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Originally Posted by JohnReid
About Key ingredients in a diorama, on another level the first thing I look for in a great diorama is,is it believable?Does it look natural?When I taught decorative bird carving ,the hardest thing to get across to my students was to avoid lining things up in a row,having things equi-distant or 90deg to each other.In fact, even today when I am working on a piece, I willoften have to go back and screw things up a bit to make it look more natural.What may look perfectly natural has sometimes taken hours of thought,placing and replacing things until they look just right. Only man plants trees in rows.It is a human tendency that I find that I have to be constantly aware of when I am working.It cannot look too staged,too square,too correct ,to be believable.In life things get dirty,dusty,worn and a good diorama must reflect this. What do you think,Stephen? Cheers! John.
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John
Well said
and this "contrived randomnes" is a key factor in digital work as well.
Perhaps the most obvious example is composing aircraft in flight.
You have to place them in such a way that the compositional elements flow the way you want.
But, it has to appear semi-random.
you can't just line them all up or it will look false.
and you need to watch the shapes you are making to make sure you don't get any man-made looking patterns.
You want to hide the artist's hand as much as you possibly can.
And it is a lot harder than it looks - but that is as it should be, because it should look like it "just happened"
on another level
The same factors effect texture maps.
Again, you almost always need to simulate the basic randomnes that is present in everything you see.
Personaly, i have found it almost impossible to manualy simulate some natural effects.
good example is paint chipping.
On the 148th aero image I wanted to show some extreme wear on the cowl of the leading camel.
The front of this camel is right in your face, so the effect had to be good or the whole image would have failed.
So, for the cowl, i had a natural metal texture and a painted texture - simple matter to overlay the painted one on top of the metal and just selectively delete out the chipped areas.
I tried painting masks that i could use as a selection tool to detele the areas, but it never quite worked.
There is a semi random quality to the size and placement that i just couldn't get manualy.
in the end I found an image of rocks (i think)
and fooled around with the selection tool until something crack-like happened
Worked out ok in the end - but I still didn't get it the way i wanted.
In some ways - you have to be more conscious of this randomness when working in a virtual environment simply becuase you don't have the benefit of physical reality.
You can't just throw some bolts on the floor and let them fall/roll/spred in a naturaly random fashion.
You have to consciously place them there.
can be difficult
But, IMHO, there is little difference between physical and virtual model making.
essentialy, we are doing the same thing
just the tools are different