Hogswatch night

Well, appeasing the Gods of Heat with an image of pyramids clearly didn't work so let's try giving them some cold medicine, shall we? (Warning! This and other posts might contain traces of ill-conceived puns. Proceed with extreme caution. You have been warned.) 

An image that comes to mind when thinking about snow, ice, hail, frost, cold things, other cold things... err, where was I? Oh yes. When reminiscing about winter, you are quite likely to end up thinking about Hogswatch. Therefore, the theme of this week is just that: the Discworld's version of our Christmas. Now, I could do an interior image with stockings and pork pies and fireplaces... but you know what? Still too hot. Let's stay outside instead.

The scene I have in mind features the Hogfather's sleigh, complete with the four boars—and presents, of course—all of that parked before a generic wooden house on a street in Ankh-Morpork. Oh, and it's snowing. Heavily.

***

Actually, it just occurred to me that it wouldn't make much sense for the Hogfather to park the sleigh on the street. How would he get up to the chimney, eh? I'm not sure flying is in his repertoire. Hmm. How about putting the sleigh on a roof somewhere? That might just work.

***

Alright, this time I did not start with the ground or the sky. I created a pig! Or a boar, if you follow the canon. And it surprised me how easy it was. I was afraid of working on the extruded bits because they usually go all wonky and I have to run after them and try to persuade them to look decent. But it dawned on me that I didn't have to extrude and position them gradually. What I did instead was extruding the body parts all the way and then adding more geometry as needed. And all of a sudden, it was finished in a couple of minutes, with no hassle.

I don't think I need to rig it because the boars will be standing still. Off to the sleigh, then.

***

Ok, the sleigh is done. I will probably need to adjust it when I yoke the boars but it will do for now. I tried to make my life easier by using modifiers and I have to admit that they helped a lot. The body of the sleigh is mirrored and solidified so I only had to create a couple of plains and logs on one side. Mesh-wise, the chains and harnesses are only a chain link, the harness and a couple of empties.

Creating the chains was especially satisfying. The result is a combination of array, curve and mirror modifiers. The benefit of doing it this way is that I should be able to quickly adjust the chain once I bring in the boars. The tricky thing might be positioning the harnesses. Right now they are added as end caps of each chain. But as the chain length and position changes, the harnesses fling about wildly. Also, the mirror modifier rotates them in opposite directions, which might be a problem if I want them to rest on the boars's necks.

Next, I'll need to start working on the roof. I'm not quite sure about the camera angle, though. I think it would be nice if other roofs were visible in the background but then the sleigh would be too small.

***

I was so absorbed in playing with the scene that I forgot to take pictures, as usual. I laid out a few houses and gave them provisional roofs (by which I mean simple plains). Then I placed the sleigh and I started wondering what it would look like with the boars. So I added those as well. And then I noticed that—for whatever reason—the harnesses became deformed. I spent a good half hour trying to figure out how to fix it before I gave up, removed the end cap and simply duplicated the harnesses. Which turned out to be a good choice because it made adjusting them on the boars that much easier.

I then proceeded to make the houses more house-like. I tried to spend as little time as possible on them so that I could work on more important parts of the scene. However, in stark contrast to the harness situation, this turned out to be a particularly stupid decision because every time I wanted to change something I had to do it separately for every house and when I was finished I noticed that I forgot to create a face here or adjust the roof there, and I had to start all over again. Caught up in rush(ed) hour, I was.

Anyway, now would be a good idea to add a few more objects I'm missing: the presents, chimneys, windows... I have no clue how I'm going to make the presents and I need the windows to emit light. Sounds like I'm going to have a lot of fun. Eh.

***

Maybe I shouldn't be having *this* much fun. It makes me feel slightly dizzy—and it gets worse when I look at the deadline clock ticking. Well, I have added sacks with presents but the presents were doing things so weird that I don't even want to talk about it. Simple scaling became a nightmare because they got all skewed. Global coordinates, local coordinates, apply scale and rotation... nothing worked. The whole scene is weirdly rotated and I'm not able to fix it.

I have also added chimneys. And it took me a couple of minutes to realize what was wrong with them. The main purpose of a chimney is to take smoke from the inside to the outside. And what does a young ambitious chimney need to be able to do that? Why yes, a hole in the middle. Well done me.

I'm now working on windows and at least they are turning out well. They are extruded a bit inwards to create space for emission provided by the faces in the back. The front is a combination of glass and wood and the idea is that they should work exactly like normal windows do. Let's see how well they work in the scene.

***

19 placed windows later, the scene is starting to look a bit better. The houses are no longer white, and everything looks a bit warmer. Now to the snowy part. I'd like to have layers of snow on the roofs and on the ground. I'm thinking about using planes with fractal displacement but I'm not sure if it will be good enough. If it doesn't work well I might need to use a displacement map.

***

Good news, everyone! Fractal displacement worked wonderfully. Edges of the roof needed a bit of trimming but apart from that I didn't need to retouch anything by hand. I have now darkened the scene a bit—it doesn't quite look like a night yet but I'm getting there. Next step will be to add a sky texture (free night-time HDR images are pretty difficult to find so I'm just going to use a simple image). And then I'll probably spend a couple more hours on lighting and "minor" adjustments.

***

Ta-daa! I'm done. The minor adjustments turned out to be everything, twice, but that was to be expected with my approach to things. The part that took most of the time was emission of snow. Finding good balance between the size and number of snowflakes took a lot of trial and error. Every time I thought I had it, there were too many snowflakes at the front—or too few of them—so that it looked like those cheap movies where you can see from which side they are hosing the set.

And since last time I quite enjoyed watching the scene rise from the ground up, I'm going to create another gif for this one. And next time? I think that time has finally come for us to see Ankh-Morpork from above. Ready up your nose plugs, ladies, the river Ankh has a lot of character.