This is the Blender Collaboration 2023, week 30 challenge. Don’t be afraid to join, a lot of us are beginners. This is all to practice, have fun, learn, and get together.
This week’s subject is “Living architecture”.
Living architecture - It could be a building made of living things, a building that is alive, or whatever someone feels fits the prompt really.
The rules are simple. 1 subject, 1 entry, 1 week.
You create whatever object or scene or whatever you can think of that has something to do with the subject. It can be as simple or complicated as you want, all entries are welcome!
Post your picture here in this thread. At the end of the week, we start to vote. And if you are the winner, you may choose the next subject and win a unique badge.
We @BlenderCollab have a few days to vote. You can vote fast but also think slowly about design, colors, technique, difficulty, subject, realism, etc. Choose consciously and not on your own entry.
The new subject week 31 “Voxel style” has already started. The winner of this week’s “Living Architecture” challenge may select a subject for next week 32 and win a badge.
I didn’t make it in time. Had too big plans again. I had this whole cinematic scene in my head with the snail going through some desolate landscape and leaving a trail of vegetation because snails have regenerative properties. And on top of the snail would be a little village of people dedicated to maintain the wellbeing of the snail and help it to revegetate the earth
But I ended up just putting together a little forest scene with my new low poly trees.
I now also have a procedural node system for making shells. So that’s cool!
I’ve got some new cool assets, learned a few things, and got a lot of practice. So it’s still a win for me. Summer holidays just begun and hoping to do and learn a lot more!
Yeah I made the snail. But texture painted it using a stencil though. Not sure if that’s concidered cheating but it gets the job done. I tried to make my own procedural texture but ended up using that for the bump node instead because the stencil texture looked so much more realistic.
I agree. The idea was too add a bunch of little underground cottages and maybe little houses. I kinda started losing motivation at the end and didn’t really finish up great.
I always keep pushing until the last minute, hoping that you are still sleeping. The next moment I look at the time, it’s already too late But I’ll have to watch the time more closely next time
@VVruba congratulations on winning this Collab with your beautifully crafted living architecture scene. Great use of procedural textures and natural-looking materials. It has many tiny details, giving a feel of size (barrels, swords, …). Making things (the scene) looks bigger.
FedPete - Reusing old assets can be helpful to minimize project time. But still, you need to spend more time on the story. Details count! (… I spent 1 hour on this. Most time went into the tree trunk, which had many displacement problems).
Cows - great Baba Yagas idea! The most detail went into the nice modeled house. But it is cut off in the scene. I think a different camera position could help the scene. See Rule of thirds - Wikipedia
Note: I don’t want to offend anyone. I try to write down positive ideas and visions in my simple use of the English language. I am also sometimes more inspired by a particular subject or solution. I’m also learning from you!
I don’t really see much displacement, to be honest, did you give up on it? I use adaptive sub-div in “experimental mode” if I want to do mesh displacement, it’s the best way but it is fairly resource intense.
I actually didn’t use any procedural textures in this one, I just used displacement maps from rock and bark textures as blend masks for the shroom bodies. For the mushroom caps I used free images I found online and made some rough displacement maps using Affinity Photo and Krita.
Yes, I did, but the problem lies in the image texture (just a photo). Which contains black (shadow) values. And once a value is 0-black or 1-white. you can’t fiddle it. I know I could find another picture, but I didn’t have the energy to look for another one.
Yes, it does look quite similar. The problem I have with Voronoi is that if you use color-ramp on it, it will crush the range in a perfectly circular fashion so it’s not great for adjustment. Depending on the scene size and how much of the pattern is visible Voronoi could be a better option, but it requires a lot more finessing.
Might do something with it some other time. The snail and shell is the highlight!
it looks so good… Not enough architecture though.
But I’ll have to watch the time more closely next time 
