First work - Porting a Fantasy scene from Blender

[Aethereal]

Hi to all
This is my first attempt at Indigo, and I choose to port a blender scene. I originally made this one in Imagine 2.0, then moved it to blender. I learned a lot in the process, so I tought it could be a nice idea to do the same with Indigo.

At the moment I have done only a "quick" test manually adjusting some parameters, and I'd like some help about getting it right.

The original blender file I exported is: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/39772216/

The first Indigo try is: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/39772406/

As you can notice, there are several differences, among them:

All the textures were procedural, so none were exported. I have to get somenice textures for the marble-like floor and the stone bump-mapping

I used both a spot lamp and an hemi to illuminate the focus of the image and get nice shadows of the blocks on the floor. How can I re-create them? This is the main difference in how the two picture looks...

The blue smoke is a blue colored transparent cylinder with a linear and a clouds textures stacked on it on the alpha channel. As alpha textures are unsupported, I can't create the effect. It has also a low emit value, and when exported the cylinder become a meshligt totally black. I had to revert it to standard mesh and give it total transparence (I could directly remove it, but I want to keep it for when it will be possible to map alpha in a future release)

The green torus was a primitive and I forgot to make it a mesh. No worries here because it worked like the blue smoke (and so it would have not worked right anyway)

Looks like Indigo does not have the "Fog" that I used to get rid of the horizon.

The exported pentacle material was on pourpose substituted with a native CR.nk (hey, why get a headhache trying to simulate a meterial when it is readily available? )

And now the plead.... any suggestion?
Thanks in advance!

P.S.
I plan to manually tune the .xml, not altering the .blend file and re-export.

[OnoSendai]

Hi, looking good, the scene definitely has potential.
Not sure of the best way to make the horizon less abrupt.
One way would be to introduce some DOF (set aperture_radius to a larger value)
This will blur the horizon line.

[bq1]

Nice scene! I imagine it would be quite hard to convert fully.

[Aethereal]

An update...

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/39830974/

I added lamp of sort with the code:

Code: Select all

<rectanglelight>
	<pos>0.000000 0.000000 1.24000</pos>
	<width>0.1</width>
	<height>0.2</height>
	<spectrum>
		<peak>
			<peak_min>300</peak_min>
			<peak_width>550</peak_width>
			<base_value>0</base_value>
			<peak_value>200</peak_value>
		</peak>
	</spectrum>
</rectanglelight>

also I have baked the floor texture in Blender and exported for use in Indigo. Unfortunately looks like Indigo doesn't like the .png created by Blender, even after I loaded and saved it again on GIMP, so I had to convert it to .jpg (I don't like that because JPGs are lossy).

There is a strange "artifact"... I didn't removed the "cloud" tube, but gave it perfect transparence while waiting for alpha-texturing capabilities or other similar feature. I gave it this material:

Code: Select all

<material>
	<name>Cloud</name>
	<specular>
		<transparent>true</transparent>
		<ior>1.0</ior>
		<cauchy_b_coeff>0.0</cauchy_b_coeff>
		<rgb_absorptivity>0 0 0</rgb_absorptivity>
	</specular>
</material>

but if you look carefully you'll be able to see an "hint" of the tube, mainly in the lower part around the pentacle... ???

I got a lot of "force accept" messages in the output, what are these?

Now I have to give the stones the right look... anyone have a suggestion for realistic rock material settings?

Thanks a lot!

[Aethereal]

And now, for something totally different... I tried to get rid of the ambient light, so the only light source is the above mentioned rectanglelight.

After 1h 10m (290 mutations)


After the week-end 65h 10m (16.000 mutations)


I suppose the colour is due mainly to the floor color-bleeding (the light source should be white).
Without ambient light, I got also rid of the horizon line (that's good).

For some strange reason, the "totally transparent" cylinder is now visible as a semitransparent black tube ??? Nice effect similar to the blue cloud I would like to obtain, but unless Indigo reads my mind, there is no reason why it should render it this way!

[Aethereal]

This is exactly the same xml, rendered with the new 0.6 test 2:

After 25h 50m (3.500 mutations)



The result is way better, IMHO (go Indigo go!), but the glass body become totally transparent, and the totally transparent (according to the specs at least) tube is still visible ???

Anyone has some nice suiggestion?