Test renders #2
For the renders I used almost same camera settings than before. Only in few cases did some tweaking (e.g. having a tree directly in front of the camera lens).
To gain a little realism I modified my leaves material by using an image texture.
So here are the renders:
Again let's do some discussion:
Obvious to see the downloaded houses are much more colorful than mine. I guess I'll do some experiments using some of my own shaders here.
As expected the level of detail can absolutely not be compared (would be horrible if a script did the same job than me modelling houses for hours and hours ;-). So placing OSM buildings next to my own doesn't work. But to fill my background they do a good job, I guess - just watch renders 13, 14 and 16.
The lit windows don't fit to daylight scenes, so I'll try to dim them down. Shouldn't be a problem - just looking for some emission node....
I wonder about floor heights - the OSM buildings seem to be much higher. For my buildings I used by default 3 m (for antique buildings) resp. 2.5 m (the modern ones) floor height.
I guess the addon offers some settings to have that manipulated, but this would mean downloading them once more, so I'd rather try to lower them a little, or scale by Z.
And of course the data includes lots of small objects being traced by OSM users and interpreted as "tiny houses" by the addon. Have to be removed of course.
Some time ago I started adding another detail to my houses: a kind of jutty surrounding the walls - mainly to give me a logical transition from roof to the walls (most important because I did without rain gutters), but of course they could be used multiple times around a house.
They're easily done by duplicating an edge loop, extruding it downward and adding a Solidify modifier - and they cast some really nice shadows:
I think the shrinkwrapped overlays don't work well when used in foreground (renders #2, #5 and #9). I'll have to do something different here.
Unfortunately I do not like my greenery anymore. I modelled the trees some years ago using Sapling addon. Working with my old PC with really low CPU I had to use as less leaves as possible. Of course my hardware is much better now, but the Sapling addon offers lots of settings, and it'll take me hours to achieve half way convincing results.
Some time ago I had to purchase a botanical addon for some different project. I guess I'll use this instead. The trees are really mind blowing, although it's heavy stuff of course - the filesize is 3 times as high as my old Sapling trees are. But anyway - concentrating on few different trees and shrubs should be half way acceptable.
And of course the rectangular shaped trees have to be rotated by some 90 degree angle to avoid some repeating patterns from one tree to the next.
Watching the renders carefully you may recognize some objects like trees, shrubs a.s.o. not touching the ground properly. Has to be fixed of course.
Let's have a few words about materials, too. I still didn't work with that consequently, using the same rough 'n' ready stuff than for my first test renders.
You may remember me having done some corrections with my red bricks material - which used to be too dark. It's too bright now. Especially the old Palais du Trocadero looks horrible. Gonna dim it down a little.
Covering my ground I thought about having some cobblestones which would give me some old fashioned atmosphere. I created it following this tutorial by TutorialField, and I really like the result.
One bigger problem seems to be how to generally structure the terrain. At the moment we have some areas covered by buildings, and besides that there are a lot of blank, undefined areas covered with cobblestone plaster by default.
In real life there are pavements, curbs and traffic refuges. But honestly speaking I don't like the idea adding things like those. I'm still planning to catch some "ancient atmosphere" - let's say: doing renders that illustrate the early 1900s. That means of course: no go for e.g. traffic lights or modernistic signs a.s.o.
I was even wondering if pavements would be ok. But some Internet recherche told me that pavements even existed in Old Pompeij, so I think about working in this direction and see how I'll come along.
I used a different HDRI here. Guess the old one was too "blueish", almost a little "Comic style". But the new one seems to be mainly uniform grey. Of course I could experiment with rotating it to catch some blue passages, but why should I? This is rough'n'ready stuff. Gonna look for some different one. Optimization might be done for the final renders.
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