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Daylight Train Station

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Description

Well, here's my first attempt at creating something in the daylight. Daylight is difficult for a billion reasons. Here're some of them:

1. Global lighting sucks. In fact, I can't even use it adequately because my computer would explode. Probably very slowly. This image is raytraced, and it's lit by three light sources. The first two are the "sun", and they're slightly offset from each other. I used two light sources because, simply, one was not bright enough. They're offset because both light sources originating from the same point produced too much light for the ambient light settings to compensate for, and setting them off from each other allowed the shadowed areas to be slightly more illuminated. This involved painting out a lot of excess shadows in Photoshop, but it worked out alright. Also, the areas under the porches are lit with some random point lights, because the shadows were far too dark to be realistic.

2. Textures need to be specifically calibrated for daylight. Because of the brightness of the main light sources, the textures need to be about 50% darker than they would be for a night image, which makes it really difficult to match everything together.

3. Everything tends to look like plastic, and you can't hide things. In a nighttime scene, you can just fail to light an area that looks dodgy, and the problem is solved. Here, there're problems with the walls looking like they're made of plastic, and the ground with the leaves shadows (yeah, that's what that's meant to be) looking pretty crap. Oh, well.

So here's a train in the daylight, anyway. The angle of the image was inspired by a photograph of Mount Victoria station, the building on the right is based on the station building at Arncliffe, the one on the left is possibly based on Panania. Somewhere in the background is a photograph of Sydney Park, and the clouds are from my backyard last year some time.

Criticism appreciated, this is just an experiment. :D
Image size
1680x1050px 549.9 KB
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Comments7
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mark1214's avatar
holy crap! that is pure awesomeness! only thing i dont quite enjoy looking at is the slightly grainy sky.
But the train and the proportions are very well met.