Making a Sci-Fi-ish Lighthouse

Actually the last year i developed the habbit for buildings and environments that i think about what could the persons living there could have made themself to make theyr life less miserable. (Working on a dystopian short) Gives more life, extra detail and helped me speeding up my workflow

VoiD010AUT

lol me too :D

Doug Brown

Here's a fun fact for you. Lighthouses are actually powered by a single, ordinary light bulb, just amplified and manipulated by mirrors and lenses and such.

Collin Cameron

It's always blowing my mind how fast you solve designe problems and add new stuff to it. Sometimes I'm sitting an hour just rotating around my object and have no idea whats missing.

VoiD010AUT

Great video as always, I was wondering, is there a place where you shared the pre-made sampler of texture you use at 16 min in the video ? I know you did share something similar for the trafic light video but it was more a littles pieces of metal sampler texture back then

your grey human story had me cry laughing - too real. i'm a new patron. just wanted to say you're a huge inspiration. thanks for everything. most importantly the grey human story.

Connor McGuire

tight

how can I download this texture? thanks

great work i aspire to be as good as you one day also how did you stitch that image texture together

This is so nuts, thanks as always. You made my day, and it was a really nasty one, I needed something cool to brighten it ;)

Mornarion

Awesome. Thanks.

thanks for sharing Ian!

Justin

Laughing my butt off at the client work grey human placeholder comment - spot on 🙃

Max Cahill

Are you going to upload this?

I'm not sure which particular operation you're referring to, but Blender lets you lock movement, scale and rotation to certain axes or pairs of axes by hitting the relevant letter after the operation key—hit G, X to move only along the X axis, R, Z to rotate around the Z axis, etc. And if you hit Shift+[axis] it'll exclude that axis, i.e. S, Shift+Y will scale along the X and Z axes, leaving the object's Y scale unchanged, or G, Shift+Z will let you slide an object on the XY plane—I use that one allll the time to reposition objects while keeping them on the ground. (These work in other editors too, like the UV and graph editors, although the double-axis thing isn't really relevant when you're only working with two axes.) Is that what you were looking for?

Carter Burr-Kirven

The shear speed of Ian's modelling in a semi-brain-dead-midnight state is mind boggling.. Not sure how he constrains to a certain axis though, even tried playback speed of 0.25. That's an awesome experience by the way.. Maybe he does click and drag real fast? Thanks for a great video. P.S. Is anyone else wondering if the 'dark video' from the Patrons idea will one day become a thing? If not, no worries Ian! You put out such an insane amount of great content I feel bad not being able to chuck more money at you..

thats from his script video, he made a script that shades smooth turns off backface culling and turns on smooth normals. very helpful

Hey Ian, love this! At around 24:20 you exclaim Shift+Q, just wondering what that is hotkeyed to? Looks like it's just setting it to shade smooth?

Lol, i thought it was just me who felt that way, i dont like showing people my work early specifically for that reason... but I always enjoy these type of videos, never think its babbling a lot of good info makes the videos more entertaining also...and of course we would like the asset :😁

I Like it Hardcore Tv

Oh man! this is insane! i love it!!

Yeah very useful! I struggled with this issue before

Diego Nossa

That shadow ray trick for glass is such a gamechanger, thanks for sharing! Where did you find out about it??

The best part of the video starts after..."I'm tired and babbling." Then it's just free flow fun

GI Jungles

Hey Brett, I have this one from blender guru: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EJK43riacd1qfqztU5ysZEKo3qoYQNS5/view?usp=sharing

Because of you, I made like this ! thk you!!!!! https://blenderartists.org/t/light-and-night-area-with-eevee/1318072

Hey Ian, where did you get your reference human model? Trying to find one has actually been more difficult than I thought.

Brett Williams

These are my favourite types of your videos, just a proper sit-down shadow session with your thought process. Love it!

Lewis Turner

Dam i love you Ian Hubert.

Jack_Wolfe

"See it'll make the other humans seem even MORE realistic!"

Ian Hubert

I dunno what to tell ya; test audiences *loved* Boxy the Plucky Comic Relief Cube.

Ian Hubert

FYI, the gray box doesn't work with the cyclists. I'm available to help art direct.

Chipp Walters

Did you know grey humans actually add realism? It's actually for realism. (You should say that to a client one time)

Excellent video as always. I'll be interested to see how you breakdown this scene/improve the road and animation down the line. Could I perhaps put into your mind a CGI breakdown video when this scene is complete? :)

Nicholas Cummins

Ohohoho that's annoying!!! I worked for a director who was convinced the "correct" way for me to do VFX was to complete the VFX for *every single take*, *start to finish*, because otherwise how could he edit it? There are a lot of factors I value in clients now, and a solid visual imagination is one of the biggest (they also tend to be great at describing what they want) :D.

Ian Hubert

Ahahaha at least for one of em!

Ian Hubert

are we gonna have a video for every house

I probably don't use as many pre-made assets as I should! One of the reasons is the patreon, though; if I hand-model everything in a scene, it's a lot easier to share it with you guys (even if it's technically permissible under the license, I feel weird distributing anything made by someone else). Also yeah I should DEFINITELY use more PBR textures. I tend to lean really heavily on trying to find the "right" image texture to use as a base for the model, and those are never going to be PBR. That said, there are certain things (large rocks and brick walls and such) where I'll always prefer using a proper purchased or downloaded asset. There's another factor, too, which is that half the time I get an asset or a texture and it's just HUGE, and suddenly my render times go nuts, or my framerate is slashed, and I like having a sense of how big an asset is when I load it into the scene. Mostly though it's just that I have a bunch of habits, and I probably haven't updated them in a while to modern workflows :P

Ian Hubert

Usually between 2 and 4k. I probably could (and should) go significantly higher res, especially since that one texture is carrying so much of the weight and used multiple times, I just always err on the side of keeping things small, when I can.

Ian Hubert

Ah will do! I think on this one I literally just plugged the image texture through a bump map-more basic than usual :D

Ian Hubert

Great tutorial! I have a question - have you ever considered using more pre-made (I.e. bought from sites like Quixel and Turbosquid) assets to speed up your workflow? Obviously something like this lighthouse doesn’t lend itself too well to that kind of process since all the parts need to fit together, but for little scene fillers like rocks and plants and bins and boxes? I also don’t see you using a lot of PBR textures, even though they’re widely available now… sometimes it seems like you’re having to compensate for the low-fi nature of your texturing by having everything be far away and dense with detail… which sometimes is a lot more work than just using high-quality shaders in the first place, and letting that carry a little more of the weight. This isn’t a criticism though !

It's not really difficult to do! Go into photoshop (or if you don't have it, I think Photopea can do the same stuff!) and just throw in all the textures that you think you'll use

Alex White

Awesome Video Ian! Quick question: What resolution do you usually go with for those big photo texture images you bash together?

Just awesome to see you at work. A real inspiration.

cdilla

Awesome video again! The light house lens thingies are called Fresnel lenses. Finally I have some meaningful input to give. 😂 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens

Sam V

Omg. I’m only a few minutes into the video and I can’t stop laughing and crying about the client commentary. At my last job we had a client like that. We would show them camera blocking and they kept rejecting it because of gray shaders and non final lighting. They simply refused to even consider any takes if even a single asset didn’t have “correct" shading on it. It was insane. This is for camera blocking! And because they had the money - and we needed it - we had to comply. Needless to say, having to texture (and light) complete scenes that they would then say “actually, no. Let’s do something else.” was incredibly expensive. Sigh. Nice to know we weren’t alone in that hair ripping out situation. 😊

This was so useful in part just to watch your workflow (I love the organic chaos you create) and I’m also glad to hear other people get very confused on how annotations work, it took me a while to figure out how to layer them! ^^’

Jay Bellecoix

This video was right up my street. I was interested in how you start blocking out large shots like this that don't start with video footage. Really useful to see it in the early stages. Plus I was hoping you'd do another more in-depth look at making buildings. Thanks, Ian.

Paul Richmond

Atmosphere!

German Bauer

dude, this was so satisfying to watch. One note, please show the entire texturing process. I know you've done it a million times, but I love seeing it!

George Moise

This was really cool! Could you do a lil tut on making those texture maps? I think that'd be super useful!

John Dyer

ayy, neat man u pumpin these out in no time :D always realy excited to find new videos here! keep up the awesome personality man :)

MultidimensionalMustard

Agree. The modeling is great but the final touches make the difference. Maybe you can make a video about it @Ian?

ian you should start a minecraft letsplay

oh god it hurts, pls make it stop :) this is why I am working towards doing my own stuff and not doing client work anymore. It just hurts.

Phil South

Haha, I know what you mean about the clients not getting work in progress. One time I went to a meeting with a client and we played a video bit by bit, and at one point one lady paused it and said something about a part she would like to see changed in a specific way (this was 2D animation), then stared at the screen for like 10 seconds. After which she turned to me and said, “oh, I thought you would change it”. She literally thought that by telling me what she wanted to change in hand-made 2D animation, it would magically be changed in the video file I was playing. And another time, a project was cancelled because I was presenting a black and white animatic, and they were furiuous that the animation was not in colour. And I was like, “yes it will be in color, but this is just like an animated storyboard to give an idea of the timing” and they were like nope, cancelled. We ordered colour animation, dammit! Good times, glad I don’t do client stuff anymore! Lots of stories like that…

Jan van den Hemel

oh and LOL, client work. DGMS. I feel your pain brother.

Phil South

Wonderful! I've always loved your use of fog, and this is the fog loviest. :D

Phil South

Watching you model and go through your process is the best way I have ever been able to learn while doing Blender. These types of videos are my absolute favorite. Great work on that lighthouse too by the way! It looks absolutely incredible!

Dawson Henderson

ngl, better then netflix

Hey Ian :) I wanted to ask if you played with the asset manager a bit. Did you try it out? I could imagine that I would be really nice for your workflow!

So awesome! can you make some tutorial about final render and composition?

Enjoyed this one so much. And the client rant was especially funny... Seems the clients are the same in every part of the world. 😂

Luka Hrgovic

So awesome to get a notification for a new vid from you. Thanks for sharing! :)

Volen CK

Will you make a lens flare tutorial or asset sometime? That would be really cool, and helpful

DCUBE

It's really amazing! you always make it look easy to do, It would be great, to see your rendering process for the final images, Greetings and congratulations on your work !!

A lighthouse to brighten my day

love the et bmx bike opening, love the shot

Richard Cave

The rage about clients not understanding WIP work is very relatable. I recently put a placeholder car into the work in progress styleframe for a car commercial and the dude goes "I guess it looks fine, but it's the wrong car, we're not advertising a rally car from the late 80s, why is it the wrong car, this won't work." Buddy, it's because you didn't sent me the car I have been asking you to send me for almost a week, and this Lancia Delta S4 is the sickest car of all time, so that's why we're making a commercial for that now instead.

Honestly your frustration with showing clients unfinished shots and having them focus on something irrelevant is waaaaayyy to reletable.. Hilarious

Cyrus Hayley

OOOOOoooo- you're totally right, especially since I brought volumetrics into it for those final renders! It'd be totally worth it for a still!

Ian Hubert

Love it! I feel that "Now it's 2am" segue *hard*. I know it'd tank the render times but having at least a still-frame with some sort of cool compound-focused light beam coming out of the top might be dope? Especially in the foggier HDR renders. :D

Howie Day

one hour of raw cg goodness :O these tuts are the best :D!

You have made my week again, I commented last time about how you uploaded twice very close periods and you've done it again!

Roy