Plain ground

Take care.

This is my simplest shot ever. I wanted to show just an air balloon without anything else, but it looked a bit flat, at least for artistic.

At first, I used a plain photograph for the sky, but because of the realism of the air balloon (shading + ambient occlusion), the overall picture just looked like a photograph. I decided to modified the background texture to make it look slightly surreal. I simply used the red component of the sky as an alpha channel. It removed the cyan from the texture allowing for keeping only the clouds. I displayed them in front of a more colorful background.

I finally added some secondary elements. A bird can go across any plain, while a rainbow cannot.

The following comes from the forum. The story of this "quick" picture.

After I did the raindow texture for the balloon bag, I applied a proper transformation on the texture coordinates to make it fit visually. But the other way around, if you look behind the balloon, the texture doesn't match.

You also probably noticed how low-res the bag was... The shading is actually incredibly good considering the very coarse polygons. They are so visible along the silhouette!

If I have time, I may think of generating the geometry as well to make my own bag, this would remove the clear-cut polygon edges. But you know, I was still satisfied with it. However there was another problem with these coarse polygons: the normals!

The balloon seems very continuous because of the normal interpolation. The problem is that a silhouette polygon may have a normal that can only be seen from behind.

It is a tricky situation where you "see" part of something that you shouldn't ever see, yielding various artifacts such as very annoying black spots. My system has a problem with that.

So what I did is a copy of the bag whose shading doesn't use the normals. I used this copy to patch most of the visual artifacts. You can notice two slights cut in the texture at the top. It is not that obvious and it is so much better than it was.

It took me much more time than expected. I should have generated the full surface with a bit of programming.