Here's a fourth update to the most recent version of my Parks project in Blender.
I've added and moved a few elements here and there since the last version. The biggest change is a little more under-the-hood, though it is obvious when you compare the images directly; I've re-worked the core of my water shader/material.
It's still not quite where I want it to be, but the ripples look more water-y to me, and it's now a lot simpler in how the effect gets built. It also plays nicer with the waterfall objects, which were looking a little too much like plastic to me in the last iteration.
Since the last version, I also had an opportunity to explore the scene in VR, using my Oculus Meta Quest 2. The scale of things looked mostly okay, but the "small" hedges, which are meant to be about waist-height, are almost as tall as me! So, I'm sort of entertaining the idea of re-working those. And then back to building out the rest of the scene and adding some more park objects to it.
I also did a test render of a different lighting setup that I thought was cool. Check this out:
This is a night/sunset scene, and I can now make all the windows light up with just one click, controlled by a world variable in Blender!
I'm not sure which I like better, honestly. But it's easy to switch between the two setups, so I'll keep plugging away and experimenting. If I end up going with the latter setup as the final, I'll have to tweak the color corrections a bit - there is a lot of odd pink-ish banding in the highlights.
