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WhereinJelloDemonMeetsMushroom

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Description

FIRST AND FOREMOST, this is completely, shamefully rushed. I had to rush things up (using more-or-less convenient ways to ensure it was ready in time), and it shows, really.
I might be repeating myself, but I'm not happy with this. I might make a better version next time (smoother, higher-quality, more animated).
Here's some of the stuff I am not happy with: ('sides, a bit of self-critique doesn't hurt)
  • The water. It kinda sucks, and its speed seems unnatural. That, and, to speed up rendering, I had to use a small-ish water plane (~300x300 units) and an impossibly dense fog to cover it up. The water is what causes the photon count to increase exponentially, I had to keep it to a minimum.
  • Bibi-Bobo's tail-waggling is too choppy. This can be easily fixed in a number of ways: Reducing the waggling speed, increasing the number of frames, or reducing the waggling angle. If I make a better version some day, that's something I will be sure to change.
  • Shroomy's stuck-inside-the-ground look. You can see this phenomenon in some 3D games: 3D models stuck inside walls or something, right? Well, I think it looks like that mushroom is stuck inside the grass or something. Which is not the case, according to my calculations, but it still looks like it. :(
  • The background scene in general. It doesn't depict what the original scene looked like.
  • Bibi-Bobo's tail orientation. I never solved my normal-to-a-spline-driven-plane problem (explained below). As a result, Bibi-Bobo's devil tail looks weird.
  • The mushroom's eyes. They do not glitter, as they are supposed to. This is possible using POV-Ray media element, but I simply didn't have time to look into it.


Actual description
Now that this is out of the way, how about actually describing what this deviation is about?
The idea originated from none other than :iconmythee: (you can see the conversation here); basically, she wanted to breathe some life back into Bibi-Bobo, her awesomely cute and adorable, yet underdeveloped, jelly critter, Bibi-Bobo. The inner geek in me took over and prompted me to get to work, and I complied. As reference, I used this and this. But you've probably seen my previous 3D works, and they mostly seem to use the same background scene: a hollow, yellowish cylinder. I was getting tired of it, and I had time to improve the scene I had made. Using the same deviation, I attempted to put Bibi-Bobo into a kind-of-realistic landscape. My attempt phailed, so I changed plans and put the adorable thingy on a lone rock in the middle of the ocean. That attempt looked good and all, but the poor thing looked so lonely... :iconohnoesplz: I wanted to give Bibi-Bobo some company, and that's what pushed me to put that cute little shroomy next to the wobbly jelly critter. It was also a good way of making non-see-through 3D models for once.

Here's a few problems that I ran into during the creation of the whole scene.
First, Bibi-Bobo's wings. Seriously, these were a pain. Basically, they're a set of curved cylinders, a kind of "filling" between them. The "filling" part was no problem, the curved cylinders were. This is when I ran into Chris Colefax's bending script (links in credits part), which I derived and made a handy GetSausage macro, which basically creates a bent cylinder (a sausage shape) with no-nonsense curvature and length, in order to simplify the bending script to my needs.
It was only later (read: way too late) that I realized I had two obvious (and much better) alternatives: using tori, or sphere_sweeps along splines. For historical reasons (hysterical raisins), I stuck with my good ol' GetSausage's. So much for all the sausages. THINK OF THE SAUSAGES!!11
Then there's the tail. That dreaded devil tail. And here was born my aforementioned normal-to-a-spline-driven-plane problem.
See, a devil tail is basically made of two parts: the tail, and a little flattened cone at the end. In the scene, it's actually more complex than that, but for the sake of simplicity, let's say it's just a curve, and a 2D triangle at the end.
Now, imagine how it would look like if the tail was all straight. You'd have a straight line, then a triangle at the end, right? And that triangle, which describes a plane, would be parallel to the ground plane. Alright, no complications here.
Then, let's say the tail moves and wiggles happily on the (x,z) plane. It gets a little more complex: The straight line becomes a curve (this was easily overcome using a cubic spline), and the triangle is translated to the end of the curve, and rotated properly around the y axis. That wasn't too complicated.
But now, picture the tail moving somewhere out of the cozy (x,z) plane. The cubic spline still solves the curve problem, but what about the triangle? It's pretty tough already to translate it to the right spot, and to rotate it properly so that it faces away from the tail, but then, here's the real killer: you need to rotate that triangle around the axis described by the end of the spline. By how many degrees? :slow:
Basically, the triangle always stays on a plane, described by its normal, which is perpendicular to the end of the tail's curve. And no one yet has found out how to keep that triangle on that dreaded plane D: Which is precisely why Bibi-Bobo's tail wiggles only on the (x,z) plane in the animation. Now you know. :XD:
English isn't my primary language, and I guess it shows particularly when using field-specific vocabulary (geometry) on subjects I didn't even study yet (3D geometry and cubic splines). Sorry >:

The mushroom, relatively, was a piece of cake. No reflections to care about (except the blush, but that wasn't a problem). I just wish I could have added little stare-induced sparkles in there. :o

The grass wasn't much of a problem either, save its texture. I ended up using a gradient-y texture inspired from the one used in usine à gaz-on's tutorial. I guess it looks decent enough.
The rock texture was also difficult, was I managed to create a semi-realistic one.
The water, however, was a pain as well. It totally screwed up rendering times, the examples given made the water plane on the (y,z) plane, and it was hard to get the waves speed right, as rendering an animation required a luxury of time (I only got to do that twice, using dumbed-down textures, hence the unnatural waves speed in the animation). Still, the scene wouldn't be what it is without water, so it was a necessary evil, I guess.

... And that's about it. This deviation is dedicated to :iconmythee:, using her character with (implicit) permission. Merry Xmas, Myth-dono ^-^ And no worries, this didn't overlap with my Bac blanc studies :3

Merry Xmas to the rest of you too, fellow deviants!

Since this "description" is quite lengthy already, I won't post the source code here directly. I'll upload it if someone asks me to, I guess. (It's huge: 26,321 bytes for Bibi-Bobo and Shroomy, 5,030 bytes for the background scene, and... 44,193,171 bytes for the grass. Ya rly. Plus the PNG heightfield and stuff.)


Credit where credit is due!
  • My little render farm - Without which this thing wouldn't even have been able to exist.
  • Christoph Hormann - Glass reflections. This one goes without saying, as it's used in all of my 3D deviations so far.
  • Chris Colefax - Bending script. Used in Bibi-Bobo's wings.
  • Gilles Tran - makegrass macro. Not directly used here, but was quite some help during the original creation of the background scene.
  • François Dispot - Usine à gaz-on. Used to put some decent-looking grass on that rock.
  • Christoph Hormann (yes, him again) - Realistic water. Omnipresent in this scene.
  • Last but not least, :iconmythee: - Original idea and reference scene.


Statistics!
  • 201 frames
  • 800x600
  • Antialiasing: Threshold 0.1, Recursion level: 3
  • Render time: 2 days and a couple of hours. Would have taken 4 days on Blorb alone.
  • 32-bit color depth, yay!
  • Billions of billions of photons shot. Spacing 0.1 on a 300x300 area covered in reflecting+refracting isosurface-based water, it hurts. On top of that, a spacing multiplier of 0.1 to 0.01 for the central objects.
Image size
800x600px 34.53 MB
© 2008 - 2024 WindyPower
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bozwolf's avatar
histerical raisins!