Fishing bridge

Do you ever have a day when everything you touch falls apart? I'm having one of those today. My desktop has fallen apart just as I was about to write the blog post. I haven't been able to fix the problem yet, so I'm writing this on my laptop. And since one of my budgies has a laptop fixation, this is going to be a short and messy post. 

Despite the technical issues, I was luckily able to fish out the render:

It is based on another of Sephiroth's concept art (can you tell I really enjoy his style?). I went for a simpler scene again, because I wanted to try a new, pure-Blender workflow.

I modelled the scene in 2.8. Even though I hadn't used the new version in couple of months, I was able to stitch things together well enough. I used the concept art image as an empty, and that turned out quite well. But I had forgotten that I should keep the scene straight and turn the camera, rather than the other way round, so there was a slight hiccup in the beginning before I sorted things out.

After modelling I thought I needed the UV Atlas, so imported all parts of the scene back into 2.79 - only to realise I could've used the multi-object edit. But that's fine, I'll remember for the next time. I tried two approaches to texture painting. The first one uses a fairly complex material with multiple black-and-white textures and RGB inputs. The textures are maps that specify where the particular colour will be used. It gives me much more flexibility to adjust things later, but it also makes the graph too complex and I have to remember to save the textures regularly. 

The other approach, that I tried on the little rocks and leaves, is to have only one texture image and paint directly into it. This, of course, has the opposite effect: less room for later tweaking, but simpler graph and the option to have as many colours as I want easily added in. 

I suppose I'm going to combine these approaches to some extent and I'll keep poking around to see how I can improve things. See you next week!