Sunset barn

So... whoever was expecting a tractor, it's not a tractor. It's not very Farming Simulator-esque either. But it's something.

As I was hunting for references, I stumbled across one that was way over the top colour-wise. Naturally, I thought: let's do something similar. A wallpaper kind of render. I haven't done many of those yet.

Modelling the barn was the easy part. It was mostly based on this reference, but I made a few adjustments. Some of them not quite intentional (like when I forgot to create the supporting beams on the sides and I only noticed when I was doing the post-processing). The most challenging part was probably the UV unwrapping. Not that I haven't had enough practice over the past year and a half. I can now make pretty-looking UV layouts in a fraction of time I used to need, but I'm still not immune to not thinking ahead (that was a multiple negatives treasure of a sentence, that one).

Whenever I work with wood textures I try especially hard to plan ahead and lay out the horizontal and vertical parts of the meshes accordingly. It saddens me to say that this project was not a success in that area. Once texturing, I still had to duplicate materials for horizontal and vertical placement, and manually select polygons for the masks (instead of simply picking UV islands or whole meshes). I'm getting there, I think, but the workflow is not quite perfect yet.

Since I wanted to work with Grass Essentials once more, I had to render in Blender. I didn't get to spend too much time with the grass, though, because the clock was ticking and I still had to do the main part of this render: the post-processing. I was a bit afraid to use 2.8 for this project, because particle systems are reportedly not fixed yet, so I couldn't use the Cryptomatte feature that would allow me to easily mask out individual pieces of the composition.

Instead, I rendered the barn and ground separately on a transparent background. I ran into an issue where the background suddenly turned black. I found some workarounds and tips on what to try, and then the issue magically resolved itself. I don't know what I did, but I'm not complaining. At least not until it randomly happens again.

I'm not on the best terms with Blender compositor (we tolerate each other), so I took the rendered pieces to Krita and put them on a nice background. And another. And one more, just for kicks. Background no. 98 seemed a particularly good choice, so I focused on matching the render to the sunset mood I was after. Because there is nothing that screams "wallpaper" more than hyper-saturated colours and dramatic skies.

I think I've done a decent job matching the colours, but you can still see that the elements don't blend together very well. And I'm not sure what I'm missing. Maybe the edges of the barn are too sharp against the background... I don't know. I tried adding a bit of blur to the rendered elements, and it helped a little, but it's far from perfect. Another issue is the shadow. I did use a shadowcatcher to be able to keep it, but it's too sharp and doesn't blend with the grass as it is supposed to. Again, not sure how to fix that. To illustrate what I'm talking about, here is the Blender render and the final composite side by side:

Now, I tried to push the colours further to get the proper wallpaper look, but it quickly turned into a parody of itself, so I toned them down again. I wander how the other artists do it that they are not just able to get away with saturated colours, but they make them look so appealing...

Anyway, that will be all for this week. As for the next topic, I'll need to think about it carefully. There are only 4 projects left this year and I would like them to be my best work, naturally. I'm thinking about joining the Christmas competition run by Reynante Martinez, but I can't find a topic I'm truly excited about. I have two ideas in mind, but I want to find something even better. But maybe one of the two (or both, who knows) wil make it as a non-competing project. I guess it will be a surprise for all of us. See you next time!