Mountain Vue

mountain tutorialBack in mountain country and that lone plum tree looks familiar as I’m on a return visit to the first tutorial in Create 3D Like a Superhero; Chipp Walters’ introduction to the landscape design program Vue.

This is as far as I got with the high res render of the scene.
This is as far as I got with the high res render of the scene.

With tree, foreground and mountain in place, I try a full-screen test render. After half an hour my computer estimates that it will take another 27 hours to complete the image! Luckily smaller images take just a few minutes to process. If I ever need a larger image, I’ll leave it rendering overnight.

The clear blue sky is the default atmosphere but you can load alternatives, such as a ‘Lead & Gold’ sunset.

lead and gold sunsetChipp Walters points out that awkward transitions between objects can create an unreal point of focus in the landscape, so I experiment by introducing a cloud, which I scale down and drop into the valley to try and give the effect of rising mist. It looks more like a giant sheep.

I really don’t know clouds at all. But I’ll only learn by playing around with the program.

clouds

Links: Cornucopia 3D where you can download a full version of Vue Pioneer (the only limitation is that it stamps ‘Created in Vue’ on every render)

Chipp Walters’ blog

Pidglings

THERE’S BEEN a strange looking pigeon around, one that looks as if it’s been sprayed with a coat of grey undercoat. It’s been pecking around below the bird table where it was joined by an adult Wood Pigeon. As the mystery pigeon then started flapping its wings in the ‘feed me! feed me!’ mime adopted by most fledglings, it was obvious that the two were related. This evening the adult was accompanied by two plain grey youngsters.

They’ve taken to the sunflower hearts so adult will now be able to introduce them to the greens available; yesterday three adults Wood Pigeons were nibbling the leaves of our purple-sprouting broccoli. We’ve been using the broccoli flower-stems in stir-fry. The Wood Pigeons know a good thing when they taste it, although they seem to be intent on nibbling the leaves to shreds, but probably the flowers are equally acceptable.

The Dolphin Paint Shop

The finished model should have had a tessellated texture. I'm not sure what happened to that, or why my altitude specific 'go-faster' stripe has turned out to be green, black and white.

My attempt at the Create 3D like a Superhero! metablob tutorial has reached the virtual paint shop. It hasn’t quite turned out like author Chipp Walters’ Dolphin underwater recon vehicle, partly, I think, because my version of Vue Pioneer isn’t quite the same as the one referred to in the book but it’s been interesting going through the process and discovering where certain functions of the program are stowed away.

Links; Chipp Walters’ blog

Cornucopia 3D where you can currently download the latest version of Vue Pioneer for free.