Thank you very much to everyone who contributed their surprisingly unanimous input! You made me feel a lot more confident as I made my decision, and I'm glad y'all apparently want the same choice I was leaning toward.
Actually, while we're on the topic of signs, I may as well explain how I go about making them. For some simple signs (an EXIT sign in the Indy queue comes to mind), all I really do is find a good photo of it and then slap that bit of the photo onto an object of the right size and shape. But for stuff like the entrance signs for the Dream Suite and Pirates, I prefer a somewhat more robust solution. The thing about photos is...they're accurate, but their resolution is limited. And in order for the image to appear sharp when it's rendered by Blender, it needs to have fairly high resolution. (Besides, you can get yucky stuff like noise and perspective distortion and objects in the way when you're dealing with photos.)
So my labor-intensive but oh-so-definitely-worth-it solution is to replicate the sign in Photoshop using appropriate fonts, vector techniques, and layer styles. I'm basically tracing over one or more perspective-corrected reference photos using the pen tool at first...then it's a matter of getting the colors and materials to look right. It takes a while - particularly tracing - but the result is a very sharp, clean image that can then be UV-mapped to the sign object in Blender. (Just doing a non-UV texture works too, since the sign object is typically flat and only one side of it shows, but that doesn't allow me to see the image previewed on the object as I navigate through the scene.)
As a couple of extra goodies to illustrate what I mean, here are my texture images for Pirates and the Dream Suite. In the case of these two signs, I've built the borders as separate, truly 3D objects that just take flat color materials; the UV-mapped sign object sits nestled within the frame, so you don't see that frame in the image. And notice how the corners don't show up on the final sign objects, since they have rounded shapes, so it doesn't matter what goes in the corners of the image. Also note how I have to simulate elements that would be truly three-dimensional in real life, such as raised lettering. I've also added a reflection to the Dream Suite image so that I don't have to increase render times by doing a truly reflective material. Finally, I want to point out that although the Dream Suite sign is way physically smaller than the Pirates sign, I've made the Dream Suite image significantly bigger so that the small Disneyland lettering is still sharp. If I wanted to get really fancy, I could put that in a smaller, higher-res image and let the rest of the image have a lower resolution, but I guess I'm just not that fancy.
Also, just so ya know, I've now added the curved steps on either side of the front balcony. No renders of them yet, since I haven't even added the sides or handrails or anything, but they're there, I promise! =D I've also added the two lamps on the balcony, and I hope to build some of the ironwork between the ground and the balcony. I'll also have to run some tests to see which renders more quickly - truly three-dimensional modeled ironwork, or UV-mapped PNG images with transparent areas and invisible lights behind them to simulate ambient light from outside the ironwork. So much to do! =P
No comments:
Post a Comment