One going to a Saudi Arab merchant, began "My husband and I would like you to join us for dinner at 12:30." Another, going to an airline pilot, read ". Just how complicated this could be was illustrated a couple of years back when an English lady of long residence in Jiddah sat down to write three invitations to a summer dinner party. At the two extremes-the summer and winter solstices-the two systems were considerably different.
Unfortunately, no day is exactly the same length as the one before so that the GMT plus three system and the western sun time system gradually drew apart as the seasons progressed. By design, western sun time was approximately equivalent to GMT plus three. Jiddah, on the Red Sea, is three hours ahead of Greenwich mean time, the standard time agreed to by most nations of the day at an international conference held in Washington in 1884. Western sun time was probably devised so members of the foreign community could keep some sort of relationship with the time zones of their home countries although local wits say it was because the British Embassy couldn't bear the thought of serving afternoon tea at 11 o'clock. Every day at sunset, you set your watch to read 6 o'clock instead of 12 o'clock. If everybody had done it, there would have been no problem.īut then, unfortunately, some nameless foreigner introduced western sun time. Geared to the sun, it was very simple: every day at sunset you simply adjusted your watch to 12 o'clock-12 midnight, that is. The basis of all time keeping in Saudi Arabia used to be Arabic time, the traditional method of telling the hour. In the meantime old timers from Jiddah to Dhahran began to rehash all the old time-worn stories about the problems that the kingdom's whimsical time keeping systems used to cause. Then, about a year ago, the kingdom decided it was time to choose a single system and what is expected to be a long-and time-consuming-transition period began.
Anyway, all elements over 0.5 Roughness still use Reflection Captures so it doesn’t get too costly.Īll GI was baked so Ray Tracing wasn’t that expensive, my project runs at 80/90 fps on a 2080 Super.Ī reminder! If you’re using elements with World Position Offset (the pendulums in my case) you have to turn Evaluate World Position Offset by object so they render correctly.For many years Saudi Arabia had seven different systems of keeping time. I tried first with Sphere Reflection Captures, but you could see the trick, not in the main view, but you could see it when the camera moved in animations, so it was time to go for ray-tracing. I turned on ray-tracing for this project, so I’d get nice shadows and defined light shafts, and most important, nice reflections on all the glass elements from the clocks and lamps. I also added a very slight sharpening effect. I wanted to avoid all the clocks moving at the same time so I added a little randomizer by position, so each pendulum would have a different starting time depending on its placing.įor post-processing I applied a Color lookup table, bumping a little the contrast and mid-levels, but ended up being a really subtle effect, I turned it off completely for the night version. The pendulums' movement was made by a shader with a Rotate About Axis plugged on the World Position Offset Node. Just try to add variety to your workflow or it can become a boring/tedious/abandoned project. You can always group elements by material type, if they use a masked material or not, proximity, etc. For example, I divided all my furniture into 5 different atlases (first-floor furniture, plants side furniture, etc.) so I modeled/textured/placed in Unreal each group from start to end, and my work didn’t become so monotonous. One way to avoid that is to create small goals for yourself, so you don’t get bored just making the same work all the time. With such a number of props, work can be overwhelming. I only used tweaked stock photos for the clocks' spheres and the carpets, except for the cat’s carpet, which was handpainted following the concept. The good part was that texturing was really fast, as almost every element uses the same type of materials, so I could reuse my Substance Painter material library adding slight variations. As always, I tried to just model the essential parts and use Copy and Symmetry wherever possible, or reuse with slight variations different parts (some clocks share small elements with different textures).