Adventures across the 3rd dimension

They're not moving in herds just yet.

 

Nooo, of course I didn't create that background.
I thought I'd leave all of that for a while and just spent a few moments making some teefies and a tongue and using that vertex colour mask trick to make his claws a different texture from the skin, which then allowed me to add noise to the skin and not the claws.

And then I had a play with this HDR image. The shadows never seem to be as dark as I would like when using that kind of lighting.

And now my Dino is rigged for posing...

 

And as you can see I've added a couple of nodes that lets me quickly change the colour of his markings and linked it to his hairy "feathers" and even though I didn't use it here, I've added a blend shape for a bit of tongue movement.
I should now be able to make him look like lots of different dinos with just a quick tweak of some settings.

Now he just needs a background.

I still need to draw more than two dinos so I can start painting...

Yeah, let's not bother saving today's effort.

It had a foreground of grass, a middle ground of distant trees and a distant mountain right at the back and they all looked like they were from different pictures at different times of day. It's just soooo hard to unify textures and style and detail.

After a mixture failures and learning (with many more failures) this is the current state of my landscape progress...

 
 
 

The first one is just with the gradient world texture, the second includes the noise textured Volume domain to try and add atmospheric perspective/mist and the third one is a colour-corrected combination of the two, which seems a necessary step cos everything is going far too blue in ways I didn't intend.
And some other additions went even bluer than that! I tried to put in my low poly tree but the colour looked freakishly out of place so I've just stuck with the flat transparent planes so far. I made them into little "crosses" to create the illusion of 3D trees but that trick falls apart on closer inspection so I may do something about that. Or not.
Obviously the big gap at the bottom right isn't supposed to be there. I'm hoping that another big foreground hill will cover that up and provide the setting for the dinos but I may have to do that as a separate render and composite the two images together. When I tried to add the grassy plane Blender crashed on me (after saving thankfully) so I don't know if all those transparent textures are too much to handle. Also it is hard to control the scale of the terrain depth so the separation might be a good idea anyway.

When I did VRML there was something called billboard that made the item (say a 2d image of a tree) always turn towards the viewer... Not sure if that exists in Blender or if it's even feasible when you have a whole forest...

Edit: And for the record, I'm impressed - I think it looks fine. Possibly the right side forest looks a bit "surprisingly blue". Maybe if the blue trees and green trees intermixed a bit more in the middle it would look m,ore natural?

Also, did you read about Fiona?
(No, Fiona wasn't a dinosaur. But still.)

Yes, the "blue" thing continues to annoy me. I can get rid of it by removing the sky... But then I don't have a sky.
Eevee seems to overdo the ambient light levels and I've yet to work out how to tone it down. It probably requires some kind of complicated node nonsense.
And switching back to single plane billboards is one of the things on my list of possible fixes. I also want to try the opposite of adding more planes per tree. At the moment it's just two versions of the same transparent image at right angles so perhaps increasing to four might make them more rounded.

And...
*googles Fiona*
*gets nothing but Shrek references*

*googles more*
*and more*

Found it! I think.

You did! *applause*

Hmmm.


 

It seemed like a good idea at the time but this is... challenging.