Summer by Antaran

by CafeGuru | Aug 3, 2012 | Best of 2012

This image has an interesting history: It was inspired by the works of 2 very talented Carrara artists: Sopher’s macro-photography-like images, such as this one:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2347567§ion_id=6&page=2&np

and Kixum’s “Dandelion Seeds” image:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2342381§ion_id=6&page=4&np

As you can probably guess, the later one gave me the inspiration for the subject matter: I mostly got curious about what would happen if I decided to use Carrara’s Dynamic Hair for the seeds to simplify creation of unique-looking seeds (could easily be done by altering Hair shader’s Frizz, Kink and Wave properties as well as thickness) — I find those changes easier to make then altering textures and saving out dozens of images. So I wanted to see how it will look…

Then there came the RuntimeDNA’s monthly challenge with a very interesting technical restriction of only using one light, so I remembered Sopher’s images and thought that I could use the dandelion I was modeling as my experimentation ground for lighting scenes with one light.

The technical part of the lighting was also fun: I wanted both back-lighting for the hair and front lighting for the flower without too many shadows, and I’ve set an extra restriction for myself to not use IDL here, so I used a shape light (a torus) and some base ambiance and did the rest with shaders and actually blocking out some of the torus’s light. It was somewhat funny that being restricted with using one light only, I actually found myself having too much of it :)…

Also, it was very hot this month (and especially during the week when I was working on this), so I wanted something to feel good about the summer. This is my most cheerful take on the season :).

This image, despite its simplicity, actually was one of the winners and placed second in the challenge, which came as a surprise, given this particular challenge’s unusually large participation numbers and the sheer stunning beauty of so many of the other entries.

This image is also somewhat a “first” for me, because it was entirely made from scratch: I modeled all the elements, painted all the textures and created all the shaders form the basic default. Nothing to brag about since everything was so basic and simple, and it did not change my overall opinion that using this DIY workflow for anything more complex is inefficient and redundant. It’s just another “unusual” point in this image’s description.