Stage 1 is almost done!

Well it is time for an update.

I almost finished with stage one, there are a few things here and there to add (a phone and a wooden outside toilet which are ready as objects) but the rest are final.
I did had a great trouble with the surrounding ecosystem, the first try was that:

and as you can see while the forest is almost ok (there are not trees close) the grass is terible, small and not close to each instance of it, not to mention the grass in front of us, there is no grass in front of us!
This happened because I added a hidden object to stop trees from spawning in front of the camera, but I over did it.
I tried to make it better but I did it worst:

so I decided to remove the automatic ecosystem and to do it by hand, which is really painful with my low power system. After all the automatic ecosystem as material it was a pain in rendering and it was adding about an hour to calculate and more, if we consider that it was filling the memory and the swap file by up to 16GBs.

I also found some tutorials about optimizing the renders and they saved me a lot of time and they will save even more once I do the finals at 1280x800p.

So there is the final scene, I added about 20 trees by hand and after the second line of trees I used a paint ecosystem brush to add random forest. I used the same brush for the grass and made it much more realistic.

Enjoy:

This is final but I have to render it again in 1280x800 sometime later. I will do some small renders to start composing in flash and I will change them with the higher resolution ones afterwards.

And I made a low resolution video to show how the door will open:





I also made the intro for stage 2, where we land after our teleportation journey and the strange life form who will explain to us what happened. This is a loop:





It is a little dark, movie maker did it...

That's all for now!

Some early shots of the inside.

I have finished the laboratory building, and I'm making the surroundings now. Before that I took some "photos" from the inside. Somethings have changed and the shots are outdated, but I want to give a first impression on what we will see inside the building.

(Above)This is the entrance from the outside to the reception.

This is the door of the main laboratory, as seen from the reception room.

The door is open now, I'm planing on creating a preview animation to show how the door opens. It is made of 3 parts, the bigger at the front will slide down and then the other 2 behind it (which are half door size each) will slide left and right, like the automatic doors in elevators. So this is the laboratory.

And this is a closer view, the texture in the chair need some adjustment.

So this is the living room, a place to relax and spend some free time.


I also did some experimental renderings of the building to see if the ultra settings for rendering are really giving me anything back, or it is just adding extremely more time to render.

As you can see below, yes these settings make the whole scene much better and they worth the extra time.

Final render settings

and

Ultra render settings

The difference is clear.

Anyway I'm populating the forest around the building now. I will soon post an update.