redfiredog

Krystal's foot

Added 2023-02-12 19:28:21 +0000 UTC

I'm not saying that Kaylee 22 will be coming out soon, but here's a hint at where she's going to be going next! I'm guessing a lot of you will recognize the city from this shot. (BTW, if it wasn't obvious, the unnamed city from the last chapter of Kaylee was Portland, Oregon.)

The model I'm using for the city is a little bit older... the skyscraper district is very detailed, but the rest is sparse, with only a handful of full modeled buildings. (You can see some flat "buildings" painted on the hills in the background if you look closely.) There's a newer, higher resolution model of the city that I'll try out, but it's insanely high-poly (like, significantly more than the gigantic downtown LA model from Kaylee 17-19.) I'll try to get it to work, but if not this is a more than serviceable fallback!

I really like how this scene looks. I found some amazing HDRI's, that have a great color balance and a sun that's slightly diffused by a thin layer of clouds and atmospheric haze. It brings out the detail without the harshness that direct sunlight has, which tends to reveal the flaws in a 3D model. There's a reason why so many movies movies set CGI-heavy scenes in overcast or hazy lighting, not many movies outside of Avatar movies can really pull off photoreal CGI characters in bright, direct sunlight.