A landscape, a path, a house
Remember how a few posts ago, I said I am quite happy to have a working Landscape Blending material? Well I was sort of wrong back then, as my tessellation wasn’t working. I knew that, but it didn’t as much matter back then as I had no height information. Well, the other day, when I created that height, it put me in quite the stressful situation of spending the whole day trying to figure out how to finish the blending of the height itself.
Anyway, I got it working, then spend tiny bit of time on a grassy-mossy looking material and one that’s kind of rocky. I’m not going to post renders of them now, as they are far away from finished. Still, its nice to have some roughness information on the landscape. I’ll probably have more grassy bits, but I will do that when I have proper foliage/flowers to put on top, because without that it will just look silly.
The brick path leading to the staircase that you can see, I redid about two or three times. First time it was too perfect. Then it was too chaotic and broken, with pieces everywhere. I tried elevating the whole thing. Then I tried having it go a bit inside the landscape. At the end I settled down on what you see now.
No, your eyes are not deceiving you—I finally have that calligraphers hut interior and some scrolls! (not finished and texture, but a progress nonetheless).
There is some thought into the text. As such I want to thank my good friend Rika Kanaya for helping me with the translation to Japanese. Lots of the texts are just wishes for good fortune. Just like what my research led me believe is the common practice. But then we have a few sentences that lead to some story about the place. It’s meant to be a flavour text, so you wont be missing much if you, like me, can’t read Japanese.
A few scrolls call the shrine an “Animal Shrine”. Then some, like the very long one in the very middle of the picture above, explain that, "…this Shrine is a place for those who want to command the animals as their soldiers.". Among others are “Spirits inhabit this place.”, “The statues shall come to life.” and “Point at your enemies and the animals will follow.”. I made those so they lead to a story that I came up with the other week. The story is that you could leave gifts at the shrine and get involved in some kind of summoning ritual, where you can send thousands of critters after an enemy of yours. The animals would do your bidding. Its quite the fantasy spin, but that is what I like the most - fantasy works. I am hoping to be able to showcase that idea through my final video using some cheap effects, but honestly, I might not have the time to get that far.
Construction
(No, I didn’t waste my time modelling a sign, but still wanted to see one in there for the giggles. :P Courtesy of.)
As always, thanks for reading! Have a good night from me.