"This Homeland" and experimenting with Roz's 3d scan

 As mentioned before, I thought I would experiment with the 3d scans that we had done at the low residency, and the "This Homeland" open call seemed to fit with Roz's scan, which she kindly allowed me to have access to. Getting the scan into Blender was super easy, and the texture came over well:

The texture is very high res:

And the polygons are CRAZY high res:

So much so that I actually used the Decimate modifier to bring the polycount down by about 100X so my poor laptop could cope (and to make the mesh smoother, plus some of the non-photorealistic rendering was actually cleaner/nicer on a low res).

After a lot of playing and modelling, plus a lot of borrowing from old assets (the paving, the fence, the tree), I came up with this:

Which I was pretty happy with, and which I am tempted to submit as it's quite 'traditional'. I like the elements of homeland - ancient, modern, open, restricted, and the hits of mystery, but also of freedom and restriction - who owns this homeland, do they want us there, do we care? Lighting was a PITA, as I used a realistic model for the sky, which made every thing very bright... Adding some fog gave depth and took the edge off it, but still..

Sharing with Roz, she responded with:

Which I also love - it makes more of the scene and the elements in it - it's more striking. As I suspected, Roz has a much better eye for ascetics.

I tried a few experiments that I wasn't particularly enamoured with, but it was fun to see what could be achieved quickly now that the scene was set-up:

I also ran it through AI, which was creepy and interesting, but probably not useful (I admit I didn't try too hard):

Thinking about Roz's image, I was motivated to play with the Freestyle option in Blender - I've always resisted because it sounded really hard, but isn't at all... 

It renders the lines OVER the existing render, so you can shade the model as normal, then have Freestyle do it's thing over the top... Here I went with a simple toon style shader using a "Shader to RGB" feeding a colour ramp. Freesyle is straightforward, it is, however, very memory hungry and very slow :(

I therefore experimented a bit with non-photorealistic rendering to give a more 'print' look, pulling on Roz's idea of silhouetting the foreground:

Everyone who saw the previous image loved the steam, and this helped to emphasis it, as Roz had done. It really brings the image and the 'creature' to life - suddenly it has breath, emotions... It was an impulse add, and that makes me anxious because "what if I hadn't thought of it" - but I guess this is how I learn - luck, reflection, and making yourself more likely to be 'lucky' in future.

The open call asked for images to be exactly A4, which makes for a nasty aspect ratio and no opportunity to crop... But then I realised there was no reason it had to be LANDSCAPE, and actually the scene was more vertical than horizontal, so I flipped the aspect ratio and did a LOT of tweaking and re-tweaking the elements and landed on this:

Which I really really like, and I think I'll submit.. I might even treat myself to a print for my 'secret' art gallery ;) Roz is understandably very busy, so I'll crack on, and do the creative writing that goes with it, and then see where we is at...