BC4-1810 Homework, Paulo Soares

I have redone only the night lightning exercise because I was unsatisfied with the way the lights were behaving in the lamps. They felt very sharp to me, so I gave them some minor tweaking. Here is my first submission of this exercise.

I have also redone the Shading a Toy Truck exercise in Blender 2.8. Before this week's class I used to completely ignore the "Input" section of the node editor, so it gave me a boost to play with it. I also tweaked the lighting of the scene because I got inspired by seeing Kent using more saturated lights. I wanted to get a little gloomy-but-not-outright horror-Alan-Wake'y vibe. It doesn't feel perfect but I'm satisfied with it.

I also got inspired by JJ McGuckin's submission of this execise in the shading basics course, and wanted to give the displacement node a go. The idea was to make it look muddy, so I did with a noise texture and heightened contrast -- and thanks to the now-available-in-my-head Input nodes, I managed to heighten the contrast of the mud... which may be a little overdone, but it's an experiment (lol).

I also used the Principled shader to give it a more metallic look, so that it didn't look so much like a toy. Then I gave I tried to give it a "brushed" look by using noise and stretching it with a mapping node.

Here is my original submission of this exercise

I think the mud looks a little silly, though. The tires are not worn at all, and there is no "thin" mud or dirt, just these thick muddy spots. Sadly, I only noticed these details after a very long render time (does 2.8 take more time to render?), and I don't have more time to dedicate to it today, and the deadline is pressing in. Despite that, I am satisfied with it. It was challenging and I feel like I "leveled up" doing it.