Sandcastle upon HDRI

(I know I make horrible puns, but I'm sure you are used to that by now. I still hope, though, that no Geordies are reading this...)

This week really sucked.

One, I'm an idiot, and two, I'm an idiot. Which is technically the same thing, but... you know how that goes. And why am I an idiot, you ask? Because I thought the class was starting at the beginning of the month. Which it wasn't. It starts tomorrow, dummy. So I had to come up with a backup scene. 

Which I did. A wonderful, witty scene, with a story and a touch of sadness, holding a mirror to the society. It could be a worthy submission to the current Weekly Challenge ("Artificial Intelligence" is the topic). The scene has a dog, a robot, some furniture, and two people in it. Which is about two people and a dog more than I could reasonably expect to make in the remaining time. So I put the mocked-up render into a new, pathetic folder called "Concepts" and I'll never look at it again. *Sigh*

And if that wasn't bad enough, conceptualising the scene seemed to have drained all my creative energy I set aside for this week, because I couldn't think of anything I wanted to make. And the time was quickly ticking away. On Friday my brain short-circuited and picked the only topic it could focus on. Heat. And a tiny pail with a shovel, apparently.

I thought I was doing myself a favour when I used the ANT landscape generator in Blender. And initially, I was. Bit of a tinkering with sliders and I had a terrain that could pass for a sandy beach. But things went south once I tried to texture it. For some reason, the ground stayed sort of... pixelated. As if the smoothing wasn't working properly. The ANT plugin uses its own smoothing, so that might be the reason. I tried to turn it into generic mesh, triangulate it... nothing helped. As a result, the sand looks super weird.

And the castle? I really don't want to talk about it. It wasn't me! I was dead at the time! 

Oh, alright, I made the castle. But did you know that the towers actually fit the pail? Yes, they do. Do I get some bonus points for that? What do you mean, "no"? It's a nice castle. A bit too regular and blocky, but I did try to make it look like the sand at the bottom was still wet... Fine, I'll put it away and we'll never talk about it again, alright?

Next week, I should be working on the homework submission (this time for real) and hopefully something extra on the side. See you next time!