been using Deled for the architecture, and milkshape 3d for the models. I've been reading anything and everything that I could get my hands on for learning texturing as well. Everything in my Tranquil Irish Home has been modeled and textured from scratch (I did use bases from both Ben Cloward, Mayang Textures, and my 3d Total Textures set). I rendered the final scene in Bryce 6 using smoothing at about 80%. This greatly reduced the low poly look. I did touch up the render using Photoshop, mask/gaussian(ing?) any areas where two polygons met and didn't want to smooth out :). I also wanted it to look daylit, and Bryce doesn't do radiancy, so I used 55mm's Relight filter, and then I added lightbeams to the windows. I found a free stock photo and used a very small portion of its forest to place in the window of my scene as well. The coat of arms is the Roe blazon, btw :).




Hope someone likes this! I'll be adding it to the site as soon as I optimize it a bit.

Updates... sad news...

Well, as you can see I havn't posted in awhile. As many of you know I learned a hard lesson in life - some people are just evil, and I should never leave a camera bag in my car. Yep, stolen. Whether I left the door unlocked, didn't close it all the way, I'll never know. All I know is that when Christina asked me about leaving the door open, my heart began to race, and I felt a little more cynical of the human conscience after that moment. I lost my camera, all my flashes, my filters, everything - but they did leave the bag of backdrop equipment (mostly DIY stuff). So, until I start saving up more $$$ for new equipment, 3d is my main venue of artistic expression.

I found a 3d level editor, named DELed (www.delgine.com) that's now free, and it makes building standard levels much easier than Bryce or other programs. And it supports exporting to .obj which makes things even easier. Best of all, it has its own built in renderer so I can easily check my progress. Hopefully I'll finish with my newest scene soon, so I can share it with you all.