Creative Challenge 1

 Hello, everyone. This is going to be my first blog post. I'm so excited to show off the things I have made. I'm a little behind this week, but we won't let that stop the creative juice machine. For today's creative challenge, I wanted to stretch my 3D muscle and recreate an effect from scratch. So, I asked my best friend (Kelvin) to send a screenshot of something he hadn't seen me do. So, I present you.

This is from a game called Lunacid. A retro-inspired dungeon crawler with a rich atmosphere and aesthetic. The first thing I noticed was the sharp reflection and the Crepuscular rays (god rays). 

I will be working in the free 3D creation software Blender which has two main ways of rendering: Eevee a real-time rendering engine and Cycles a path tracing rendering engine. 

Cycles have reflections right out of the box. But I want this not to take an hour to render so we are switching to Eevee. I did render one shot just so we could see what cycles look like and it took 8 mins for this simple setup. However, this gives us a good idea of how the refections should look like. 

In Eevee, we lose all reflection and bounce lighting. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as we can fake reflections in various ways. Depending on how comfortable we are with simple reflections, we could use Eevee's new ray tracing feature. This employs a limited version of path tracing with lower resolution and fewer bounces. Screen Space Reflection is one of the features available when this option is turned on. The only downside is that reflections are limited to on-screen objects, which can cause artifacts like missing reflections.

The fact that we need to have everything we want reflected within the rendered screen limits us greatly. We can't have shots of only the reflections. Even if we could get the reflection working with off-screen objects. The smaller resolution of the path trace makes all reflections blurry. Additionally, in my render, there seems to be a weird dark spot in the reflection that changes randomly based on the angle.

So, back to square one. We have a floor that needs to show the underside of this ominous cube. And just like that, I remember a similar effect that Silent Hill did for mirrors. They mirror the geometry, and the "mirror" itself is just a hole that looks into the copy of the room. 

Applying that logic in Blender, I ended up mirroring the cube and having the plane be semi-transparent. This gives us sharp and full reflections. Getting to this point took a lot longer than I expected, but it was so fun that I kept adding to the scene.

This is not even close to the final render but is the closest to the screenshot Kelvin sent me. I will be doing a quick writedown on how I got to this point. The god rays are just a plane that has stretched out Voronoi noise mixed with normal noise. I also added faded edges to all sides using the final mixed value to blend from transparent to emissive pink. The window hole uses a similar emissive pink with its shadows disabled allowing the spotlight to come in. We are still in Eevee so bounce lighting isn't a thing so I placed a point light where the spotlight is hitting to fake it. The floor and wall texture is a prior texture I made that represents concrete. I mixed a little bit of wave noise in to make it look more marbled. As I said prior, this was so much fun that I just kept going, and I don't want to make this blog a book. Kelvin sent me more screenshots and videos and I ended up adding caustics. And I had to stop myself before this turned into a bigger project. Please let me know what y'all think. For those that are curious below are more renders/screenshots and WIP.