Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 2
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If it's any use to you Jay, mine started off life as clear glass. :cheese:
Ah, that one from the SC times. When I experimented with it at the time, it did not always work. Good to know that it is limited to normal priority. Who found that out, Graham?
Ah, that one from the SC times. When I experimented with it at the time, it did not always work. Good to know that it is limited to normal priority. Who found that out, Graham?
Normal? I thought it was low. I don't know who discovered this detail, but it was through Grahams labour of keeping notes that I found it again in SC.
Thanks - yes, I meant low - and that's what you said in the video.
Well since I've not done anything with her for a while I figured I best get Vicky out for a play...
First image I was tinkering with skin. The most noticeable thing about her face for me is the weird symmetry it has, the skin maps supplied are not correct as far as bump for Bryce and both materials and model are too overly perfect.
I modified the skin material a bit and the cornea - which had inappropriate material settings for Bryce.
Second image, the lighting from the first image applied to the entire model.
I modified the clothing lapels which had inappropriate specular settings for Bryce.
Savage..., yes, tried the glass too (there’s an actual water one in the glass mats), but as I was working with water, I thought I would keep the setup as that.
Below, is the problem I have with the water and the internal refractive/reflective rays. I must have something incorrect, as stated before – e.g. has it got to do with the parallel light used, the settings for it etc. As the ref index of the drop is changed from air (note the ray goes simply through without no effect of refraction as expected) to max it’s obvious there is refraction of the light, but there should also be reflection occurring too at where the refracted light is meeting the interior wall of the droplet (blue A). The ideal situation is given in the last image, which is why we get rainbows, caustics etc. I just thought that we could see the same effects in Bryce droplets.
I don’t know what is happening. The Bryce setup may not be sensitive enough to see all rays, which is waht I think is the casue, else, the initial light physics in Bryce for the mats is wrong, or is using a different method for producing diffraction/reflection effects. But, I doubt that is the case.
David...saw the Easter egg vid...now I am really puzzled. No, not by the vid, but why the term ‘Easter egg’ – emmmm, let me guess, it was discovered at Easter time. No, that can’t be it. No wait, it’s some secret, in-house jokey word you programmers use :) Nah, that's not it either. I also like the skin effects achieved from Vicky, but I think it's the staring eyes that in some of these models that is also giving the illusion of a rendered face, and not a natural one.
Jay
Savage,
nice render!
One thing strikes me about it, though, as well as Jay's......the droplets are too regular, and don't cling at the top, bulge at the bottom
due to surface tension & gravity.
Took a few closeups for examples to show what I mean.......would model some irregular droplets, then position them into the surface of the glass, tile, etc. ......i.e. instead of on the surface. =)
Sorry I can't help with the refraction question, but I can at least answer the Easter Egg question;
Any hidden feature within any software application is called an Easter Egg. This derives from the tradition of hiding Easter eggs for children to find (I think it's mostly an American tradition). Some fine examples of Easter Eggs can be found on Google, for instance, type the word tilt into the search bar and hit enter. ;-)
You are of course correct, but the client isn't paying me enough for such an amount of detail. I'm already not charging them for the three and a half hours it took to render. :-)
David, I realise I don't comment on your contributions too often... it would get very repetitive to keep saying "excellent stuff" all the time. :-)
But needless to say your recent stuff (as always) has been much appreciated and eventually I'll get to play catch up with the latest batch of tutorials too.
Luckily (for me) payed work has gotten in the way of learning new stuff, but hopefully after next week, things will get a bit less hectic here.
I may have to give Daz Studio another try, Poser is very hit and miss when I export people from there and it takes quite a lot of work to get them looking anywhere near right, although the Bridge has it's bugs and quirks, it may help me (by making it a bit easier) to incorporate more people into my renders.
This is strictly a guess but I believe the term easter egg comes from the fact that it's deliberately hidden but waiting to be found much like an Easter Egg in an Easter Egg hunt for kids. It's also not a new thing, various programs have had various "Easter Eggs" for years and years I'm not sure when the practice of hiding "Easter Eggs" in programs started or why though.
Easter eggs, at least in Bryce, are often code parts that were not developed fully and not activated. The particle emitter is also such an Easter egg.
David, I realise I don't comment on your contributions too often... it would get very repetitive to keep saying "excellent stuff" all the time. :-)
But needless to say your recent stuff (as always) has been much appreciated and eventually I'll get to play catch up with the latest batch of tutorials too.
Luckily (for me) payed work has gotten in the way of learning new stuff, but hopefully after next week, things will get a bit less hectic here.
I may have to give Daz Studio another try, Poser is very hit and miss when I export people from there and it takes quite a lot of work to get them looking anywhere near right, although the Bridge has it's bugs and quirks, it may help me (by making it a bit easier) to incorporate more people into my renders.
Thank you Dave, and no I don't expect continual a commentary. I know how it is to be in the fortunate state of having plenty of work on. And when I don't I play catch up. Indeed, this thread marches on faster than I can keep track, because I'm instead working back through my emails (some of which I should have attended to months ago) and "todo" list of ideas for tutorials (which is generally what I focus on first). Seems to me with finally getting to grips with the new lighting and material options in Bryce there is the potential to raise the bar for all Brycers willing to commit a bit more time to their final renders.
And I find the problem solving aspect to the whole process probably the most interesting bit.
Here for example, in answer to a question submitted by Mark Noke to the Bryce-Tutorials.info contact page
Bryce 5 minute problem - how to prevent your boat from getting waterlogged? - by David Brinnen
The final render uses the blurred anisotropic reflection effect and a bit of IBL driven TA. Those are not fireflies in the boat by the way, they are supposed to be knots in the wood...
By it's simplicity I think this render shows off the benefit of getting the lighting and materials right. There is nothing to this scene, a terrain, an infinite plane and a simple boat model (with cutter), yet I think it looks nice.
The cutter-video is really good. Short and to the point. I was never in this situation but it is good to know that there is a simple and straightforward way to do it.
Still in the ‘drop’ area: below, another finalised work.
The ripple-like effects were produced by simply creating a bump map of circles (below the main image). Forgive the over-abundance of drops' interest; it's probably 'off-topic' in this 'Show us your renders' thread.
Jay
Oh I like that! And I think this is just the kind of thing to put in this thread. My only criticism is that there is some pixelisation on the circles. Maybe it would be possible to achieve this procedurally and avoid this issue... I will give that a test.
Edit: BTW, that's a nice looking tree, how did you make it?
This was a challenge issued by others on another site I visit. They also asked for something more, which I've yet to create. But this jack-o-lantern and the other two will be used in the final image. Again, this one isn't fancy, just something made using Wings.
Jamie, you are not the only one to be playing with Wings this evening. Nice work on the pumpkin(s). Can loose a lot of time just mucking around in winds.
Also... here's a go at doing procedural drips effects in water... The main issue being it is hard to get the drops to overlap and when they do... things can go wrong.
@David: Thanks. Yeah, it does take me lots of time to figure out how to get something done in Wings. If I muck around more maybe less time will be needed. Love the cube, by the way. I've got to go back, again, and watch the cube making tutorial.
It's probably not available anymore but Daz used to have a product that would be just perfect for working with that tutorial, it was product sku ps_af001 which meant it was for Poser of course, but Poser can export in a format Bryce can work with so no big deal. Anyway it was called Ultimate Morphing Hi-Res Millennium Cube. I have a copy and would gladly give you a copy except I can't, you know, copyrights law and stuff. :)
Megacal...lovely images of drops. The occurrence and shape of final drops, I feel, may also depend on their initial 'landing-upon' a surface; yes, overly complicated.
Have tried to create a realistic drop on a surface with 'menicus', too; like one sees on the legs of a water beatle where you get an added, tiny attachement of water between the water surface itself and the leg - using the metalball thingy (love that word, 'thingy' - it gets one out of so much explanation :) ) in Bryce is required. Realistic drops, for this user anyway, are proving hard to produce.
David...many thanks. Yes, the tree was got from the 'Create/Special trees/Special maple' apps section in Bryce. I like when such trees are un-groupable, as they allow for further manipulation in how many leafs, branches you want to include in a scene.
On the ripples, I used Photoshop Elements 2.0 to create the circles in the bump map, however, as it only allows increments of 1's in the thin-ness of lines, 1 was the least achievable I could go (users of the real Photoshop 'ware, I presume, can go down to smaller values). I suspect, too, that bit quality (8 versus 16) might have advantages in creating such ripple bump maps at a finer level - thus avoiding the steps seen in mine, which is an 8-bit bump.
Jay
No shame, and on a public forum as well :-P
Freudian slit?
:mrgreen:
You must have eyes like a Sh*thouse Rat to spot a typo like that :-D
But it's good to know ye'ole'organic spell-checker is in good form!
PS: Can a mod please remove the duplicate I just accidentally posted, I don't know how that happened!
And yes, I noticed your Freudian as well, perv :mrgreen:
Hi Jay,
glad you liked the pics....not best lighting, but hope it helped.
Here's thought, haven't tried it, but what about creating an irregular mesh in another app, e.g. Carrara or Wings, then import it to Bryce
and just "plug" it into the side of the object the droplet is clinging to?
Or in Bryce, take a sphere, make it more of an egg shape, do some boolean cut outs, scale it down, and use it as a droplet(?)
For a flat surface like Savage's tile, in Bryce, create a plane and use a bump map like you did for the ripples, only use something that would create irregular little smoothed mini-terrains......then place it below the surface so just the peaks were showing......vs creating
and placing a bunch of individual droplets......though that would be necessary for a curved or irregular surface.
May not work in the case of a transparent glass, but should on opaque surfaces. :)
Actually there is a simple raindrops (well the ripple caused by them) solution that I think is either built into Bryce or maybe is included in one of the free content packages. It's in a material library titled calm waters and is named raindrops, the author is record as Daz3D which is why I think it's included in Bryce or comes in a content package. I'm fairly certain I've seen this material even before Bryce 7. Below is first a picture of where it's at in the materials library, second is it's material lab settings. The third picture is a simple scene with a brick texture applied to the default ground plane called Brick2 (I just wanted something to be seen beneath the water). I then created a surface water plane just slightly above it zoomed in somewhat and angled the camera looking downward and applied the raindrop texture. In the third image the material is as it is set in the library. I felt the bump effect seemed a little too strong though so the forth image is with the bump reduced from 7 to 3.5. Not a bad effect except that the ripples seem a little too perfect.
Well, a Freudian would cause a slip of the fingers to make a "typo", whereas I was quite deliberately getting mixed up with the music video thread. ;-)
http://www.freudianslit.com
(work safe)
Cal...yes, some very good suggestions. Did, at one time, have my bump just below a calm-like Bryce water plane, and then increased the bump to peak through, but the quality of my bump is poor, as recently stated above. I would like to stay in one ‘ware, that is Bryce, to do these works, but it isn’t always possible, I’m finding.
Lord...didn’t know about the raindrop mat in Bryce..very handy to know - could easy get away in using this mat, generally, but, again, I’m a stickler for realism (well, to an achievable point using just Bryce). As you observed in your own experiment – “the ripples are too perfect” – aren’t they, and appear not to be adapting to real-time, physical effects. Several pictures of ripples, rain, drops...etc., I gleaned (I would publish them here, but didn't take the credits of the photographers) from the network, show cancellation effects between separate ripple events (as expected), and so you get a variety of resultant ripple effects that don’t look like those others unaffected. So, creating the bump gave me more control as to the effects I wanted.
Jay
PS. I think I should have initially posted this whole ‘drop’ stuff/work in a separate thread, as I feel it’s a distraction to this ‘show us your renders’ thread - apologies to those, then, bored by this. Stopping now..well, at my end anyway ;) But extremely thankful to all who offered advice, help and interest.