CGAN Oct24 - The House - Final entries

The House

Brief: A Halloween theme for October. A creepy house with a dark past and a sinister present. Haunted? A nest of otherworldly creatures in the basement? Home to A crazed scientist making abominations in the attic? Whatever it is, you are tasked with depicting it.

Deadline: Midnight on Thursday the 31st of October. There will now be no voting and no eventual winner, this is just a creative exercise with a time limit.

This thread is where you post your final entries, WIPs (work in progress) should be posted over here:  cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...oct24-the-house-wips


Challenge rules and guidelines:
cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challenge-rules

Rules in brief:
- All challenge entries must be your own work.
- You should post at least two WIP images that are clearly different from your final entry and each other.
- Your final entry should contain your image (inserted so it shows up full size) and at least two links to your WIP posts on the forum.
- No chatter in the finals thread – if you have questions, post them in the WIP thread or PM an admin.
- Feedback is allowed & encouraged together with the voting and in the WIP thread.
- Deadline is given in UK time (midnight UTC) with a grace period of 5 minutes for getting the post sorted.
- Each member may cast one vote.
- No cheating! Admins may decide to disqualify an entry that does not adhere to the above rules.

BOO!

WIP 1: cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...-wips?start=30#52210
WIP 2: cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...-wips?start=40#52215
WIP 3: cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...-wips?start=40#52217
WIP 4: cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...-wips?start=40#52223
WIP 5: cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...-wips?start=50#52275
WIP 6: cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...-wips?start=50#52280
WIP 7: cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...-wips?start=60#52289
WIP 8: cgartnexus.com/index.php/forums/challeng...-wips?start=60#52297

Also BOO! 
Or maybe just... booooo!
Or Boo-urns.
Anyway... how many wips did I post?

First one.
Second one.  
The tower one.  
And then tiles.  
The fence  and then  the grass.  
And then some texturing and trees.  
And then some guy appeared!  

There were some more in there that I missed but it all went on for far too long. And after lots of failed rendering and a bit of paintover to try and fix the rubbish glare from the Fog Glow Node I ended up with this thing.

 


 

And Boo-boo from me. I did learn a few things while working on my house... If I can remember what they were... One was that you can link items instead of appending them to the file, which was very convenient to keep the files a bit tidier. The other.... the other... uhm... Might have been a shortcut key or something

But I got sidetracked by a bout of depression and stopped working on it, I'm afraid. Maybe one day I'll finish it just because. Or something.

For the two finals that actually were finished, some feedback:
Banj's shack is very well rendered and look like a black and white photo. It has a nice eerie mood to it as well, but I guess I would have liked - or at least expected - a hint of something more sinister. Or maybe I'm just not seeing it? All the zombies are hiding from me.

Val's image on the other hand looks more like a still from an animated movie, with the graininess and style. I do think the two bats could have looked a bit different from each other... other than that, my one issue I think is with the beam of the flashlight. Somehow the way it meets the red light from the house "head-on", makes my eyes a bit confused. Perhaps just aiming it to the side and letting the red/pink light wash over the figure a bit more would have worked better.

If this was a vote... I would not have been able to decide on a winner. As usual, admittedly.

There are three bats! 🦇🦇🦇

And if I was voting I'd... well, you know.
I think Charlotte's was my favourite idea. It immediately made me think of The Miniaturist and I would have liked to have seen it progress further although I certainly wouldn't have liked to have done all the fiddly work.
And then Banj really frustrated me by doing in one day (one day!!) everything I'd been trying and failing to do for nearly two weeks. He's too good at this 3D stuff. Especially when it comes to those textures that arrived later.
They always look so authentic and natural and the resulting renders seem to look effortlessly perfect without the need to fix and fiddle the lighting and hide the rubbish bits like I always have to do.
But I do prefer the final WIP to the end result. The subtlety of the values in that one seem to create a more sinister mood and a believable world/environment whereas the higher contrast of the final image catches your eye in a bold way more like a movie poster or book cover. But whichever way you present it it was still great work.

As for my own effort... I'm pleased with all the things I learnt this time, especially with the arrays, bevelling, the booleans and the Lattice/Mesh modifier that distorted the structure at the end in a more wonky, "Haunted House" way. Sadly the texturing seems to let it all down as the rendered views don't look quite as good as the blank wireframe polygons.
Maybe one day I'll get used to all that UV stuff.
Or maybe I won't.

I suspect "all that UV stuff" is easier than "all those nodes and arrays thingies"


I agree about Banj's renders though. Still remember that e-wok with a certain envy. All the different materials really look like those particular materials. Me, I just change the shininess/roughness a bit so that porcelain is shinier than cloth.

Charlotte wrote:

I suspect "all that UV stuff" is easier than "all those nodes and arrays thingies"

 

*Unwrap UVs*
...
...
...
"Blender not responding."

I never unwrap anything. I probably do it all wrong.

Not unwrapping anything must make Christmas (or Christmas Eve for crazy people) pretty uneventful 

I have added a video of my process to my post up there ^. You wont see any UV fiddling in it though as I didn't record that.

I too was looking forward to the Doll House. I liked the idea which was different from the others, and hope it appears eventually (fully textured and rendered  ). I like Valences colourful lighting and those little figures at the windows... what do you mean "what figures at the windows?"   And there's the other details like the bats and moon and grass...

As for mine... A hint of something more sinister? Do you not know what happened in that building in 1967? Well gather round children, I have a tale to tell you... (I don't, but I know something bad happened there, just inside that doorway). There was going to be a little more decoration, such as a few more skulls and bones hanging around and the original intent was to have a bloodied tree stump in the foreground, and some blood around the entrance to the cabin. Time ran out so I left it where it was.

So basically, in 1967 someone killed a goose for christmas in their little hunting cabin.