Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 3
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Of course you may - see attached image.
Yes TLBKlaus, Octane is impressive, but performance is down to graphics card alone and so long as your MB can talk to a nvidia card that has cuda on board that's the end of the matter.
Mr Silus, thank you, yes what I am most interested in establishing right off the bat is how difficult it is to export scenes to Octane from Bryce and then establish them - test 2 - which is cooking right now, I've discovered another thing to make life easier. But it will be a while - an hour - before Octane has done calculating.
Curious minds want to know why Octane, not only does one need a specific make of graphic card, but also it is somewhat expensive.
Luxrender is also unbiased and very much cheaper (think open source)
Thanks David
I asked myself, what happend if you would use a Maximum Ray Depth of 12 and TIR of 5 for example. I think, this could make the glass thingie (octaeder) looking a bit more like octane. Of course render times goes up.
I've looked at Luxrender and Octane and goodness knows how many other renders, if you want to take price out of the equation, and you have the patience to make DS to talk properly to Bryce because as far as I can tell, there's very little to choose between Bryce and Luxrender if you do things right (but without SSS, either way, as short as it is long). Octane however, for the quality of the light and the material capabilities, it is in another league entirely. A step forwards rather than a step sideways, if you see what I mean?
Edit. Hopefully, in a years time when I know how to use Octane properly, you will see what I mean. Remember, I've only produced one finished render so far in Octane, you can't expect me to know what I'm doing from the off!
electro-elvis, hmn... the problem is that there is not sufficient control over the TA render engine to coax the feelers into finding the caustic area's. And the render time, as you say, rises horribly. TIR higher than 2? Didn't seem to make much difference either. I went as far as 6 for max ray depth but beyond that there was no discernible difference.
Edit. Edit. Here's another quick Bryce scene port - lenses in the glasses don't look right, have I mentioned Octane has a lot of material options?
Bryce first, then Octane - no the other way around... sorry.
@bullit: Thank you. I was going for a sunrise/sunset--the viewer can pick--look. With the clouds I chose it appears either one to me.
@Horo: Thanks.
@Mr Silus: Adjusting the FOV is something I did work on. Too wide and there was more water than I wanted, too small and most of the foreground mountain was cut out. So I settled on what you saw and changed the title. :lol: Last Ones Standing is the image of the last mountains visible as the area is flooded to create a reservoir.
@David: In your first Bryce image I see a wall with baseboard behind the two object. In the Octane image I don't. Is this because of the difference between the two programs or done on porpoise? I like the look of the glass top in the first because it looks like glass. In the second image what its made of is questionable. Lighting gives each image a different atmosphere, which is nice in its own way. The one glaring difference between the two programs are the glasses, the left lens to be exact. Octane allows the bottom edge of the wall tile to be seen through the lens, something which doesn't happen in the Bryce image. Still, both are very nice images.
I Googled Luxrender to see what Pam was referring to, and saw it was a render engine plug-in that can be used with several programs. Luxrender itself is free, but may cost in order to use it with some programs; DS Studio being one. I didn't see that it could be used with Bryce, but that may have been my oversight. When I use Blender I use Blender's GPU render engine, which is faster on my computer than CPU rendering, something that would be nice to have for Bryce.
You've got a good eye Jamie, the difference is due to Bryce's "iffy" mesh smoothing method, it's not right and this is particularly shown up when curvature filtering is used.
@David: That one aspect shouted at me like a sore thumb. Did you use the same general light settings for both images? The top image looks bright and cheery while the second image looks somber? Would I could afford Octane I'd give it a try.
@David - great examples. As I've mentioned, I've found interesting differences in Bryce renders using TA, Obscure and pure IBL. I managed to acquire an HDRI in a controlled environment and made photographs of a scene in this real light, which I will remake in Bryce so that the true lighting can be compared. I will then attempt to redo this for the Octane render engine, though my video card is slow.
@MrSilus - I'm not sure I can agree with the notion that a GPU is more efficient than a CPU. To get a comparable speed, one would have to compare the price of the chips as well.
As of yet, I don't have that much control over Octane, I'm just experimenting and seeing what happens. Most important to me at the moment is finding the best way to export my scenes from Bryce. The useful thing is that Bryce is very strong in areas where the Octane standalone seems weak. Using this has already impressed upon me just how good Bryce is where it is strong. HDRI handling and the material synthesis are more flexible - in some respects - in Bryce.
Am pleased that David's computer woes are mostly over, but it seems he's got himself infected with the dreaded Octane virus. Very difficult to completely eliminate that one.
With both comparisons my preference is somewhere in the middle. I can see why people like the Octane version of the underwater-themed pottery image - it's very "impressive". There's even a "buy her diamonds" sparkle off one of the highlights. Aww, luverly.
But the image driving the HDRI looks to be (primarily) several overhead neon strip lights. I work under those every day, and Bryce is giving the more realistic representation of that even and dull experience. The Octane render looks more like a little studio flash setup, with three major light sources with fairly hard shadows and specular highlights / reflections. Very nice looking but...
Perhaps, in a Bryce re-run, if the HDRI image was mapped to a sphere sized only slightly larger than the scene and with obscure-light illumination properties, there would be a closer match?
So my most frustrating Bryce project, ended in tragedy....
The project was simple enough. Use the instance lab to populate a terrain with vegetation and create a very stereotypical island landscape in Bryce. I never liked using just materials with the look of vegetation to simulate it. I wanted actual trees, bushes, grass and rocks spread out on a terrain like it happens in real life.
I used the Instance Lab before and although nothing as ambitious as this (in the quantity of things I wanted to instance), it always proved to be very slow to work in Bryce (when it didn't crash). Bryce gets insanely slow with a lot of instances in the scene, even if the memory footprint is small and saving scenes with lots of instances takes ages...so I gave up, because I just had no patience to wait several seconds just to move an object in a scene with many instances or minutes to save a scene.
Recently I got back to it with the will to be patient. And the results were much more than frustrating. Not only did Bryce crash 8 out of 10 times using Instance Lab, which meant I had to redo everything I did after the last save, but I also ended up losing the project entirely, because Bryce can no longer load it...
I kept saving the project every time I made an addition to the instances on the terrain, because I knew Bryce could crash at any time. It reached a point where saving the project took about 10-15 minutes (no kidding) and I only knew that Bryce was doing something, because I had Task Manager open and saw that its memory usage was rising.
So I closed Bryce after saving the project (without any error) and when I got back to it later on, Bryce could no longer load the scene with an error message first and then a crash...
Below you can see what I was able to render the last time I saved the project. It's in no way finished as you can see, but I can't do anything with it anymore, since the project file is corrupted to a point where Bryce gives these error messages.
So this huge post (and I'm sorry for the rant) serves to show my frustration to a piece of software that I love, which is a lot of fun to use like no other piece of software I've used (and I develop software for a living...) and is marketed as mostly a landscaper, but fails to deliver on what's expected from landscapers at this point in time. I've used the EcoSystem feature in one of the more recent Vue versions and it's easy as pie to populate a terrain with vegetation. Loading the plants and trees is slow, but populating the terrain is lightning fast and when applied, the instances don't make Vue slow to a crawl.
Honestly, Bryce misses a lot of features found in newer applications, but I would already be happy if at least the ones it already has, worked properly.
Again sorry for the rant, but it was too frustrating and I just had to share it.
A sad loss, MrSilus. In this kind of circumstance, "Save As" is your friend.
If I recall correctly, the Vue instancing system is render based as opposed to object based. I think the multiples appear as a render effect (maybe with some clever slight variations) but don't exist as zillions of individual poly based objects. Bryce is still just duplicating poly based objects and so eats the RAM. Not ready for prime time.
@_ PJF _
I did save another project with the same scene. It just doesn't have any instances, just water, terrain, sky, clouds and light rays .
Doing all those instances was really time consuming and frustrating, due to all the crashes in a span of a few days that I worked on the scene. I would need to go through everything again, in order to replicate what you see in that image and I'd rather forget about Instancing Lab at this point. It's not just buggy. It's broken.
Edit: as for Vue, you're right. The instances appear not as zillion polygons, but as what can be seen in the image below
MrSilus, harsh experience taught me a long time ago that when working with Bryce (and, to be fair, other programs) it pays to incrementally "Save As" separate file names whilst developing a project. Constantly adding to a scene and saving over previous work is asking for trouble.
This regime consumes more hard disk space, for sure, but it does prevent total loss. I've even been able to rescue useful partial scenes where the final effort has been lost to oblivion due to hardware failure (and my poor backup discipline).
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that everyone, and everything, is not out to get you. This even applies to the forum post system. Copy to clipboard (at least) before pressing "submit post", or be prepared to kiss that essay / rant goodbye.
For anyone interested it brick buildings / objects / backgrounds etc.
Check out this little Free app from Acme Brick.
It lets you choose from assorted brick styles, build a wall and save
the result as a BMP, JPG, TGA or TIF image which you can then
use in Bryce's Terrain editor or Mat lab. It also lets you click individual
bricks in the wall to re-arrange the pattern.
You probably wouldn't be allowed to use the images in commercial renders
without permission but may be for your own use it may be useful.
It's only 1.4 Meg in size.
It can be found here:
Mr Silus... Oh dear, sorry to hear about your loss.
I've been using the IL quite a bit recently. It does crash if you ask too much of it in one chunk, but there are things you can do to minimise it and ways to speed up Bryce after instancing.
There are several extremely well written and highly detailed threads about the Instance Lab further down the forum, written by Peter. Reading those will help to maximise the IL and minimise it's quirks.
My tips are to only use the 'Default Wireframe' viewport option, don't use the Open GL options below (they will slow viewing, moving etc.) unless your scene is simple enough to be able to move stuff around without slowing Bryce down to a frustrating crawl.
And directly after instancing, select your instances and go to Attributes and click the "show as box' option. This will drastically improve your viewport speed as Bryce doesn't have to draw any mesh details, though obviously it makes judging your scene more difficult, but you can easily switch between 'view as box' and regular view by unchecking that option after you've finished rotating or moving the camera or moving objects.
As for you not being able load your scene and the screen grabs of the error windows... I'd have to ask if you have two versions of Bryce installed on your computer?
I ask because the most common reason for opening a Bryce document and getting the "there is an object missing" message is because the document was created in the latest version of Bryce (Version 7.1.0.109) but being opened in the version one before that (Version 7.0.1.34).
It's worth double checking that for what ever reason Bryce isn't trying to open the document with an older version. That may solve your problem and you may get your document back.
Because I've yet to win the lottery, I downloaded the demo version of Octane just to see what the program was about. I decided to see what an object I made in Wings looked like rendered with this demo, and was pleasantly surprised. Hopefully this will be the first image. Nothing was done to the object, it was imported as a mesh, which it is, and what you see is due to default settings.
The second image, I hope it's the second image, was done in Bryce. Defuse was set to white, used TA and the sun to get a reasonable light. Rendered at 64 RPP and 4 MRD. Since I didn't change settings in the Octane demo I didn't so anything more than I just mentioned.
There are some limitations to the demo version, one being nothing can be saved or exported. So the hopefully first image may look a bit strange since its a cropped image of a Print Screen copy done in GIMP.
I do see a difference between the two images, which I think might be my limited in depth experience with Bryce, which might be why the image rendered in Bryce doesn't look a nice as it could. Given that, the first image looks a lot smoother, having a more polished look. But decide for yourselves.
Silus,
Very sorry to read of your troubles. Without knowing your exact workflow I'm going to toss out a couple of known means of crashing Bryce when using instances.
1. When working with terrains, be careful with clipping. I find clipping very useful, I apply it before I paint instances to prevent painting plants into areas where there should only be water. As you well know when you complete your painting session and exit the IL you will be presented with a grouped object often called Unnamed. This Unnamed is linked to the terrain. It is important to ungroup the unnamed and regroup it before you go back into the terrain lab and undo the clipping. For some reason failing to unlink unnamed from the source terrain before again altering the clipping will crash Bryce outright.
2. Deleting instances is where a lot of people "break" their instancing sessions. Here is what I can tell you.
A. Dont even bother trying to use the Eraser brush within the IL, it is not reliable. Using this brush will almost always cause Bryce to crash outright. No worries, it isnt really all that detrimental to delete the unwanted instances in a safer manner
B. The only way to safely delete instances, is to allow the IL to go ahead and create any instance it has drawn. To do this you must exit the IL, allow the wireframe to update, and then remove the unwanted instances from the wireframe view. Never try to delete instances from within the IL itself.
3. Dave Savage is correct again as always. To further speed scene navigation, turn your source into a show as box before you start painting it. This way when you exit the instance lab your resultant instances are born as show as box.
4. Dave is also wise in his advice not to try to do too much in one session.
5. On the issue of deleting instances, make sure you do not accidentally delete a source. Doing so will defy the internal logic of the scene and it will become corrupt. For example, most of the time if an object has been instanced and you seek to delete it, a dialogue will pop up asking if you want to delete the source alone or the instances as well. At first this seems like an unnecessary question but it has a purpose. This is revealed at those times when the flagging fails, and one accidentally deletes a source object that they are unaware was instanced within the scene. If you so somehow delete the source the current session you are in will continue more or less unaffected. If however, you you close and reopen such a scene there will be a missing object flag and the scene will be unable to open. This sounds similar to your current problem.
Internal logic problems are found in other areas as well. I have found that sometimes the Materials mirroring of sources and their child instances can often break, such that changes made to the source material do not affect the instances. I must go back and apply the material separately to the instance group, at which time Bryce seems to treat each individual instance as a true object as it takes a long time and can use over a gb of ram to update a complex group.
Memory. I cannot stress enough how careful we must be about memory. Ideally, for every 10 mb of ram used while painting instances, it will expand the true memory footprint of your scene by about 70mb!!! So imagine that you are painting and you have the task manager open and you can see that you most recent brush stroke raised the memory by about 3mb. Doesn't seem to expensive does it? In fact you have been painting for several minutes now and have painted about 40mb of instances during this session. Lets for randomness sake say that your total page file usage after ending the painting session but before closing Bryce and reopening is around 1gb at this point. When you close and reopen the scene you find that it uses much more than 1gb, but closer to 1.3gb. I'm not sure if this is some sort of memory leak, or perhaps just a more accurate representation of the true memory consumed by instances, not sure. But it is really easy to hit to 2gb mark and not even know it, thinking you are still hundreds of mb below the threshold.
By the way, that scene you were working on looks FANTASTIC!!!! Seriously, amazing!
Best of luck!
Alright I re-did the last image using everyones helpful suggestions and I think it came out better this time...I did add a fireplace.....so is it better??? Trish
Yes thank you, my computer woes are almost over - much like my car or my heating system, I know how to fix a lot of things, but I don't like to think that I might inadvertently break something I can't fix - there is always that concern that I know enough to get me into trouble but not quite enough to get me out of it again.
My "infection" as you put it is down to a few factors which I am happy to share with you.
1. Octane has SSS - that's a deal breaker.
2. I can run Bryce and Octane renders side by side without either taking a noticeable performance hit - which appeals to my inner geek.
3. Path finding looks a lot like TA, at least so far, but Octane offers more control over the Kernel - in the event that DAZ 3D decide to look at any further Bryce development and they ask my opinion, I want it to be a better informed opinion about what is - "out there".
Also was cheaper than Cinema 4D which I've been admiring (and not being able to afford) for years - but I don't want to argue cost is the be all and end all, instead I prefer to think in terms of value. I'd rather pay a little more for something than waste time and money on cheap tools only to have to get a better tool later on when I discover the limitation of my initial choice.
What have I learned so far... well, only that different light - is really different light. Where Bryce is strong, it's hard to setup Octane to beat it (at least for a noob like me) where Octane is strong, even for someone as familiar with Bryce as I am, I can't figure a way to get the same quality of light - which like it or not, that's not the point, it's just about getting the renderer to do what you want. I hope that over time, as my understanding grows, I'll be able to get Bryce like rendering out of Octane and that that in turn will lead to a better appreciation of what is really going on.
Thanks for the suggestion, I will investigate how large the obscure light sphere was. I usually try to get it just out of shot so it's still close enough to offer a light bias. The other thing I tried as IBL direct + TA - this looked slightly more promising but the render time even at lowered RPP was... substantial.
@_ PJF _
You're right! Backups are extremely important and I try to do them often. But the main problem wasn't that I didn't save the scene. I did save it. It took 10-15 minutes but Bryce finished the saving process and showed me absolutely no errors. But when I tried to open the project again, it always gives me that error of "an object is missing" and after pressing "ok", it crashes...:(
I can only assume that there's a bug in either saving or opening scenes with lots of instances.
@TheSavage64
Thanks! For now I'll avoid using the instancing Lab, because my next project doesn't require it. But this was a scene that really needed it...working that is.
Thanks for the tips regarding viewports. I noticed that Bryce does that (showing every object as a simple box) when moving objects in a scene such as this (with lots of instances), Whn releasing the mouse after moving what we want to move, it gets back to the default viewport.
As for the version of Bryce and if I have more than one installed, I don't. It's just .109, where this scene started to be created and also saved in. As I mentioned above, I think there might be a bug when saving scenes with lots of instances (which corrupts the file, even if it shows no error) or a bug while opening scenes with many instances.
@Rashad Carter
Thanks! I don't remember deleting any of the source trees (they were just two at that point, one palm tree and another type of tree). I just kept them "hidden" after instancing them. Still those are the errors I get when trying to open the project again, which of course makes it useless now.
I did use the delete brush once or twice, but as you said, it was not reliable (in my case 100¬ realiable) since Bryce crashed every time I used it. So afterwards my approach was to instance objects, get out of IL and render to check the results. If ok, save the project. If not, select the group of instanced objects, delete and start over. It was painful to do this for a few days, because Bryce crashed more often than not in IL.
As for memory, and as I mentioned, I tracked the memory footprint quite a bit, since I always had the Task Manager open. And I didn't seem to be overdoing it. The most memory I saw consumed by Bryce when working on this scene (after instancing), was just over of 500 MBs which isn't much...at least when compared to other scenes that didn't even use instances.
As for the unfinished render of that scene, thanks! It has lots of imperfections (like trees that seem to be flying), but since I can't open it anymore I can't fix those problems. I'll just reuse the clouds and light rays in another scene :)
Anyway, thanks for all the advices and sorry for derailing the thread a bit. But it ended up also being a way to show my stance on Bryce development. It does need new features to stay competitive, but I would be glad to just see it have fixes and improvements to the features it already has. The instancing lab being a glaring one. As I said before, I don't find it buggy, it's more than that...I find it fundamentally broken.
@bullit35744 Much better! And the fireplace fits the mood and context of the scene perfectly :)
@GussNemo Looking good for the first try. Octane seems awesome, and although I haven't tried it myself, I saw tutorials of it and the interface's learning curve seems to be a bit high. But maybe I'm wrong and when I start using it I might change my initial thoughts about it. Still I'll need to win the lottery as you said, to use it in it's full potential :)
@David As always great scenes and photo realistic at that, in both Bryce and Octane. It's harder to compare both in this scene, because the lighting conditions are so different, but the Octane one just seems so much more life like. It's truly amazing. It's just so expensive :(
@StuartB4 Thanks! I don't have a "building" scene planned for now, but It's always nice to know about tools that might make my life easier when I do create such a scene :)
Yeah, you don't need to tell me how expensive it is! I've been coveting since we finished the Bryce 7 development cycle... Time over cost though, rendering is still a good value hobby. My last holiday was in 2003 - and what I've spent on Octane wouldn't get me very far and I'd have less to show for it. So I'm not regretting my choice.
Bryce is more flexible, nicer to use and less expensive, but Octane offers different and largely complimentary strengths... Here are some more renders. I'll let your eyes tell you what to think, you don't really need me to do that!
I was sorry to read about your scene trauma's but having read all the replies I could see you'd already had all the best advice going. Another of Bryce's strengths is the attitude of it's community - that's real value add for any product - a point worth driving home with DAZ 3D at every opportunity I reckon! (where are our galleries - *mutter grumble mutter* - new website?).
@MrSilus - I'm sorry to hear about your frustrating experiences. You've been given good advaice already by Dave (TheSavage) and Rashad.
The IL tutorials _PJF_ refers to are available as PDF on my website (see sig). Go to Bryce Documents > Guests > Objects. There is also Rashad's tutorial, which should be consulted first. I assembled the PDFs from the original tutorials on this forum and publish them with the authors permission.
A word to memory: Bryce does everything in memory. The file saved is compressed. But this compression also happens in memory! This means that if your scene has used up most of the memory, saving finally overruns the remaining bit and Bryce either crashes or saves a corrupt file. Once the scene is converted to a file and compressed, it is written to disk and the memory released.
You cannot judge the size of your scene by the site of the file. The only way is to watch the Task Monitor as Rashad suggests.
@Trish - oh yes, it's much better. The fire can do with a bit zweaking, the flames are a bit round and then - if you have the patience to wait - use soft shadows. Nevertheless, the mood has hugely improved.
@David - in both cases, I prefer the Bryce render. However, this may be unjust because the materials and the light differs too much.
Good, I'm glad you said that, my intention here was to play to Bryce's strengths! There are some details which interest me. But since these are only renders 3 and 4. I don't know enough to know what I'm looking at.
The knives look great...both of them. I like the first one better, but aside from the models, they are too different to make a proper comparison.
Indeed! This community is no doubt one of the best I've been in. Every single person in these threads is definitely one of the reason I keep coming back. Kudos to everyone for being so nice and providing insight/suggestions that will help improve our work. This hobby is a very "solitary" one for the most part, so it's great to be able to share and improve with a community willing to do the same.
Plus, people like you, Horo, Rashad and everyone else that, despite the fact that Bryce development is stalled which makes it lose some of its appeal, continue to show us what the "old" Bryce can do, in tutorials and such!
@Horo Thanks! It's already bookmarked :)
I'm guessing that that's what happened, since I really did not get any error message. Bryce just saved the file, gave absolutely no error and when loading the scene again later on, it showed the "missing object" error and then proceeded to crash.
Well last night (early this morning here), the discussion about the Instancing Lab inspired me to this render.
It contains 160(ish) instanced trees of three different types, over 300 instanced red flowers and about 200 instanced rocks.
The scene took about an hour to set up and just over 2 hours to render.
I'm just doing an alternative version at slightly higher quality (144RPP) at a slightly different camera angle and with another 300 red flowers added. I'm being told just over 5 hours until it's complete.
@MrSilus, I feel your pain. Despite it's numerous good qualities, Bryce is not as stable as we would all like, and hitting memory limits can be a problem as well and give the illusion of additional instability. Wish I could help.
I would suggest doing your work in little steps, saving each time as you are already doing, and always keeping a copy of the last known good version. (and by "last known good version", I mean a file that you open, render to completetion, save, and open without errors again.) That way, when something goes wrong, you'll only loose a little bit of work instead of a lot of work. It's not the preferred way to work on a project of course, but it's far prefereable to the alternative of loosing a huge project.