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| 1 | +### Mardini 2025 - Graveyard |
| 2 | + |
| 3 | +Today is day 30 of [Mardini 2025][mardini-2025]. The prompt for today is "MOONLIGHT", |
| 4 | +in the LOPS category. |
| 5 | + |
| 6 | +The original idea was just to silhouette a tree against the moon, but that seemed dull |
| 7 | +and uninspired the more I thought about it. It also didn't give any hint as to what kind |
| 8 | +of detail to include outside of the moon and tree. The moon is a sphere (citation needed), |
| 9 | +so it has a square aspect ratio. That leaves a lot of negative space that needs to be |
| 10 | +filled with _something_. (I know I don't absolutely _have_ to make my art projects in the |
| 11 | +16 by 9 aspect ratio, but my site is set up for it.) |
| 12 | + |
| 13 | +After looking up a bunch of reference images for ideas, I saw one that showed a bunch of |
| 14 | +zombie hands reaching out of the soil in a graveyard, and it gave me the idea for this. |
| 15 | +The project as a whole is interesting because the actual render is very, very lightweight. |
| 16 | +In fact, in post, I'm throwing out about two-thirds of the beauty pass and generating |
| 17 | +completely new color data made from gradients, driven by custom render variables exported |
| 18 | +in addition to the beauty pass. |
| 19 | + |
| 20 | +New stuff: |
| 21 | + |
| 22 | + - LABS Tree generator tools. I think this is the third time I've played with them, and |
| 23 | + although I didn't go too deep into it (I didn't even touch leaf generation) I did |
| 24 | + go into it this time with the specific goal of making a particular type of tree in |
| 25 | + order to fit the creepy graveyard theme. |
| 26 | + - Many additional render vars (AOVs) in the Solaris/Karma render settings. I wanted |
| 27 | + to render pretty much everything but the moon in COPS, but still use Karma to generate |
| 28 | + a bunch of helpful AOVs to use as masks and other helpful information for compositing. |
| 29 | + - Figured out how to make a vignette effect in post-processing. It's not exactly |
| 30 | + difficult, but there isn't a node dedicated to it so you have to build it yourself. |
| 31 | + - I also used a white noise + soft light blend mode with a small mask amount to generate |
| 32 | + a fake film grain (a very, very small amount of it). |
| 33 | + - Orthographic camera. Oddly, I've never attempted to render using one before, although |
| 34 | + I often use them when I'm modeling. |
| 35 | + |
| 36 | +My entry post is [here][entry-post]. |
| 37 | + |
| 38 | +[mardini-2025]: https://www.sidefx.com/community-main-menu/contests-jams/mardini-2025/ |
| 39 | +[entry-post]: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/100354/?page=1#post-442178 |
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