Attic Laboratory Artwork
- Posted by: Chris
- Posted on: 8/19/2024
- Comments: 0
- Categories: 3D, Lightwave,
| COPY: | N/A | LAYOUT: | Chris Wetzel |
| Models: | Chris Wetzel | SURFACING: | Chris Wetzel |
Design notes:
Created this scene to display my recently created Grimiore and Witch Hand Candle Holder. Then ended up creating alot more models some barely seen in the background: the attic itself, the hexigon table and pedistal in the center of the attic, the book stand, the antique mailboxes, hourglass, cinder block shelfs, lab table across the back wall, microscope, beakers, erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes, boiling flasks, lab burner and row of books. Also dropped some existing older models into the scene, like the kitchen scale and Bulova mantel clock. You might also recognize the small round window in my attic scene looks alot like the big one at the New York headquarters of the Dr. Strange.
additional models needed to round out the scene
Like Charmed the TV series I decided on an attic laboratory for my book of shadows. I wanted an modern-day old house attic and a lab put together from old garage-sale type stuff. Shelfs put together with cinder-blocks and wood planks is an example. The classic surfacing downfall of not making objects look old with scratch and smudge textures, I'm guilty. The forground hexagon table top and the book stand could have looked more scared up. Also as an attic laboratory every nook and cranny should have been filled with junk, potion bottles and ingredients. The flasks and beakers should of had graduation marks and the jars labels, I got lazy for my background objects.
Alot is going on with the candle and hand: soft body modeling with bones to move the hand, texturing the complex shape of a hand, particle dynamics with collision object for dripping candle wax, a second particle stream with and hypervoxels for the flame, moving snake bracelet that crawls up arm plus all the rings: scull, moonstone, eyeball, two pentigram rings, flor de lune, devils heart, coffin and cat charm ring. The most noise in the render is around the candle, this is also where the render slowed down to a crawl.. had to use limited region and render small parts at a time to keep the render from freezing. Could have used Depth of Field to make my background defocus, but this also greatly increases render time and made the choice that I wanted my background sharp.
Needed a skylight because I wanted blue moonlight streaming through the scene in streaks. Lightwave has volumetric lights, but I didn't use one. I tried a volumetric light, but it added terrible noise to the entire scene, didn't create the streaks I wanted and made the render time almost stand still. So the light streaks are just a textured object. I wanted the Grimoire to appear lit by the candle and attic by skylight. I also wanted to see all my background objects, a balance forground, background and lighting the kind of thing lots of pros render in channels and composite. I didn't do that... just used Lightwave and because of its realtime render engine I can see changes as I make them that look very close to a final render.
useing lightwave 3d
I used Lightwaves 3D's legacy particle and hypervoxels system for the flame and candle wax. There is a whole new system in LW2024 for fire, water, smoke etc. that uses OpenVDB librarys and tools like LWFlow and TurbulenceFD. I have not used these new tools... yet. Don't think I'll be making an animation I wanted a poster so I rendered for 24x36 inch at 300dpi 7200 x 10800 a huge image. Didn't need to see wax dripping down the side of the candle, candles burn and wax drips to slowly for most animations. So I created a particle emitter in the center of the candle, used the candle as a collision object, ran the emitter till particles ran down the side of the candle. Saved a single frame of the particles in position, then applyed hypervoxels to that without a particle emitter. The flame does have an active emitter and animation over time would show the flame moving. I used three seperate spherical lights to create the candle flame illumination, one just for the book, one for the hand/sides of the candle, and one for just the top of the candle.