"Mark Birch" <las### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> The bricks are too grey.  You have some beautiful powerful colours in the
> background, but the bricks look washed out by comparision.
Agreed. Am playing with the bricks at the moment.

> texture variation, like maybe a small granite texture, overlayed with a
> large scaled, slightly turbulent bozo to tint the colours a little
> beige/brownish/reddish colour.  Also some greenish moss/mould could add
> some more variety to the colouration.
Also agreed! I shall play in this direction!

> More superfluous details!  Some lamps/torches could look good - not
> necessarily turned on, but it also gives the option of a spooky
> night-version of the scene.
I was thinking of having lamps on posts on the vertices of the platform
handrails. I experimented briefly with lamps for the earlier trefoil
versions, and I found they were too close to the wall when mounted on wall
brackets - all they did was slow the render horribly and confuse the
picture.

> Some flags or banners hanging from poles jutting out from the walls.
Very good idea! I shall definitely try this.

> A hot air balloon or some wooden flying contraption like a DaVinci
> helicopter or an Ewok hang-glider.
I favour hang-gliders, but they'll be a final detail. (Thinks: launching
platforms?)

> If you're going to have people walking about, what sort of stuff might they
> have laying about?  Potplants, junk, posters?
Hmmm... this starts to sound a bit too recognisably 20th century. Potplants
have potential though.

> The knot in the distance is HUGE by comparision to the foreground knot, and
> far too indistinct - I can barely see it in the high-res version.
That's the way I wanted it. It's meant to be planet-sized, and possibly even
outside the atmosphere of wherever-we-are. If it's visible when you look at
the whole picture, but barely noticeable when scrolling around a zoomed
version, I think that's good!

> Doors/Windows:
Your method is almost what I had in mind, but I had completely forgotten
about the inside() function - this makes the job much easier! I don't want
to use differences if I don't have to - it will dent the render time
something rotten, whereas simply leaving bricks out and adding frames will
hardly slow it at all, except maybe at parse time.

> I'd love to see some knots in the middle distance, partially washed out by
> the atmosphere.  You could even try making a giant swingbridge to connect
> the foreground knot to one of the others.
There will be other knots; once I'm happy with the foreground I can
instantiate others trivially (although I need to make the brick detail
lower on distant knots for memory reasons - 90% of the objects are bricks).
A bridge sounds tempting but it doesn't really fit with my mental picture.
And it'd be a b*****d to connect up!

Interestingly, there is no atmosphere - the background is simply a suitably
pigmented sphere. But I'll probably use fog of some kind to achieve an
atmospheric effect on the other knots!

Thanks for the pointers, very useful.
Bill

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