Weekend Contest: Above the Clouds
Image: Nieuport 17 by David Paul.
It’s time for another weekend contest! Bjorn Strand is our previous winner with his impressive work ‘The Hero‘. I asked him to pick a theme for this weekend.
Bjorn said:So since I’m flying this weekend, I was thinking a good theme for next weeks blender contest would be “above the clouds” it could be anything from flying machines and dragons to floating cities whatever people can come up with!
Well, there you have it. We might have some sunnier images than last week ;-) And if you need some help getting a good looking sky backdrop, check out the tutorial ‘Adding Clouds to Blender Cycles’ Sky Texture‘ that I posted last week.
One other thing: there’s a lot of interest in seeing screenshots of your scene in Blender. If you like, attach an image of that along with your work.
Post your work below (attach an image), and vote for your winner. The winner will get a post on monday, and will get to pick next weekend’s contest theme. Have fun!
Might enter this contest if my fifth disease goes away soon.
actually, that would have been a nice weekend contest topic too! “The Fifth Disease”. Need to memorise that one :)
I also will give it a try… just for the fun of it
Quick shot from me and video :)
Done in Blender Internal, not much time of making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFfcxr9J_k4&feature=youtu.be
Sorry image idk why lost so much quality here’s better version.
http://i.imgur.com/eLOZAZC.png
Quick shot from me :)
http://i.imgur.com/eLOZAZC.png
Nice,but why so fast,we have plenty of time,maybe you could improve your render or came with something completly different…First that come to my mind for entry is hot air baloon(dont know is that eng.word for it.),so i also plan to do something on that topic…
Sorry for my poor english:-(
This is what I sort of accidentally created when I followed the Realistic Earth tutorial by Andrew Price. I moved the earth without the clouds, and with some nice compositing I created this image, only using a texture from NASA of the clouds above the earth.
if it’s not too much trouble, could you upload the blend file :D
I tried your clouds and stuck a cube in the middle and animated the clouds.
Here’s my first entry, “City in the Clouds.” Comments and critiques appreciated! Enjoy, and good luck to everyone! :)
Here’s my second entry, “Hurdle over the Moon.” Inspired by a nursery rhyme. :P
Very cute image! :) And since you asked for critiques I will offer you my opinion, the only thing I think is missing is a few more lights in the scene. I’d do a very soft blue light to fill in the shadows, and then just a bit of a backlight to separate everything from the background, and then I think you’d be golden! I might also try experimenting with having the ground visible or not, just to see what it does to the composition. Good job though, and keep up the good work!
Thank you very much! Sorry this is so late, but I haven’t been able to check blendernation recently due to time constraints :P But now, I have time!!! :D
Crazy bird, with help from last week tutorial about noise texture in the sky…
That is one crazy bird for sure.
Haha, those eyes though!
An artwork in similar mood to the David Paul’s work, shown in this contest header. It is just a rearranged example from my book.
I tried to recreate lighting conditions for the “Brocken spectre” effect depicted on the photo: the shadow of an airplane on the cloud below.
If you are interested in details of this scene – this is a CC work, you can download it at http://airplanes3d.net/downloads-p40_e.xml
The background image is credited to Tomo Yun. You can find plenty of free high-resolution aerial clouded skies photos on his portal (http://www.yunphoto.net/en/).
(Click this picture to enlarge it, it seems that the minimizing algorithm of Disqus adds significant blur…)
Really amazing image Witold. Very good job! Congratulations!
nice work witold
Thanks. guys!
Toy plane flying in the sky
Here’s my entry. It’s actually part of a bigger project I started a while ago. So there’s also an animation for this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUh9_QF-h3g). It’s the first time I enter the contest and I hope I can get some of your positive attention. Good day guys, so long, Johnny/TheMoonMan
Would love to see the rest of the project, any links?
Can someone tell me exactly how much time remains until the deadline because timezones are confusing?
Here is my entry called “The City of Dreams”. Rendered at 2000 samples in 2.70. Fun Fact: The cloud material is only made with volumetric scatter. Hooray for Cycles with volumetric rendering! :)
Man, I thought I was being so clever doing a hot air balloon. “NOBODY else will think of that!” I says to myself. Oh well, you know what they say, nothing new under the sun (or above the clouds apparently :p). Anyways, LOVE that we finally have volumetrics in Cycles, great job to all the devs who worked on that! Took a while to render, but alas, thats what I get for adding all the bells and whistles. So after watching tiny squares fill in for a couple of hours, here it is: “Balloon Ride at Sunrise”. Enjoy.
Sigh. Uploaded the wrong version, then sat here debating how much I wanted to clutter up the feed, decided might as well post the right one after all that work. So I extend my apologies for my mistake, and please disregard the previous entry. And I’ll just copy the original text as well…
Man, I thought I was being so clever doing a hot air balloon. “NOBODY else will think of that!” I says to myself. Oh well, you know what they say, nothing new under the sun (or above the clouds apparently :p). Anyways, LOVE that we finally have volumetrics in Cycles, great job to all the devs who worked on that! Took a while to render, but alas, thats what I get for adding all the bells and whistles. So after watching tiny squares fill in for a couple of hours, here it is: “Balloon Ride at Sunrise”. Enjoy.
Thats cool! I love the light rays! And yeah, the volumetric stuff really slow down the render (mine took 5 hours), but it does make it look awesome :)
Thanks! And yeah, mine was a couple of hours too, I went to bed before it was done, so can’t remember how many lol. In retrospect probably should have done the clouds a lot simpler, just diffuse/glossy really, you can’t tell at all in the final version but they’re actually using a little bit of volumetrics, and some SSS too, so probably could have saved a lot of time there…
Yeah, my clouds (which I now see are at a bad viewing angle) were done purely with volumetric scatter. I was gonna add SSS to it, but I found it didn’t do much for mine except slow it down. SSS might work better with volumetric scattering if some kind of spotlight is used instead of a sun lamp.
That’s a good example of an image where we do not only see a Blender user but also a painter at work. Congrats for a very nice composition and a nice mood!
Thank you for your kind words!
Hi!!!! Already is weekend!! This is my “Hot flight with Blender” As always, time will not give more… In this render, one of the balloons makes an effect that I do not like, it seems less rounded than it really is. If I have time I’ll upload another view.
Hope you like!
Hi!!!! Already is weekend!! This is my “Hot flight with Blender” As always, time will not give more… In this render, one of the balloons makes an effect that I do not like, it seems less rounded than it really is. If I have time I’ll upload another view.
Hope you like!
Sorry to repeat the entry. I was wrong with the previous version
Love the Blender balloons :D
Here’s my entry.. it’s called “Clouds-Eye View”
Hey.. how do I delete this shit?
Dude.. y’all need a better system for comments..
when something is deleted, it shouldn’t be showing up as guest.. that’s annoying..
Looked it up on the Discus website. Thats apparently a feature not a bug :/
I have to agree. The commenting system needs some help. Biggest thing is to remember to log in before you comment. It would help if it made you log in before you could comment.
Really interesting textures, I kinda dig it.
Anyway, this picture has an interesting climate…
My entry
Sigh, I didn’t log in…
More colorful version
Hi this is mine scene.i finally finish it and i just want say sorry to my old friend amd 7750 for the overheating through the rendering and modelling process…He is 6 years old you know…I am pleased with the final render 4000 samples i dont know if it has a big difference from a 2000 samples i just wanted the glass to have the less possible noise artifacts.im a noob you know still learning..
Sorry my first model had a problem that i didnt see last night.the sea mechanism was a bit off position to the left.i re-render it and add a rainbow and focus effect.
Interesting idea!
thaks a lot Witold
First try to create clouds with volumetrics in 2.70 Cycles… Have to spend some more time :)
Really enjoy the emotion of the character!
Mine is called: “The Mountain Above the Clouds”. Inspired by Angel Island from Sonic the Hedgehog. I used lots of displacement modifiers for the Mountain and Island. Rendered in Blender 2.70 with 500 Samples.
Thats really cool! I like the way you made the island with the water under it. I have a special place in my heart for low-poly/simple design stuff like this. Makes good wallpaper :)
Thanks! I just wish Disqus didn’t lower the image quality so much… :D
Yeah, it’s kinda annoying. If I remember from the last contest, you can always post a link to the full quality image from like imgur or DeviantArt.
Here’s my entry, first time entering. Done in Blender Internal, about twenty minutes of work and five minutes of rendering. I call it “Floating Sunrise”. Comments and critiques are welcome. Thanks!
And there’s a screenshot, for all who are interested. Enjoy!
The coloring in this great! I love the orange and pink hues, it’s all very dreamlike
Thank you! I’ve been playing around a little bit with various types of lighting, and I seem to have come across a decent one, at least for these purposes.
“the Loner”
Blender internal
I really like the graphic quality of this one! And very nice touch of color with the bird. :)
Brilliant idea, quite out of the box, and excellent execution. What, if any, post-production did you do? I’m fairly new to this, and I love your style. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback! This is my first contest so I was a little nervous about posting anything
Anyways, I try to use just blender if at all possible, (so no post)… I did, however, use the compositor and the “color management” tab
You’re welcome. Thank you for the “behind the scenes” look at your artwork. It’s a cool artwork, I must say. I might try something similar in the future, just to see how it works. Are those just modeled planes, or are they alpha images on planes, or possibly curves? Sorry for all of the questions, but I really like your style and want to know how you accomplished it. Thanks!
They’re modeled planes. The broken stumps are part of a particle system linked up to a group of stumps in a different layer.
Don’t hesitate to ask any more questions, I’m happy to answer!
Thanks! How did you go about creating the smoke? It looks really good. Also, what was your method for modeling the tree? It also looks fantastic. Thank you for answering all of these questions! I really appreciate it.
The smoke was made from a bunch of circle meshes placed in front of each other. The tree started as a plane and I just extruded one side all the way up, subdividing the edge whenever I hit a break. The “e”, “r”, and “s” hotkeys were heavily utilized :)
Okay, thank you. I’m definitely going to need to try this style of artwork. It looks really good, and I’m interested to see if it’s a style I can use. What type of lighting set-up did you use? Thanks!
I’m actually curious as to how you got the light scattering near the base without cycles? Did you do anything special for that or is that just how the lights ended up working? Its been a while since I used internal, but I didn’t think they created that kind of effect.
I just used a hemi-lamp and ambient-occlusion. The planes intersect each other at the base, so perhaps that’s why the light scatters, but I’m not entirely sure.
I am sorta interested in knowing why you chose the Internal engine over the Cycles engine. By all accounts, I am quite new to blender and I have basically only learned how to do stuff in cycles. I know the Internal engine is needed for smoke rendering and stuff, but I don’t know the full ins and outs of it.
I started learning blender before cycles was implemented (I think I started with 2.49) and my computer is fairly old. The cycles stuff is great, but I’m more focused on efficiency- a scene like this in cycles would have taking exponentially longer on my machine compared to the internal renderer. Don’t get me wrong, cycles has a lot to offer, but nothing I’m (personally) willing to sacrifice my time for. I’m looking forwards to the day when it’s just as fast :)
I can attest to it being faster. Whenever I have done rendering involving smoke, it definatly seemed to render a lot faster.
This really is a good example of using a 3D graphics program like Blender to make 2D(2.5D?) artwork, thats not always the easiest thing to achieve. I love the abstract design mixed with the red bird to draw your focus. Really good job! :D
Messerschmit Me 262 (above the clouds)
Blender 2.70 custom
Cycles Render 200 samples
My Blog= prashant0t4.tumblr.com
Fantastic modeling and texturing. You have some really nice things on your blog as well.
thanks eric.
I like these WWII airplanes! Good work, the models fit well in the background.
However the cockpit canopies and fuselages require some improvements (as you probably know)
thanks witold
My entry this time is “Cloud City” – heavily inspired by Star Wars and the volumetric cloud node setup was learnt from this fine project by eMirage: http://www.emirage.org/2014/03/12/free-download-aerial-cityscape-v1-0/
Wow this one is very nice! Great work!
Thanks man!
Really gorgeous application of volumetrics, and the color palette is great as well.
Quick low poly attempt to get the “ground above the clouds” :P.
Crepuscular rays and clouds with cycles volumetrics.
For some reason I can’t login on firefox.. When I click the little login button, enter my username and password and press enter, the popup window displays rotating gears for a second and then disappears. I tried deleting BN related cookies, but it didn’t seem to help.
Works fine in chromium though.
Yeah, that happens sometimes with Disqus. This system’s touchier than an angry girlfriend. lol
This is my entry, a slightly modified version of RAH-66 Comanche helicopter.
this was actually started a bit back but just finished it recently
I call this one “Grumpy Squirrel’s Big Adventure”:
Oh man…things are not going to end well for that squirrel…
Here is my work.
Is titled:”I’ll meet you on the other side”.
Hope you like it.
I’m so ashamed,i was entering from mobile phone and just want to see who vote up,and accidentally voted for myself…so sorry…So votes are n-1.
:-)
How is possible to vote without log in?
Disqus allows guest votes. No harm done, I’ll remember it, thanks!
An easy mistake to do. I’ve did it my self, but not on my one image though. The vote an view buttons are way to close on the small mobile displays… Great image! :)
This looks like the start of a very interesting narrative…
Good picture – the balloon looks quite realistic, and fits well into the sky
Not very original, I know. This was just an old project, and I wanted other peoples opinion on it.
My entry, “Floating Sunrise”. Comments and critiques are appreciated! Thanks!
Sorry about the double post, Disqus is being odd.
Here we go! Been working away from home on my “Oh, so slow laptop” this weekend. Had a bit of a struggle to get this done in time. Everything modeled in Blender. Some texture work and post-pro in Gimp & Inkscape. A lot of good work in here as always. Good luck to everyone! :)
Almost forgot :) Here are some scene screen shots..
Nice! The Teddy bear looks almost surprised :) Another Image for your daughter. ;)
Thank you! I Guess he is :-) Yes, might be another image for her bedroom wall. I asured her the teddy Bear will get safely back in the basket. :)
Great job on the eyes for the bears. Also adorable image. I just noticed that his hot air balloon is just a regular balloon and that made me smile :)
Thank you! I actually started out with the eyes on Friday, need them for another project as well so I’m glad you like them. The “regular balloon” thing is an important detail. :) Glad you noticed. Guess I could have spent more time on the balloon instead of the Blurred out Antonov which were the most time-consuming object in here.
Maybe just a different color to really make it pop? Colorwise that is! Don’t want the teddys plummeting to their doom!
That could do it, thank you for the tip. I will take that it in to consideration if I ever decide to make a bigger project out of this. I also managed to loose some of the details on the balloon. It should have been rotated about 180 degrees. It’s not easy to get everything right in such short time… :)
This is my entry, hope you like it! I didn’t have much time this weekend so I couldn’t upload it earlier.
“And when Earth and soil was not enough, they thought about Cephalopods…”
This is my Blender cookie proflie http://cgcookie.com/profile/dango/, to see more of my work.
Render Cycles, postpro Photoshop
All praise the mighty Helix!
But in all seriousness I really love this. Especially the dimpled metallic texture on the shell, and the lovely background.
Thank you! :)
Yep.. this one is great!
Very well done Dan!
Nice work! The nautilus is my favourite animal.
Here’s my entry. Messing around with the cloud generator
This work has an interesting mood. The lights on the ship create an interesting effect.
My contribution, titled “The Dreamer”, still some littles troubles with the smoke under cycles.
Something about this image really intrigues me! Love that little fella :)
“The Adventurer”
My first submission. No hot air but also ballons.
Rendered in Blender Internal. For the clouds I watched the tutorial from Andrew Price.
A Particle System for the ballons.
Here my try, it took me abbout 5 hours to model/compose and i hope ppl gonna enjoy it!
Here my try, it took me abbout 5 hours to model/compose, and i hope ppl gonna enjoy it!
Thats a non rendered shot, it explain a bit how i made the clouds. =)
Hi Pablo, one thing that strikes me about this work is that the Blender screenshot is a lot more appealing than the final render. Somewhere inbetween something went off track in my eyes. One obvious thing is that the composite contains WAY too much dispersion, and also the motion blur does not add dynamic to the image, it does quite the opposite. Take it easy on the effects, they should be so humble that it’s hard to notice they are there, and focus a bit more on the composition. Modelling wise this could have been an A+ image! Also like the idea how you made the clouds, actually very efficient!
Thanks for the tips, for sure ill keep working on it to get better results and maybe a A+ render. =)
I also planned to do a hand made texture paint on it.
Thanks for the tip, i posted the final render above i hope you gonna like it. =)
Here’s my humble submission… figured since I wrote the cloud generator I couldn’t stay away from this competition in particular…
Imaginative take on the theme!
And thanks for the Cloud Generator script. I used it at first for my clouds, until my computer ran out of hard drive space and Blender crashed! Oy, the timing. While creating some new hard drive space, I settled on painting the clouds instead. Maybe next time! ;)
The great white!!!awesome job nkr.
Beauuuuutifuuuuuuul..
You wrote the cloud generator?! Thank you! Haven’t tried it yet, but I will for sure. Cool image! :)
please remove the shark eye and its gona be a perfect render!
Absolutely brilliant!
My PC obviously needs some help. It kept overheating, so I had to turn down all the render settings a ton. But I’m glad to say it finally did render, and here it is: Misty Islands
Good on you for working through the hardware trial. I had an issue of my computer running out of hard drive space. It’s funny how these small challenges can throw you big obstacles.
And I’m curious–are those particle system-based clouds? :)
No they’re just a shader that’s part transparent and part white diffuse shader using a noise texture. I basically took the tutorial for world clouds and modified it for a cube.
This is my first real Blender project and weekend contest entry. There is a big mistake at the bottom of the balloon that needs fixing, but I am out of time. Also, I struggled to make the balloon material more realistic, any suggestions?
You need some bump map or specular map. Something that breaks the perfectly homogeneous shining.
Yup was going to say the same thing, just something subtle to break up those highlights.
“The Mountain Adventurer”
This is a piece that I created, I added color to create contrast I also did it all in blender internal with a little bit of compositing.
Had only a few hours this weekend on my hands, and time constraints prevented me from refining and finishing this, but it was fun anyways. Maybe next time, I’ll finish one the way I want it:
My image link didn’t work the first time, so I tried PostImage link, which isn’t showing either.
Trying the Disqus upload one more time:
I think you did a great job of capturing the feeling of the original animation.
Thanks. :3
My entry
I like it – you can use simple effects to obtain an interesting shot!
I vote for this work!
Thank you :)
Here is my entry.
Sorry its lat but it takes a hour or 2 to render
I love that you did everything procedurally. Any chance you could do the node setup for the mountain a bit more zoomed in? I can make out some of the nodes, but most of theme are too pixelated to read :( You have a lot going on there and I would love to take a look at everything thats going on.
There is a little more than you asked for. I had to render the cloud in a different scene since the clouds are transperent. I used a mountain material I had before and made it more detailed. Here is a link for another of my projects. It does have image textures. http://cgcookie.com/blender/images/dirty-jobs/
Hope the pictures help.
That is great actually! Thanks!
Wow! The scope of this is truly impressive! Did you render this all as a single image?
Thank you, Eric Varela! Yes, it was indeed a single file, a single image, a single scene, but two render layers: All the elements is the first, and the the triangulated backdrop/background was the second, just to save render time. I will be posting in the next hours screenshots of the viewports, wireframes etc. on the Blender Artists thread.
Very nice! Ambitious and imaginative, and a nice usage of the geometric art style!
Thank you!
Here my final render, really thanks for the tips that wass really helpfull. =)
Here my final render, really thanks for the tips that wass really helpfull. =)
Hey all, the winner has been announced!
http://www.blendernation.com/2014/03/24/weekend-contest-winner-balloon-ride-at-sunrise/
Space Donut!