Light of day

Cassero Fighting towers - v1

Last night I followed a brief tutorial on using HDR lighting. I remember using HDR in trueSpace 6 and loving the rich and lifelike quality it brought to a scene, although its use guaranteed a lot of waiting around.

The scene is of a mythical gladiatorial arena, composed of interconnected towers with unguarded staircases running along the outside walls. A scary place to wander, even before sword-wielding maniacs start chasing you.

Lessons learned: I don't really understand HDR. Some tutorials impart knowledge that you can use to make creative decisions. Other tutorials are a set of steps that you try to follow faithfully, without really knowing what you are doing. This was definitely the latter. I was extremely disappointed that the scene resulted in CUDA errors, forcing me to render via CPU.

I'll complete a write-up of the HDR workflow. I may check out a couple more tutorials to see if there are other approaches. Everyone is so in love with Eevee, but I prefer the qualities of Cycles for final output.

A shout out to the newly integrated denoiser filter -- applied here to reduce the grain that cycles render often produce. The filter drops into the compositor so it applies post-render and produces great results in most situations.

Tonight

I'll return to the Fireshark when I have nailed down the design through more drawing work. First, I'll do a more detailed version of the towers.