So it looks like the poll is closed and the winner (with 45% of the vote) is Walter Lincoln Hawkins, polymer chemist who invented plastic sheathing to give rural access telephone access.

Also, in thinking about the DAWN/DAY/DUSK/NIGHT variations I was wondering about the method of adjusting the lighting. We've had an increasing frequency of wallpapers created with Blender -- if this (or F34) also use Blender might we think about adjusting the lighting in the software? (i.e. not only changing tone but possibly shadow placement, etc?) Not sure who could provide the history here? @duffy ?

I admit to not being fully aware of the idea behind (or the limitations) of the 4-pack of wallpapers, but Blender would make it relatively trivial to have, say, 24 variations on a wallpaper with the main change being less about "time of day" as a color conceptualization but about "time of day" as in "placement of the light."

One idea here for F33 wallpaper might literally be a rendering of a set of telephone poles, with sheathed wires hanging between them, the sun rising and setting, changing the shadows of the poles and wires along the ground.

More ambitiously (and again I may be misunderstanding the purpose of transitional wallpapers, and this is likely overly-ambitious given the time frame), we could actually have the poles remain, but the wires and surroundings change, signalling some sort of progression of time beyond the scope of a day. An example:

1) Poles, unsheathed wires, dirt road, farmland.
2) Poles, sheathed wires, dirt road with cars, farmland with more buildings.
3) Poles, more sheathed wires, paved road with cars, small business in foreground.
4) ...

Just throwing some thoughts out there and hoping to get some clarity/ideas on the 4-pack wallpapers and how far (or if) that concept might be stretched to other ideas.

Looking forward to the next releases!

I drafted and rendered a quick idea below in Blender.

Side issue because I don't know where else to put it: Pagure sent this to me after uploading the above image:

"Good Morning

This is the log of loading all the files pushed in the git repo into
the database. It should ignore files that are not JSON files, this
is fine.

Loading: files/94952a8776739b70990b060fb3d288dfc03ba9a9bab3c1705f6625f16241acca-pole-test-sm.png -- 1/1 ... ... FAILED"

Just an FYI in case this is a message I shouldn't be receiving or is indicative of an error or something.

Thanks!

Another view -- different materials and lighting.

Here is a music video made of images that may be related and hopefully serve as source of inspiration. It includes Poles, unsheathed wires, mountains, clouds, wind: https://youtu.be/KLz-ktBpSIY?list=RDuDTaxJxZIX0

Hello, I've made this render in Blender! Maybe it can be used as a starting point for other ideas? I was thinking of adding more fog and other lights. Also the shapes have no material so I can make them transparent with a transparent material or a wireframe modifier.

Just a suggestion, with the intention of providing some good brainfood: we don't have to be literally with the telephone poles either. Think about how you might visualize entire communities that were 'off the grid' suddenly lighting up as they were hooked and up added to the telephone system. The higher-level concepts to think about here are networks, connection, lighting up previously dark areas, or even communication as a stream flowing to broader areas.

@kylerconway re: the wallpaper 4 packs.... IIRC the way it works is it's the same image with different coloring / lighting. And i think the day is split into 4 tween points if that makes sense, and inbetween two points (let's say inbetween 12 midnight and 6 am) the 12 am image gets overlaid on the 6 am image and they're blended together slowly over time. I hope that makes sense in terms of the mechanics of how it works. So if items move in the composition, they'll sort of slowly transition over time at partial transparency if that makes sense.

Here is the idea we came up with from the Nest hackfest:

We'll have a world from space view, of a non-Earth planet. With the time-of-day wallpaper, we'll have it have no lights in the dawn, a little more lights noon, more lights sunset, then fully lit for midnight. It should show city spots being connected to other city spots.

We'll show a continent and have it split up into different 'countries' that represent the releases of fedora. the number of lights per release will relate to the number of downloads/users (this is fudgey). Lower releases in the left, higher releases in the right.

Here's an example of a graphic (non-freely licensed note) that represents the type of angle / visual we're thinking:

https://besthqwallpapers.com/Uploads/25-4-2019/88786/thumb2-earth-at-night-from-space-europe-city-lights-continent-satellite-view.jpg

Here is a graph that has the per release data we need from @mattdm::
https://i.imgur.com/2pPC8IP.png

With the lights, we need to make sure the contrast levels are appropriate for a desktop wallpaper.

Hello, I have done the first steps of the project and I think this starting point is pretty good:

The only catch is that the star map is taken from here and I don't know if we can use that image in this project. These are the Usage Guidelines from Nasa.
I wanted to use this particular image because its really beautiful and very hi-res.
While I wait for an answer I'm going forward with the planet and the lights. I don't know if I will use external software for the lights yet, I'll see what's the best looking way to do it!

Perfect! I've been playing around with NASA textures as well! Was planning on using the particle system for the lights so we could use weight maps to place a specific number of lights in distinct areas per release grouping. Not sure how we should group them yet (since we have just 4 views), but here's a CSV of releases with my approximation of top download numbers per the chart above.

Fedora Release Peak downloads (in thousands)
6 63
7 53
8 108
9 61
10 70
11 80
12 82
13 80
14 88
15 50
16 55
17 62
18 51
19 43
20 82.5
21 83
22 100
23 110
24 107
25 150
26 120
27 132
28 138
29 139
30 140
31 157
32 117

Hey @duffy, I have a question about your message that I missed.
What do you mean by "Lower releases in the left, higher releases in the right."?
I have already generated land and I have an idea how to make the lights, so on that we are set.

Hey @casungo ! So @kylerconway posted above the numbers for the lights per release. So we were thinking we'd start w release 6 at 63k from the lower left, then go right until release 32 w 117k. Each release is a "country" on the map and the lights are distributed.within its borders. make more sense?

Hello!
I made an Earth In blender with both day and Night, I think We can play around with it and add the lights, but I am not so sure about how city spots being connected to other city spots.

Night

Day

Thanks @duffy for the clarification! Makes more sense now, also, it's a very cool idea! I'm working on it right now. As I said I have generated land, the next step is to make the actual lights. I'll post a picture of the night in a few hours (possibly).

@lawlesx how do you have the land mapped onto the globe? we wanted the landforms to be abstract. if we made some form of map can you project it onto the globe?

Ok here is an update. I tried making continents myself, it didn't turn out great, so I found this great planet generator that would be perfect for our needs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dONehSMYEag
I contacted the author asking if we could use his nodes to generate our planet and its already been 1 day without an answer.
Also, I tried to do something with particles for the lights as @kylerconway suggested. The catch is that I'm bad at simulating particles in Blender so maybe someone could do a better job at this other than me

This is what would look like if we could use that planet I linked earlier:

@duffy Ya sure I can do it if I get some form of map but you need to provide 2 of them one with the continents and the other with the bumped area like the elevated area that you can see
the bump map looks something like this i guess

Then I can surely make like that.

@casungo I can try working with Particles or I guess we can get some royalty free images that we can use by modifying it to our need.

To all,
For you information, the default background git repository is set for Fedora 33 including a placeholder for time of the day. Please upload the default wallpaper on the f33-backgrounds branch.

@casungo awesome thanks for your research! did you hear back from the guy yet? since time is short I asked @madelinepeck to create a map & bump map that @lawlesx could use to map onto his planet model so we'd have something for beta. The beta deadline is tomorrow but it's a packaging deadline, so if @luya is ok with it we could probably take until Monday to do it.

@lawlesx would you have time tomorrow to map @madelinepeck 's map + bumpmap and post to the ticket tomorrow so I can submit the artwork? If you need more time let me know. @madelinepeck is planning to have the map artwork ready for you by the end of today Boston time.

(also @lawlesx & @casungo i think it's ok if the beta doesn't have the lights yet, maybe @casungo could you research the particle stuff in the meanwhile? I wonder if @mciahdenn could help with particles too he is a blender pro, he might be able to point you in the right direction?)

@duffy Yeah I can do it tomorrow , if I get the map , but make sure the dimension for both the MAP is 6000 x 3000 or the same ratio , I am really sorry I forgot to mention it. Basically I convert an image into a 3D model.

@casungo awesome thanks for your research! did you hear back from the guy yet?

No problem! Nope he did not reply to me but in the mean time I did some more progress with the earth and recreated from zero his tutorial and didn't downloaded his file so I think we are good on that, plus I think it looks a lot better. I'll post the results when I finish all the sun positions so we can at least ship them for beta, what do you think @duffy?
I'll figure out the particle stuff as soon as possible too!

@casungo sure! Also if you can pop into our chat, it's https://app.element.io/#/room/#fedora-design:matrix.org - I'm mizmo, @madelinepeck and @lawlesx are there too!

Ok! I'm joining right now!

Ok I'm cleaning up the blend file to be used by the public, I'm uploading it later for sure.
These are the files I rendered:

Dawn:

Day:

Dusk:

Night:

I'll be honest this was an interesting challenge and I hope it works?! Never made a bump map in gimp. It won't let me upload the original gimp file but I could try and email it if needed?

Also, I need to mention that I forgot to spin the clouds in the renders above. I'm posting the blend file soon + I will update the comment with the new renders

Ok, I modified my comment above with new images and this is the blend file:

with all of the textures:

Here is a watercolor night sky background so far in krita

In my opinion this is fantastic! Tomorrow I will see how well does it look on the render itself!

The beta deadline is tomorrow but it's a packaging deadline, so if @luya is ok with it we could probably take until Monday to do it.

It will be okay. I ready the package for review for the time being: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1868290

@casungo Will it be possible to increase the perspective of the planet from the bottom? Simply fill both bottom left and right by the portion of the planet itself.

It is entirely possible! I'm doing it right now

I applied @madelinepeck's sky too. Before I render the other times of day, @luya is this good?

@duffy I am sorry I am late, but I had to make the world from scratch and I had to generate an Normal/bump map. Well i made the earth but it looks Like Mars to me (XD) with less greenery
I think I can change it later but for the purpose of presentation this might work.
Also @casungo did a great job, his work is also great. For sun rays try adding a volume scatter for god rays effect with density and Anisotropy to low, try tweaking till you find it good.
Anyhow
So here I go
Day

Night

Night with watercolour that was provided by @madelinepeck but I think I need to do change the way i use it because it attracts so much attention, I need to make it little dark I guess . I guess for now this will do.

Hope you like it

@casungo i think that looks good can you do the other times?

Here I go!
Updated blend file here:

Dawn:

Day:

Dusk:

Night:

I tried to make some rays but at the end the results weren't that good because I couldn't find the right settings, sorry to disappoint on that).

@casungo
The update is better. Sightly increase the bottom of the planet nearly third of the height from the image. You will see an improvement.

This is a render from the viewport, does this visual look better?

Ok quick update, I need to go out now, so I rendered them anyways so if you like the visual you will have these ready :thumbsup:

Dawn:

Day:

Dusk:

Night:

If you need to make any adjustments while I'm out, basically take the blender file above and move the camera on the Z axis to 18m

you guys are awesome! i will have a play tonight w gimp and get the finals in the repo. awesome work. do you have ideas on the lights for final?

Sorry I've been MIA here (massive storm took out power and internet for many across my state―power's back, internet is not yet so I'm only temporarily on). These all look great! When are the final (non-beta) due?

My thought for the lights was to have each of the four views increase in the number of lights, adding proportionally to four groupings moving forward through time of the downloads of the fedora releases (see this comment: https://pagure.io/design/issue/687#comment-670355) so by the time we got to the final background via fade you'd have the most lights and they'd slowly fade out and start over again.

I'd been working on a way to paint on the lights using Blender's weight map functionality and particle system (example below with 1200 lights mapped on the globe). The globe doesn't look good at all, but the process could be used to add to the excellent examples in the thread here if we wanted.

This is a render from the viewport, does this visual look better?

Yes, better. After the beta release of Fedora 33, we can widen the arc by moving the viewport from its x and z axis.

OK here's the tweaks I made in Gimp, will try to upload to GitHub now.

DAWN

DAY

DUSK

NIGHT

@luya I have ^ uploaded to the repo now - sorry it took so long I ran everything thru optipng @ -o9.

https://github.com/fedoradesign/backgrounds/tree/f33-backgrounds/default

@duffy No worries. I packaged the background and submitted them for review.
Reviewed package: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1868290
Tarball and SRPM: https://github.com/fedoradesign/backgrounds/releases/tag/v33.0.1

Just a general note of some feedback I saw on a reddit thread about the wallpaper. I commented about the process and indicated I'd post a link to the feedback here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/ihdv5t/fedora_33_default_wallpaper/

@kylerconway wondering if you'd be up for trying the lights workflow you'd worked out on @casungo .blend to see if it works out?

I get the reddit feedback. I do like more abstract compositions too. I'll think about how we can make it a little more abstract.

I wonder could we render the mountains / landscape on the planet in the watercolor style @madelinepeck used for the background? cell shader or smtg like that? 3D experts help me out? :) eg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7N8lyHQbNo

It looks like I'm running into an issue with adding visible lights that track the procedurally-generated landscape (https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/PNfbbc/)

In short, the particle system is there, but it tracks the geometry of the sphere, not the procedurally generated landscape, so all of the lights are on a smooth sphere underneath the generated geometry (and thus invisible). I'm not sure if there's a way to overcome this but the above link does not seem hopeful (though I'm very open if someone knows a way--I do not but will keep looking).

Here it is with Eevee (on a non-displaced globe):

And here with Cycles (1st selected so the particles are "visible", and 2nd as they'd appear under the geometry):

I'll ask around and see if there's a solution, but this method is―other than it's obvious shortcoming here―the simplest method I know for quickly generating thousands of objects onto a surface (so we could mimic the raw number of lights reflecting Fedora releases over time) without placing them by hand.

Also adding the Blender file (and other assets) in case that's helpful.

Following up with a sort of answer I got from someone on reddit: "If you want the particles to follow the displacement, do it via a displacement modifier. Which you can do by baking your material displacement to a UV mapped texture. (And then, be careful about modifier order, maybe "use modifier stack" in particle settings.)"

I've never "baked a material displacement to a UV mapped texture" before, but I'm going to try to look up how to do that and proceed unless there's a reason not to do that that I'm unaware of (please chime in if that's the case).

Quick followup -- this guide video looks like what we want to do. I'll try this tomorrow and then attempt to render the lights for at least one of the views on the surface.

New update -- my session (and/or blender) just crashes when trying to bake the geometry :(

Anyone else want to try?

@mciahdenn ^ around? Do you know of any solutions to this?

This is not the final solution (and not the final version), but these are renders where I've just artificially elevated another sphere with particles above the actual geometry. It's very imperfect, but I'll keep going in the absence of a better or more sensible solution.

Also, perhaps we can do some post-processing with G'MIC to further abstract if we still want to move in that direction. Below is a bad example, but perhaps demonstrative of what we could do. Might be best to render the globe without the background so the background could be unaffected by the post-processing.

@kylerconway do you have an updated .blend for the elevated sphere?

Yes -- Sorry! Attached.

I thought we might break them up roughly evenly as below:

Fedora Release Peak downloads (in thousands) Group
6 63 Dawn
7 53 Dawn
8 108 Dawn
9 61 Dawn
10 70 Dawn
11 80 Dawn
12 82 Dawn
13 80 Day
14 88 Day
15 50 Day
16 55 Day
17 62 Day
18 51 Day
19 43 Day
20 82.5 Dusk
21 83 Dusk
22 100 Dusk
23 110 Dusk
24 107 Dusk
25 150 Dusk
26 120 Night
27 132 Night
28 138 Night
29 139 Night
30 140 Night
31 157 Night
32 117 Night

Which leaves us with the following totals for the four views:

(in thousands) View
517 Dawn
429 Day
632.5 Dusk
943 Night

Here's an output on the one I semi-completed:

And with some g'mic "graphic novel" with a burn blend at 40% opacity.

All of this can be changed by weight-painting the icosphere (to change where the lights are) and adjusting the number of particles (i.e. lights).

@kylerconway do you know how the land / cloud / etc are getting rendered? The new blender UI really is hurting my head lol. I'm trying to modify them but cannot figure out where they are coming from!

Also why does it render to magenta?

Yeah -- Magenta is the "you're missing an asset" color in blender. If you download the *.zip file -- https://pagure.io/design/issue/raw/files/4946aea6d9c196042be1001b340469852b08632ae0585ac1707b2396eb5d8079-F33.zip?raw=1

It has the assets in there and you have to relink them via the shader tool per element (I'm not sure why it's not relative linking. What you're seeing is a magenta cloud element (surrounding the globe) and a magenta background (the wallpaper by madelinepeck).

Here's a really quick image guide to reassociate the correct file (in the below example the clouds):

Also, the land is there, it's just under the magenta clouds (which are partially transparent). So they should show up once you fix the clouds (and the background space/stars).

blender file for @kylerconway

Here's a modification to the Day look with some distant lights and brush-stroked clouds. There's also a 4k export of this I'll upload later.

Working on night view is rendering out glitches for some reason I don't understand yet (below).

@kylerconway the day one is looking a lot better with the clouds - do you know why it has the black spots (one on left one on right)

I figured out the glitching -- it was the compositing 'glare' node. Removing that made it possible to get a clear image, but I'm not confident it works too well without the added glare.

@duffy - I figured out what the orange or the right side of the globe was -- it was the actual land/beaches transitioning to oceans using the modified texture. I've rotated the globe, pulled in the clouds, and I'm running a different render now (will upload when completed).

Also, I'm going to look into something different for lights that may or may not work.

Renders taking a very long time on my machine. Uploading files here.

Updated cloud texture.

Separate blend files -- same assets as before.

maybe we can use a real photo? https://images.theconversation.com/files/306102/original/file-20191210-95111-c94s3k.jpg

Change to clouds.

Change to clouds.

That is a improvement. For the dawn, day and dusk, will be possible to add a subtle glow similar the photo posted by @mythcat ?

Change to clouds.

That is a improvement. For the dawn, day and dusk, will be possible to add a subtle glow similar the photo posted by @mythcat ?

I'll try to figure it out and upload here.

Also playing...

Updated clouds for all views. @duffy indicated she's going to add some other effects.

Zip File with all images attached.

Making progress, here is a preview of dawn

More progress on dawn, having some color profile issues so theyre not accurate to what i wanted but will keep trying to fix

Figured out the color profile thing. Have all 4 completed, running optipng on them right now then will upload here + to git

Here they are optimized, working on getting into git now

@luya https://github.com/fedoradesign/backgrounds/commit/1a382a4efe04a605e751beba625a666e60d92fb1 the images are in the repo now, so sorry for the delay!

Hello guys! Sorry for being pretty absent recently! You all have made a great improvement since I last posted. The final images are stunning and I really like them. I hope to be more present in the creation of the Fedora 34 wallpaper!

he guys, I already mentioned this once, please make smaller versions for the "visual" upload and then put links to the originals. Think on the ppl like me, had to wait 6 minutes for everything to load. Just because I want to make a comment! And after login, the shit starts loading again.

@mythcat just a warning, its possible to set you here on moderation to!

@gnokii: Am I ready to help the fedora design ... new tasks?

@mythcat just a warning, its possible to set you here on moderation to!

Hello :grinning:!

I want to thank the design team for their hard work and for making this beautiful work of art :heart:.

But I just wanted to ask whether the fact that the background isn't aligned in the same way on all of the Artwork "phases" is on purpose? As I noticed that it can produce some weird results when the background changes:

And if it is on purpose, why isn't aligned differently in each of the "phases", but only in two of them?

Anyway, this is definitely one of my favourite Fedora Wallpapers :heart:!

Hi @lyessaadi thanks for your kind comments! The shift was intentional to make the wallpaper more dynamic.