Heya!!

Here is an 8 image summary from start to finish on this project:
Right after modeling, this was the first look (obviously, this was pre-unwrapping)

Post unwrapping and finishing of the basic bricks, I added some dust. This dust was later edited and became close to invisible.

Of course, what ruin would be complete without run-off stains and muddy bases and so on? None. This was even after displacement was added (and before I knew of the texture bug in Cycles).

The ivies have finally been add...
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Hey all!

Really jazzed to get this one out today!


The entire list of things has changed a bit, as you can see, but, the main points remain, the most important of which was to get the ruin as the focal point.

The coordinates system is still a bit buggy with the ruin's textures (as you can see the floor's bump-mapping is gone and there are some black bricks), but the rest of the scene I am really jazzed about (though it's still not complete).

The background, makes it look as though there is DOF (de...
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Hey all!

Happy to share this one with you!
It is only rendered at 50 samples, which isn't much, but apparently more than enough for this scene, so yey! Here's the render, followed by things that need to change:


 - Currently, there is no focal point, because everything is practically evenly lit. So for that I want to use light to set focus on the ruin itself.
 - The texturing is a problem, because sometimes Cycles renders it right, sometimes it doesn't (bug they need to fix). So the goal is not to...
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Hey all!

I went ahead of the tutorial on this one for now, because I needed to see how this scene could be finished. The below is NOT the finished scene. It is only a test render and looks cheap and nasty (apart from the ruin, but even that is out of focus, lol):


Anyway, the night of, I was working on the trees. Making sure to keep it as simple as possible, but still giving as much detail as possible. It's a juggling act in every project (no matter how powerful your PC is...
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Hey all!

This is what the current preview render looks like:

I adjusted the above a bit, because it's lighting isn't finished yet and so it was a bit on the dark side, environmentally speaking, haha. Anyway, just added some brightness and contrast.

The leaves themselves are the most difficult and personally, I have to admit I couldn't get them as close to the real thing as I had hoped, but, I am very happy with the leaf shape:
I've seen this three-point shape not nearly as often as I would like t...
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Hey all!

What a mission! It was such a task to get this size of ivy in the scene. The generator works extremely well and it has nothing to do with the quality of the software. Blender rocks and the ivy generator too, but I was referring to getting it to render (Cycles is a bit more heavy duty than Blender Render, imo).

BUT! HE came through as usual and I added HIS suggestions to the book as well on how to get it going with a good look and proper detail.

For today's post, I made a clay render (fo...
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Hey all!

Can finally move on to something other than bricks, haha, sort of:


This is where I am leaving it alone from this point and moving on to the blocks' insides themselves, because as you can see, they are still as white as the day they were modeled, if not more so, hahaha.

Let's recap on how this went on (remember, all procedural textures, not even texture painting):

This was the firstly applying the bricks. It was a scale test before unwrapping the whole thing and separating the two section...
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Hey all!

I took some time today to specifically look at some buildings and I saw that when there is a place that water flows down regularly, where it hits the ground or drips for a long time, there forms stains too, so I added some staining on the floor as part of the floor's aging, but I ran into some difficulties, because I wanted to do it my way, instead of listening to HIS way, but thankfully, it didn't take nearly as long as before for me to relent and do it HIS way.

This is the result of ...
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Heya!

Worked late a night to get some more done and while I did get some work finished, it was more like a testing time than it was really writing. I needed to see if I could get the streaks I wanted in Cycles and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to, but HE insisted on HIS method for it being used (HE helped me last week with a theory on how to do it) and so I did and as usually it worked out well, giving this result after adding a bit to make them more convincing:

Remember that it's all procedural...
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Heya everybody!

Been working on the tutorial and, oh snap, is it taking a while, hahaha. Personally, I've learned a ton during the writing of the book and people's reaction to it when I show them what it's about and what they would be able to do with it is really a confirmation that this is truly an anointed (means favored and chosen by GOD) project. Thank you for all the support!

Today's work followed on the tip from yesterday, which is grouping everything into node groups making the whole set...
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Hey all!

I find giving you all updates on the tutorials as they progress, quite fun! Anyway, here is today's update. I have finished the mask and also the colored bricks (remember though that they are far from finished, this is just their base color):
While I am very happy with how they look currently, I am not satisfied that they look old (which they don't at all here, lol). So I will experiment a bit and see what works and what doesn't, but overall, I am very happy with the ratio of the brick...
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Hey all!

I want to show you a little something more from the tutorial. A factor image. This is what I use to define what goes where when I texture, to find it what it designates, you'll have to wait, but I can tell you that I used add here, instead of subtract, because I am going for something a bit more dramatic.

Remember, the image here is not the image that will be seen. It is a stencil or a mask if you will that tells Blender that this input goes here and this one goes there, aka Factor ima...
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Hey all!

I really enjoy seeing views on the website and I particularly enjoy it when I know that what you find here is interesting and educational to you at the same time, so thank you for your support. Feel free to tell your friends about this blog and the upcoming book on procedural textures (^^,)!

Back to the post. Today I started working on the ruin + ivy scene. I want to, through this tutorial show you that you can achieve some extremely complex things you may not even have dreamed possibl...
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Hey all!

While I was working yesterday and after watching Andrew Price's tutorial on creating a rundown warehouse, which can be found here, I wanted to find out how the Ivy Generator in Blender worked (I liked the results he got). So yesterday, after working some on the book, I started playing around with it.

Keep in mind though that this is not a small generator and contains a huge amount of faces (mostly the leaves) and that needs plenty of memory. Many of my attempts resulted in Blender free...
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