Noob bryce question:
Serene Night
Posts: 17,559
I am an utter novice, and I bougth http://www.daz3d.com/shop/majestic-mountains , because I want to make some quick background renders for some scenes I'm doing, and wanted to make a few winter scene.
It includes 4 scenes, which I figured I might use.
One scene, the primary scene that has the mountains, renders with a strange 'striped' texture on two of the center mountains.
I am honestly not sure how to fix the problem, short of taking the renders in photoshop and er... painting it out.
Can anyone offer any advice? The product picture doesn't have mountains render this way, so I assume it is my error of some kind.
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Actually it does show up in the promos as well if you look closely. This is a very old pack, it was made for Bryce 5, which is before DAZ 3D bought Bryce.
Image 1 - Dunno... looks to me like the picture does show this, but that's beside the point really.
Image 2 - E to edit the selected terrain.
Image 3 - Take a look at the resolution, 512 is a reasonable resolution.
Image 4 - Try using smoothing, press once, exit, render and see if things are better. If not try another smooth.
Image 5 - Check that the Solid and Smooth options are checked.
Edit, since you mention being an utter novice, then I should point you in the direction of http://www.bryce-tutorials.info/
EDIT:
Thanks to your advice David! Smoothing fxed the striped mountain, and I appreciate the help.
I hadn't noticed the striped mountains on my computer screen in the promo art, until I enlarged the picture.
Anyway, its all good.
Thank you, and I will review the tutorial.
Actually it's not your fault, I too have that product and that scene rendered for me the same way and all I did was load it and told it to render. So all settings where what the creator/Vendor Estevez put into it. My guess is it was created for an earlier version of Bryce and when done in Bryce 7 renders differently because something is now working differently then the version it was created for?
Interesting, I too followed your advice David but I followed it in two parts. First I went thru and looked at the resolution of the various terrains used to make the mountains. Many were set at 512 - Ultra fine but all of the ones with the stripping effect I found were set at 1024 - massive resolution so I set them at 512 - ultra fine. At a casual glance this mostly corrected the problem but upon closer examination you could see there were still unwanted lines in some of the mountains. So then I did the second part and went thru and hit smoothing once on the terrains that were previously at massive resolution, this did mostly get rid of any unwanted lines that were lingering but in my opinion it made some parts of the scene look unrealistic. Below are examples of my results. The first image is the scene as it comes out of the installer with no changes. The second image shows how it looked after I reduced the terrains that were 1024 - massive resolution to 512 - Ultra fine. The Third image is after I went back and did the smoothing.
LordHardDriven: thanks for the thoughtful analysis. I found it very useful, and will test that in my version. =-)
I like the look of the mountains, and recently saw a product at rendo which used this very set in the backdrop behind moongate, so while it is an older set, I do rather like the look of it.
No problem and for what it's worth I'm still playing around with it because if it was made for Bryce 5 as Chohole stated then there are lots of features for improving a scene in Bryce 7 that weren't in Bryce 5. One thing I noticed right off the bat which could be changed is that the creator has the scene set with Gamma Correction which kind of gives it a somewhat washed out look. With Gamma correction turn off the colors are alot more bold and rich. I'd show you accept I though I'd also see what using the True Ambience feature in Bryce 7 (one of the new features not found in Bryce 5). Unfortunately rendering with True Ambience greatly increases render times and so the image won't be done for a few hours. I'll post it here when I'm done.
I can't wait to see what you come up with. =-) I like this scene, and have seen what others have done with it. I have to open the files and save them so they render properly. Now I have to locate some different trees to add some variety.
Well it's nothing special, I didn't change the scene itself just the way it rendered and all I did was remove gamma correction and told it to use True Ambience. Removing the gamma correction made the biggest difference in that it made the colors look better. True Ambience usually takes more work then just enabling it to get it to really improve the look of a scene but I didn't have the time so I just enabled it and hoped I'd get lucky. I'd say I didn't though because near as I can tell, all True Ambience did was change the render time from a few minutes to around 13 hours. Anyway below is the result. The first pic is the scene as it was with no changes. The second pic is the scene after changing the resolution of the terrains that had the stripes and with gamma correction off and True Ambience on.
The issue is that the original scene does not seem to have many - if any shadow regions - the area in which TA (true ambience) tends to visibly take effect. This could be for any of several reasons.
Due to the limitations of older less powerful computers and Bryce 5 - which was designed to work with less powerful machines.
Materials tended to incorporate an ambient response. This is governed globally by the ambient colour. Image 1 smaller arrow on the left. To detect if this is the case, make this colour something obvious like bright red and notice if anything in your scene changes to being reddish. To negate this effect, either modify all the materials... or just set this colour to black.
Another old style trick was to add sky dome colour - larger right arrow. This acts as a non-shadow casting light pointing from directly above.
And then in the sky lab - Image 2 - if shadow intensity is not set at 100% then light passes through objects as well as casting shadows - dramatically increasing render times for TA as well as negating the effect.
It is also possibly that none shadow casting fill lights were introduced also. But as a rule of thumb, consider that if your scene does not start out with visible shadow regions, it is unlikely to visibly benefit from using TA. But it will take a long time to render.
If you wish to upgrade an old scene to new lighting...
Bryce 20 minute lighting project - upgrading lighting - a tutorial by David Brinnen
I know, I know, I should have looked at that tutorial first but I was going to be busy for a while and so it didn't matter that the render would take 13 hours so I just thought I'd give it a shot. I did figure there were shaded areas in the valleys of the mountains and perhaps there were and TA helped because if you look closely around the highest peaks left of center there is an area where more detail is revealled then in the original although I'm not sure if that's from TA or from removing gamma correction. Actually after just taking another look I do see quite a bit of differences in areas that were shaded due to the countour of the mountains although I'm still uncertain what brought those changes on.
I would say there is a good chance that was the work of TA, turning off Gamma correction generally increases contrast in a scene and in doing so reduces visible information in shadow regions.