Sign In
Sign in
English

  TopBanners18070901.jpg          
July 16, 2018, 8:10 PM

by Editor in Chief
 
How old do you think is too late for you to "master" Blender? You might think again after reading the comments from this week's winner.

How, then, can you too qualify for this award? Please have in mind that this award is reserved for those that are on par with or that excel top-notch works published by artists and studios. If such work does not appear during a given week, this award is not being given to anyone. So please submit your best work to www.blenderartist.org or to the Member's Gallery of this site, or Contact Us to show where your work is available on the internet. It doesn't have to be a Blender render, internal or Cycles. Any other render engine is fine as long as Blender was used as a part of your workflow.

So, it is with great pleasure that www.BlenderNews.org introduces to you the winner of the Render of the Week Award for the week of July 16, 2018: Joakim Tornhill.

Title: "Swan Lake"
Genre: Environment Design
Renderer: Cycles

Final Render:  ROTWA180716.jpg

Clay Render 
ROTWA180716MO.jpg
  
Artist's Comments
About Me: 
I’m just a person that loves to create stuff on the artistic side. I have written some books (SF), sculpted in clay, created smaller movies for fun, taking photos and drawn a lot in 2D when I was younger. 3D I started with like five years ago in Blender. I did try with 3DS Max several years before that, but failed rather quick back then and put it on the shelf.

It was not that easy to get into Blender and 3D and many times I just put it aside and thought “no more”, but like three years ago a family member started to go to school learning about game design and she then started with 3D as well (Maya). Then I took up Blender for real and worked in parallel and suddenly I had climbed the mountain and knew what I was doing “for real”. From that point, I have used Blender almost daily in my spare time. Still, I am not using it in a work-related matter, except for some Freelancing, (working daily as an IT-consultant instead), even if I’d love to have a main work that was about creating 3D.

For everyone that is asking… it’s never too late to start with learning 3D. I started at the age around 45. Then you can calculate my age I believe smiley.

Right now I’m giving as much help as I can back to the Blender community, where I have specialized in how you create material in Blender cycles. Thus I have the FB group “Blender procedural textures” and also the YouTube channel “Blender Insight”. Besides that I’m trying to answer all questions in this area that pops up on different forums. All this I do because the real strength with Blender is the users, the community and their love to help others.

About "Swan Lake:"
This was an idea I got when just randomly looking through images at Artstation. My eyes fell on a drawing made in grey scale where you could see the morning fog rising from the lake. There was not more than the lake, some trees in the background and this morning fog. However, the image put a feeling inside me that I liked and I was wondering how this could be in color and perhaps with some more elements in. 
I also “needed” a nature scene to try out my newly bought “Graswald” AddOn, so these two thoughts about trying “GrasWald” and do my own version of a foggy lake started to get me going.

The swan in the picture has its own story. I exercise almost daily using a kayak in the city canal that we have. All spring I have been attacked by this really angry swan that claimed that a very large area was its territory when defending the egg nest. However, the swan now has five kids and is very calm again… so this image was more to try to bring forward the beauty in the swan again for me, so I could stop being pissed off at him.

So… a lot of feelings in this image wink.

The piece itself was not that hard to do for me. I just added four planes that should be the shore, the lake, the forest background and the sky, did a configuration of camera settings and basic light (and added an HDRI). I have found that putting the camera correct as soon as possible will ease a lot of stuff later on....especially when doing real measurement work. 
Then I created like five different trees in the Sapling AddOn, made a group for it and weight painted the plane to get a good placement of the tree particles. 
For the fog, I added a big cube that I used volume material on. In short, I separated the Z axis so I could control the height of the fog and made the difference in the fog using Musgrave texture. For the lake to get ripples, I also only played with the material, so no displacement there, just a distorted wave texture together with the principled Shader. 
The swan is two box modeled objects (A curve for the neck/head and a sphere for the body) that I later sculpted the details on. I did a rough separation of material for body, beak, and head using vertex groups. Then I UV unwrapped the swan, baked the textures into a single image and smoothed edges between the different materials in Gimp and also created a rather simple bump map to use on the swan. 
The front of GrasWald grass was mostly to play with the parameters that come with the AddOn product. Did some post settings directly in the particle system, but 90% was done with just a few clicks. 
Finally, I appended, placed and rendered a fly (previous work) in different positions and combined images of fog, flies, and lake+swan+tree in the compositor where I blurred out the flies so it matched the other main image.
Some final color correction and vignette were then done in Gimp as well and then the piece was finished. 
I was thinking about adding feathers on the swan as well using particles, but got into memory issues so I gave up that thought this time.

Related LInks:

1. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/BZ3vm

2. https://www.artstation.com/magicglow

List of Articles
Subject Date Views
Blender Retrospectives 2020 Blender Retrospective Feb 20, 2021 211030
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 Worthy of Your Note - for Animation & VFX file Jan 25, 2020 563136
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 Worthy of Your Note - for CG, Games & Viz file Jan 25, 2020 426237
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 file Jan 25, 2020 431984
Tutorials Top 15 Highest-Rated Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 file Jan 25, 2020 375890
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 for Blender 2.8 file Jan 23, 2019 345022
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 Worthy of Your Note - for CG, Games & Viz file Jan 23, 2019 684325
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 Worthy of Your Note - for Animation & VFX file Jan 23, 2019 408408
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 file Jan 23, 2019 344933
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2018: Winners Annouced file Jan 02, 2019 381668
Blender Retrospectives 2018 Blender Retrospective file Jan 02, 2019 376078
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2017 file Jan 09, 2018 969010
Blender Retrospectives 2017 Blender Retrospective file Jan 01, 2018 696793
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2017: Winners Annouced file Dec 26, 2017 550766
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials (Videos) Released in 2016 file Jan 16, 2017 765424
Blender Retrospectives 2016 Blender Retrospective file Dec 29, 2016 1060317
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2015: Seven Winners Annouced file Jan 20, 2016 790576
Blender Retrospectives 2015 Blender Retrospective file Jan 12, 2016 762286
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2015 file Jun 26, 2015 805636
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2014: Five Winners Annouced file Jan 02, 2015 813859
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2014 file Dec 11, 2014 852725
Render of the Week 'British Sailing Ship' by Juan Pablo Fuentes - the Winner of the Week of May 4th, 2020 file May 05, 2020 10321
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of May 4th, 2020 file May 05, 2020 9739
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of April 27, 2020 file Apr 29, 2020 10987
Render of the Week 'Characters' by Michael Weisheim - the Winner of the Week of April 27, 2020 file Apr 29, 2020 12571
Render of the Week 'Scarlett Johansson 3D WIP' by George Siskas - the Winner of the Week of April 20, 2020 file Apr 22, 2020 10854
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of April 20, 2020 file Apr 22, 2020 9517
Render of the Week 'Messy Room' by Tatsuki Yamada Hatemei - the Winner of the Week of April 13, 2020 file Apr 14, 2020 12233
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of April 13, 2020 file Apr 14, 2020 9667
Render of the Week 'Mary Jane Watson sculpt' by Veer Chidar - the Winner of the Week of April 7, 2020 file Apr 07, 2020 10377
Render of the Week 'Joker corridor' by Mirosław Cichoń - the Winner of the Week of March 23, 2020 file Mar 24, 2020 10495
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of April 6, 2020 file Apr 07, 2020 10910
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of April 6, 2020 file Apr 07, 2020 9569
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of March 23, 2020 file Mar 24, 2020 9500
Render of the Week 'Seagulls’ Cry' by Gregory Smith - the Winner of the Week of March 30, 2020 file Mar 31, 2020 9753
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of March 30, 2020 file Mar 31, 2020 9309
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of January 27, 2020 file Feb 01, 2020 9844