Materials #2
Hardest was doing the soily ground - the biggest problem turned out to be the huge dimension of the model. Even so called "close ups" represent 5 to 10 meters distance. And of course I didn't want to work with different materials for each camera setting...
So the challenge was finding a material convincing me at the close looks, but not being too boring uniform for the long shots.
I did lots of experiments with procedural textures (which I prefer), followed lots of excellent tutorials, but in the end I wasn't convinced. They brought wonderful results if you'd like to show few square meters of soily ground, but failed for my purpose.
So I decided to use image textures instead. I found some good stuff at Polyhaven.com. To avoid tiling issues I discovered a wonderful tutorial by Blenderguru Andrew Price (thanks a million times, Andrew!).
The result is half way convincing - at least it's much better than my first attempts.
Problem is that these textures use really detailled displacement - which of course produces mass of data. I used Subsurf Modifier with 5 levels, but would have needed at least 8. That was the point where my hardware decided to quit...
There's a new Blender feature called "Adaptive Subdivision", which is expected to save memory and render time over and over. It's still labelled "experimental" (and lastly that's what I did - experimenting with it a little bit ;-)
In few words it means subdividing regions being close to the camera lots and lots, and reducing subdivisions the more distanced things are.
Unfortunately it didn't work for me at all. One "Out of memory"-message after the other.
Anyway - I can live with the actual result.
Another problem turned out to be some natural stone shader (to texture the main pillars' feet). Again there are multiple tutorials on the Internet, but they all use Voronoi texture for the basic structure. And to me this was too irregular - I didn't want too confusing structures but thought about having a kind of disturbed brick texture. Unfortunately you can't distort a brick texture...
After some Internet research I puzzled along a guy called Ryan King who did lots of really excellent procedural materials - one of them being a cobblestone shader. This was exactly what I wanted - just changed the colors...
Funny enough he uses Voronoi texture as well, but thanks to him I learned that there's a new feature included in the Voronoi which I didn't recognize before: a controller for the randomness. Turning it down gave me exactly what I wanted.
Million thanks to you as well, Ryan! Absolutely terrific work you're doing.
And one more Internet ressource: Ducky 3D did a procedural wood shader which is extremely simple by at the same time bringing really charming results. Just convince yourselves and have a look at the renders.
Until now I used some CC0 shader which may be a little more photorealistic but is way more complicated. I decided to replace it completely by Ducky's shader.
Many thanks as well to you, Ducky 3D!
I modified my own stuff as well a little. Respecting that people used mainly wood and coal for the heating in the former times I expected that there should have been a lot of grime in the air polluting everything. To respect this I added some dirt mainly to my former brick materials.
It wasn't a big affair, just overlaying a noise texture, and the result may be quite subtle, but to me it was worth while.
For the iron Tower parts I used pure metal and added some (little) rust. I learned that the Tower was painted in 1891 for the first time - two years after being finished. So I suppose that he started to rust even while being constructed...
Somewhere I read that they planned to have him painted in some quite penetrant orange color even during construction, but in the end they gave up the idea.
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