Endless vistas
Tricks and tools for creating a performance-cheap scene
01 LOOSENESS?
Looseness is one of the things you should use to your advantage in Dreams. It’s a good (and performance-cheap) way to add textures and variation to your models. Looseness defines the distance between and the size of the flecks that cover all surfaces in Dreams, and you can use it as a way to smooth hard edges. In this example you can clearly see the difference between the left (without looseness variation) and the right one (with). To paint with looseness in your models, switch to the Looseness tool while you’re scoped into a model.
02 LET’S ROCK
Let’s make a rock. We make this using the basic Clay tools – use the square Clay brush set to Stamp mode, then use add and subtract to rough it up a little and bring out the form you want. Experiment with soft blend as well for some interesting effects. Use Smear mode to draw some cracks and texture on the rock. Finally, add some colour using the Spray Paint tool, because rocks are rarely uniform in tone. You can duplicate and rotate your rock to create a heap.
03 BUILDING A BRICK
Select the cube Clay brush and edit its shape using the Shape Editor. Change the proportions of the shape to match that of a brick. For this piece I imagined the kind of brick used in a medieval castle. Whenever you’re building assets, it’s a good idea to enable the grid guide. That way you can always get the asset aligned correctly to the scene, even if you change its orientation after building the object. Exit the Shape Editor and stamp the basic brick in the scene.
04 BE SMART ABOUT IT
In Dreams, the best thing you can do for performance (thermo) is to reuse as much as possible. So, give your brick different sides so that you can rotate it and flip it around to avoid a boring repetitive look. Use the Clay tool to add a few dents and ridges, and then use the Looseness tool like you did with the rock. The impact an object will have on overall performance is determined by the surface area of the object in terms of the amount of flecks it takes to cover it.
05 COLOUR
Select your object and choose Save As A New Creation. This will allow you to go back and change the asset, and see that change reflected on the entire scene. Let’s add some colour using the Spray Paint tool. For even more variation you can use the Paint mode with surface snapping turned on to paint over your models later in the process. After doing the colour-pass, you can go into the sculpture’s outer and inner properties and tweak the colour on individual copies to make them look unique.
06 OPTIMISE, OPTIMISE, OPTIMISE!
Now you’ve got your main building blocks, make sure they’re as optimised as possible. The main way to do this is to use the Details tool. Make sure it’s set to decrease detail and start blasting your shapes. Notice that the Sculpture Detail tool works on all clones of the same object at once and that changing looseness through the surface properties of the model or with the Looseness tool doesn’t benefit performance. Look at the difference the detail level does in terms of graphics thermo (the yellow circle in the left corner.
07 SEE HOW FAR YOU CAN GET
Okay, so you have this small diorama setup. Let’s add some grass. You can reuse your rock asset for this. Make a copy and open the Properties of the sculpt. Raise the tint to around 90% and choose a green colour. Set the original colour saturation to around 50%. Go to Fleck Properties and increase the looseness of the model until you see the individual flecks at around the size you’d imagine a patch of grass to be. Raise the impasto to 300, and increase the ruffle too.
08 LET’S BUILD A SCENE
Now you have some quality assets, you can start building a landscape using them. You can even bring in elements from other Dreamers. You can make a scene like this using what you’ve made in our three Dreams tutorials to date.