Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 3
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That's a very nice island, Dave. I missed some ladies on the beach but the weather is not inviting for a sun bath.
Mr. Silus; you probably already know this but have you tried using" large address aware" it helped me David has a video about it on you tube.
Savage ; really nice island
Can we have a talk about the instanceing (spelling) lab and what it can and can not do as far as creation...Could I use it to make better looking fire for example...ect ....Trish
The Instancing lab basically allows you to create multiple copies of one object (or group of objects) placed on the surface of another object. For example you could create one tree, select a terrain, and (if your computer can handle it) create a hundred instances of the tree placed roughly upon that terrain without having to manually arrange them.
Of course, there are additional details, but that's the basic idea. How did you intend to try to use it for fire?
Sean; I guess since you explained what it does fire would not be good......Trish P.S. trying to make my fire place look better spheres are not cutting it....so I tried triangles this is it so far WIP......
@bullitt-- try rocks perhaps, they make better irregular shapes for fire in my experience...
Hello again all... I've just gotten the Ivy Generator off of Horo's site [many thanks] and am looking forward to giving it a try.
Here are some more scenes, this time from the Floating City series. The buildings are largely from the inestimable Dystopia city blocks collection, with some of my own creations mixed in. I've been periodically adding new designs over the years, though the poly numbers and memory are right at the edge of what my old machine can handle lol.
...and a few more. :D
Bullit, the problem with using volumetric materials on overlapping objects is that where they intersect or overlap. You'll always get a bad join effect. The trick with fire is to use a single sphere (or sometimes a stone works better because of it's more irregular shape) and then to edit the material to get the flames to look natural. When that's done, you can build your logs or whatever around the flames.
Alternatively, you can watch this video tutorial from David for another approach to setting up a fire effect.
In other news, the alternative render I was doing of the Island got to about 4 hours in before I decided it wasn't looking right so I cancelled it and mucked about with it some more. Taking Horo's comment on board, I added people. Sorry it's not just girls sunbathing, but I already had this couple ready to go.
OMG those are superb!! Love the renders from the second set as well. ;-)
@Mr Silus: I've not a scene as elaborate as your first one go down the tubes, which by the way looks awesome, but I have had the "sorry but I've just crashed" box show up a time or two. Do hope you can finish your image, I'd like to see the final results. As to my first try with the Octane demo, that's probably all I'm going to do with it. I did it just to satisfy my curiosity. Not being able to save or export kills using the demo program.
@David: Nice looking images. I think I'm partial to the first image due to the ridges of dried mastic(?) on the floor. Those ridges give the image a better perspective look. Still, wow.
@bullit: That image does look good. I do have a couple of questions, though. The light on the figures' face is fainter than the light on the floor to the left of the figure. Wouldn't it be the other way around? Her face brighter and the light on the floor fainter? On the inside of the fireplace mantel, wouldn't the light be a molted faint red/orange being the close to the fire? Fire in fireplaces cast light out into a room, the intensity depending on the strength of the fire. With the guard in place, shouldn't there be light coming out on both sides and below the fire guard? It won't be sharp light, more cloudy where it would hit the floor and inside the mantel.
@Trish - Instancing can be done but there are a few tricks you ought to know. I highly recommend to read Rashad's and Peter's (Kine_magiK) tutorial which I assembled from the forum threads to PDFs. They are on my website (see sig), go to Bryce Documents > Guests > Objects.
@TLBKlaus - those round city renders are great, particularly the cities.
@Dave - good camera angle. The water looks cold. I think the shadows are a bit dark, considering the overcast sky I would expect the light being more diffuse and hence the shadows less dark. Minor quibbles, of course. The couple really gives life to this render.
Put this one together quite quickly for a short lived mini contest. Now I am wondering whether it is worth trying to work more on it to turn it into a decent render.
Not your average Leprchaun
Well, this is already a very nice render. I just doubt that the lady can sit that way for a long time, except she's an acrobat. At least one of her legs should support her.
Migration.
Oh stop it Dave! I'm trying to work and you are distracting me with your wonderful renders. If we had a gallery I'd give this top marks without question. Be nearly a years soon since the galleries went South... that's quite a long time for a website that caters for artists to do without a gallery. How about a render of these ducks with targets on them in a shooting gallery? Gallery, gallery, gallery, see I can't stop saying it now I've stated. I think I'm getting a bee in my bonnet.
Still creeping up on SSS in Bryce. I'm leeching tricks off Octane.
I've also figured out how to export terrains and their materials to Octane - don't let anyone ever tell you Bryce's bumpmapping is poor. I'll let the pictures do the talking, I should be working. I blame Dave!
Savage;This is a migration I've got 6 of them pekin ducks, sorry David I had to throw this in
now that is the BEST one yet !!!
They'd like it on top of my PC right now, it's toasty...
They'd like it on top of my PC right now, it's toasty...
no comment needed
@TheSavage64 Nice renders with IL usage. And no crashes ? I'm "traumatized" now, but I'll have a go at re-making the island scene eventually and I'll be sure to be even more careful than before.
@Sean Riesch Thanks. It was indeed frustrating because I was really patient with it. As I mentioned, Bryce crashed 8 out of 10 times in IL as I was populating the island with vegetation, but I kept going. I already knew ever since I bought Bryce 7, that IL was buggy, I just didn't think that it could corrupt a project like it did.
@Trish Thanks, I already know of the "large address aware" trick. The major problem with that scene of mine, wasn't memory though. It was really how broken the IL is and how Bryce's save/open mechanism is also flawed to a certain point, in scenes with lots of instances in them, because mine got corrupt and I can't open it again.
@TLBKlaus Those floating city models look gorgeous :)
@GussNemo Thanks. Unfortunately, I can't finish the scene because the project file was corrupted. I did save the scene in another project file, but without any instances, which means I would have to redo it all over and probably go through the similar frustrating experience of using IL, which I will avoid for now. My next project has a lot of objects in the scene, but I don't need IL for this one :)
@chohole Very nice and cute! As a suggestion, I think the vegetation around the model should be a bit darker and with some specularity for contrast.
Well I am not about to alter the pose at the moment, as it means starting again. I did use a "canned" pose to do it quickly. I have however altered some mats a bit, and tired to make it look as though she is caught in a spotlight or camera flash, unexpectedly. Trouble is that now, with the spotlight stright on I am losing some shadows.
Mr Silus.
No crashes for mine.
Another easy trick (but it takes some forward planning) with the IL is to instance primitives instead of complex objects, so for tree type 1 you can instance cylinders, for tree type 2 instance pyramids, for bushes instance cubes and for stones instance spheres.
When your scene is populated, save the document and then go through each group of object types and convert them to what you want them to be. So for tree type one, you select all cylinders and use the convert option to make them all trees, then using the original cylinder (that is now the master tree) that you used to make the instances, click the E to enter the tree lab to edit the tree type.
Rinse and repeat with all the other primitives converting those to what you want. You still have to 'save as' at each stage, but the IL will cope better with primitives.
And have a look at David's excellent 'Grass Terrain' tutorial instead of trying to instance grass.
Hope this helps.
You could pop something under her feet?
How about two spots from angles at either side, use complementary colours so they add up to white where they overlap otherwise they will provide corresponding coloured shadows where they do not.
Finished cooking my PC.
Got another different idea for SSS in Bryce from Octanes material options. Here reflection is suppressed my metallicity settings and scatter is controlled through blurred transmissions via specular halo - max ray depth 6 for those that are curious.
I trust I don't need to tell you which render belongs to which render engine. Oh... if only there was a DAZ gallery I could submit my renders too... imagine that?
The bee is still there.
I definitely have to check out the tutorials you gentlemen have made, there's a lot I still have to learn... :D
Here are some space-themed ones starting with a Star Trek-Ringworld crossover, a fantasy one, and a mock book cover for a story i might write.
You could pop something under her feet?
How about two spots from angles at either side, use complementary colours so they add up to white where they overlap otherwise they will provide corresponding coloured shadows where they do not.
Finished cooking my PC.
Got another different idea for SSS in Bryce from Octanes material options. Here reflection is suppressed my metallicity settings and scatter is controlled through blurred transmissions via specular halo - max ray depth 6 for those that are curious.
I trust I don't need to tell you which render belongs to which render engine. Oh... if only there was a DAZ gallery I could submit my renders too... imagine that?
The bee is still there.
I think it is wonderful that you are working with Octane. It is superior to LuxRender in that it is so much faster and more flexible. I am hoping that spending time with this unbiased application will give you ever more insights to apply to the next development cycle for Bryce 8. Yummy!!!!
A few things come to mind. First, I have noticed that when new frames are being rendered in Octane and Lux and even all the other unbiased renders, that the first passes look a lot like first pass Boost Light renders, very contrasty pixels of light and dark. But over time the illumination evens itself out. I suspect Bryce TA might already be moving in the right direction.
I am a firm believer that Boost Light gets TA much closer to unbiased rendering than TA without Boost Light. I wonder how many more steps would be needed to update the Bryce engine to itself become unbiased?
Also, the speed issue cannot be ignored. Think of how often we have spent hours and hours for renders that dont look realistic at all compared to a 20 minute Octane render. It makes the whole question of the Bryce render engine a paramount one.
Question is, is it worthwhile to further update the already slow Bryce engine knowing that doing so probably still will not ever reach the proficiency of the unbiased renderers out there? Or should we be focusing on ways to export Bryce scenes into an unbiased renderer like Octane that can maybe be made to read Bryce procedurals natively?
One thing is for sure. The bathroom renders indicate the basic truth of biased renders, in that light is missing from the Bryce version. Edges are too dark, shadows arent as smooth as they are in the Octane version.
I bring all this up to point out that in a certain context, Octane could be seen as Bryce's competition. But Octane outputs far superior to Bryce at the moment even in the hands of a fist day Octane novice and a 12 year Bryce master.....clearly Octane is the future. So we need to think carefully about how Bryce can be positioned in the future. Why wait 2 days for a mediocre Bryce render what you slaved over for weeks when you can render a photorealistic scene in Octane in less than 3 hours?
Keeping Bryce relevant keeps getting harder and harder. Bryce needs a quantum leap of sorts to catch back up. A native unbiased renderer would do just the trick. Okay Vasily, bring it on!!!
TBKLaus, everything you make is mind blowing. Seriously you make me sick.
Dave Savage, that fence render is amazing. If it had been the work of anyone else I'd say it is perfect, but at your level of expertise I will ask about why there is light missing from the undersides of the plants. I would assume that there would be a decent amount of light bouncing up from the brightly lit pathway there, enough so that the underside of the plant leaves shouldn't be so dark. But this is just a quick calculation of my eye, I could well be wrong about the missing light. The ducks render looks fantastic, the water looks great, the ducks themselves look awesome and the lighting, especially the indirect lighting is spot on!
@Dave - this migration is just great. They go home, don't they? Cool idea about instancing primitives and then convert.
@David - great examples. You get to grips with Octane.
@Trish - nice picture, pity it's not a render.
@Pam - I liked the previous more. Yeah, that's true photo-realism to have the shadows of the flash covered by the object photographed straight on.
@TLBKlaus - great renders.
@Rashad - if Bryce gets the attention it deserves, then the render engine can be made faster - it's all old code, further hampered by Axiom which makes it so difficult to make Bryce 64 bit.
Meanwhile there's yet a lot to discover in Bryce. It can be more than we think. Here's a simple render with Viki 3 and an HDRI. She's looking away from the sun and her face is not lit. The scene has a horizontal FoV of 190° and a vertical one of 120° by using the EWL.
Second render is exactly the same, only a mirror was added. There is not only reflection in the mirror, Viki's front side is lit by the light from the reflection of the sun shining in the mirror. There is no cheating light behind the mirror. Bryce can do it.
@TLBKlaus: Not much I can say but, wow. Truly very nice images.
@Dave: You so quack me up some time. A city near us has duck races each year to raise money for different things. The ducks they use are very much like those in your images. Also, the island scene looks very much improved with the lighthouse and people. I wonder, though, if water ripple would be that course(?) that close to shore.
@David: Those mountains are fantastic. If I didn't know better I'd say there photos. Of the two fancy cubes I like the shadow in the first but like the molted gray mixed in with the tan(?) color in the second. The second looks more like the real thing to me, with the delicate shadowing around the protrusions. Or is this happening because the color is different for each cube?
@Horo: The effects in the second image is really interesting. I take it the reflection of the sun in the mirror is the same as the reflections seen in the mirror towers.
Being the curious type, I hunted for a nice tutorial that gave more information about Octane and found several on You Tube and on Vimeo. Because I wasn't going to be using Octane in the foreseeable future, I was only looking for information about the program itself, not how to actually use it. I came across this Introduction to Octane Tutorial that demonstrates its features. The guy on this video is to Blender what David and Horo are to Bryce, and he does a very good job of presenting general information about Octane. Now, If only I could hit a big lottery payoff.
Thinking on Rashad's comments, I remember Octane allows something that Bryce doesn't. When an image is rendered, the image can be tweaked as the render takes place. When tweaking is done, rendering starts again until something is again tweaked or the render stopping point is reached. This is also something Blender has with the Cycle render engine. To me, this saves a lot of time in working with an image. Instead of stopping the render, making changes, starting the render again, stop, tweak, start, etc. changes can be made on the render fly, if you will.
Hi Rashad and thanks. I agree about the ivy shadows, though really, the problem is that the leaves wouldn't grow the way I wanted them and as result have left voids underneath them (I would have preferred the leaves to be more vertical).
The shadow under the leaves is just the result of TA. I didn't go to the trouble of adding extra lights (the scene is only lit by the Bryce sun) to simulate bounced light as in the render I am hoping to use for the job I originally made the fence for, there will be no Ivy.
I suppose I could have cheated a little bit and added some ambient to the Ivy leaves, but I'd have been more inclined to add lights and with 4 complex Ivy plants with hundreds of leaves that all have transparency, adding light would have taken the render time well beyond the 2 plus hours it took... not that that would have been a problem if it had been the final commercial render, but for an incidental post on the forum, I rarely do renders that exceed 2 hours.... I know, excuses excuses. :-)
Guss: I did consider making a wave terrain that followed the coastline of the island, but it was more about the Instancing than anything. I also re-looked at the 'Ocean Foam' easter egg for something extra, but as it only works when the render is set to low priority, it wasn't going to happen on a complex scene for the same reason that I mentioned above to Rashad. As Rashad has spend many a long productive hour attempting to get coastline looking just right, it's always a tricky point to join up what is essentially open water with a hard edged terrain, maybe something I can explore more in time... Or maybe I could just instance thousands of ducks to hide the water ripple. :-)
Horo: Instancing primitives and converting is just something I picked up from someone else... It is a good though.
You've lost me there. Which mirror towers?
Horo, interesting that you made the mirror reflect light onto Vicky's face.
In the past, I have used reflective white surfaces out of camera view in the same way that photographers use those light bouncing thingies just to lighten shadow areas slightly.