Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 4
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Still playing with Dragons.
Edit: Background not Bryce
@Dave: Real nice image, colors in the background work well together. And love the dragon, though I can't figure out if the look is of one who has pulled a good prank or one who is about to have their evening meal.
More experimenting with reflection, specifically TLBKlaus's Nexus object. Trying to understand the relationship between external light and internal space. Deleted the radial lights, and used just external light and settings. Also adjusted Ambient and Transparency setting for the material. This all started as I took TLBKlaus's suggestion to raise the MRD to get more reflections. With the MRD set past 12 everything was burned out, so I kept the MRD setting at 12. Sun intensity for the first two is set to 10 and specular to 20. Ambient for the rods and sphere set to 25, Transparency set to 45. Sky dome on the Sky & Lab palette is set to white. The third image has the same settings for the material but Haze and Sky Dome colors are set to black. Sun intensity is still 10 but specular is set to 200.
They're all great Guss... Bottom one is my favourite.
Meanwhile: Still still playing with dragons. :-)
@StuartB4 - looks nice. Fits the name.
@GussNemo - usually specular does. It has to be set for the materials as well. Something went wrong in your example. New series look nice.
@Dave - nice colours on the first dragi! The second one is an interesting picture with the lady mostly monochrome. I like the contrast.
Plod, plod, plod, document...
Bryce 7.1 Pro Advanced - converting procedural textures into image maps 1 - by David Brinnen
Bryce 7.1 Pro Advanced - converting procedural textures into image maps 2 - by David Brinnen
Bryce 7.1 Pro Advanced - converting procedural textures into image maps 3 - by David Brinnen
Progress on this project is not exactly rapid. Need more time. Must try to waste less time eating and sleeping! (two of my favorite things)
@Guss... one minor note, you don't have the ends of the cylinders quite long enough - they should go through the cube so there are no gaps in the final image. :D
@Dave: Thanks. I think it's mine as well. That dragon looks very content, and the shadows fit the placement of the figure. Really like how the left wrist sits right under the spike above the wrist, and the shadowing in that area. Nice.
@Horo: Thanks. I'll have to look at the specular for the material used, I think it had been set to zero.
@David: Left rabbit image catches my eye better. One on the right looks like a real bad paint job.
@TLBKlaus: Oh, that's good to know. Thanks. I've corrected that for the last image above, and repositioned the sun to dead center day time on the second image posted here. Look for a PM.
Followed another tutorial and produced the third image. Amazing what I can do when fed enough bananas.
Guss..that last one is phewwwww...super stuff -- get it printed and framed immediately. What would you title this?
Jay
@Dave I can see you like greg martin's work too :)
Also, really like the skin of the red dragon. Very cool!
@GussNemo You may say landscapes are not your thing, but abstracts are certainly up your alley. That last one is very good :)
@David Thanks for another set of great tutorials. At this point (and probably for a while now) I don't think that there's another piece of raytracing software that has so many tutorials as Bryce. At least to my knowledge :)
Thanks, the Red Dragon skin is one I altered from the original in Photoshop... here it is again, this time with greenery added and for the first time ever (I don't know why it's never occurred to me to do it before), I used the 'flip X' on a complex model because I wanted a version where she was looking into the camera.
@GussNemo - the last one is really a WOWser.
@Dave - those strange friends look very nice in this park-like place.
Stuart,
I like the direction you are taking the lighting. While there are a few things that could be improved witht hge rose I must say that you are definitely getting into a sort of realism. What I like is that you have a nice strong key light and the indirect light is well done. The colors are not overly saturated, which also lends to the realism. Nice!!
Guss,
I really like the way this tubular intersection study seems to be developing. I love the various materials you are trying and all of the lighting variations. I like the most recent examples the best.
David B.
I will be having a look at your tutorials, thanks for the links and the hard work that goes into making them. I like the most recent bust image, but I fell somehow that the skin does not respond as strongly as one would expect from the glowing cube and the rod darting through his head. At fully white I would expect the output from these sources to be a bit brighter, and thus to affect the nearby skin tissues a bit more. Otherwise, I'd say this is one of the more successful studies.
Forgot to add, I'd say with the bunny this is the first time the two engines produced renders that look anything alike. Honestly, there is something way odd going on with the color balancing but otherwise both images appear equally plausible to me. Great job! Now, aside from for the first time presenting them with the exact same material... how else did you do it? Any particular lighting tricks involved since the other side by side tests or can we chalk this particular success thing up to the materials being identical?
David Savage
First, I am curious how you modified your OL set-up to handle an indoor scenario like your purple room. I may well be misunderstanding something so please help me out. From what I understand OL requires the items you want lit to be placed within the radial that has been named Background. Fine, but how then does one include the 6 walls of a room into that situation?. If you make the Background Sphere smaller than the room the walls will not receive light because they are outside the sphere. If I make the sphere larger than the room the interior of the room wont receive any light because the light is being occluded by the presence of the walls themselves resulting in a room that is black. It occurs to me now as I am typing that one might then disable shadow casting for the walls thus allowing the TA light into the room...but that seems like it might cause other problems....not sure. I will have to test that out. Anyhow, I have become concerned that it may be very difficult to light scenes with TA only without the introduction at any point of a point light source. This matters a lot to me because as long as light comes from points in Bryce the rendering will always be deeply biased. In real life light always comes from some form of geometry with some degree of width so to my mind finding ways of avoiding bathing surfaces in point based light is an important step in bias removal. However, it is difficult to generate lights powerful enough to serve in place of point radials even now with TA optimization from individual light sources, its still not quite the same. Hope I am making sense. Please dont hesitate to ask for clarification if I'm incomprehensible. Had a big glass of wine tonight!
Love the Dragon, and I am truly digging that red material! Very nice feeling of surrealism from the dragon and the girl, who looks almost like a mime mixed with a clown. Her stare into the camera is perfect!!!!!!
There's a white balance control in Octane I've not yet fiddled with... That might provide the answer. Octane is very much focused on the rendering and materials, so there's a lot to go at, if it wasn't for the fact that most of what I find is something that I've been waiting for and desperately want to play with, it would be daunting. Everything other than rendering and materials in Octane is pretty basic. I don't think it would suit someone new to 3D art, it's not what I would call intuitive.
OK the material porting is covered in the video - so that's covered.
The HDRI was exported spherically mapped from Bryce and imported into Octane - that's 50% of the lighting.
The sun position, I lined up a sphere in the sky in the Bryce scene over the sun position and tried to use the soft shadows to gauge the size it should be and exported that to Octane and used it as an emitter - the other 50%.
The ground plane is just a flattened Bryce cube.
I made a little stand and put it under the Bryce camera, once exported I could use this to position the Octane camera and then just vanish the stand. I'm still finding positioning things in Octane a bit of a struggle. Bryce via DS world co-ordinates do not correspond to Bryce via Wings co-ordinates. But as you know, DS bridge is sometimes not that reliable and Wings 3D is more robust, But... DS will bridge Bryce primitives without conversion... so - swings and roundabouts. I don't think it's an insurmountable problem, just going to take some time to work out the best strategies. As far as possible I'm trying to do as much in Bryce, it's partly for the challenge, but also, I learn more that way. The biggest hurdle is dealing with the procedural functions. If Octane had access to Bryce's materials... GPU fractal based materials + rendering... It would save Octane a ton of memory on the GPU.
I think what would be needed would be "light emitting objects" such as you get in some other 3D programmes. That way virtual light bulbs could be made that were nearly point lights sources but had geometry with width. OL looked for a while like it may produce something similar but you simply can't get anything more than a glow from an object and it introduces so much noise even at 256RPP.
It would also help if when you made the radial lights bigger it diffused the light coming from them more, but as we know regardless of the size you make the radial light, the light still just comes from a single point that remains the same size and newer fill/sphere lights (although they have their purposes) don't really do that either.
This... in essence, but using a HDRI as the photograph.
Bryce 7.1 Pro Advanced - rendering inside photographs - by David Brinnen
Funny how coincidences happen.
David's post above shows a scene lit with strip lights and after my last post about Light Emitting Objects, I decided to have a quick look to see if I could knock something together. I decided to try to make a strip light.
In this render, the shadows are starting to look about right for a single overhead strip light. Which is good for a scene whose only light source is a single radial light with no soft shadows shadows set anywhere in either light or render settings... Still, it's too noisy to use for anything.
Savage,
Thanks for explaining the room set-up. I always assume interiors benefit from the presence of all 6 walls in that it gives the TA a chance to bounce light off those very walls. However, I have found that TA does do a good job of enclosed rooms if there aren't some point light sources available somewhere.
Light emitting objects are a big part of what TA Optimization was supposed to address. We got part of the way there but then development had to move on from lighting to other things. What still remains is to find a way to get these glowing object to glow brightly enough to completely replace point radials even in outdoor situations, and also as noted, to solve the noise. Under purely TA light especially with Boost enabled as would be needed for TA Optimization resulting scenes would be extremely noisy even if otherwise accurately lit. But another major benefit of keeping all the lights speaking the same language is render time. I find that point lights slow TA down with each new point source added. But with TA optimized radials rendering remains quite swift.
Here are some new ones...
...inspired by @Guss' exploration of my Nexus tutorial, here are two new entries into the
series. The first is a traditional cube, and the second is a variation using hexagonal columns
as both the struts and the outer shell. [@Horo will probably think it's too busy for his tastes. :D]
The third is a different experiment, some flaming dice. :D
Oh never mind my personal tastes, purely subjective. The artist is the final judge.
@Jay, Mr Silus, Horo, Rashad: Thank you. All three are from two tutorials I found on Deviantart. The sphere and cross arms are from TLBKlaus, and I don't remember who did the other. The one you three like the most is an elongated sphere, 4 torii, and an enclosing sphere, also elongated slightly. I really don't like plain, so I put in the colors. I noticed it's easier to reflect objects using an enclosing cube than a sphere, but easier to reflect light using a sphere than a cube. Correct me if I'm wrong in this line of thinking. A title Jay? Hmmm, not sure. Maybe Twisted Brothers? Never have thought of titles before.
@Dave: While I really like your first dragon and woman image, adding the greenery to the second makes it really pop. And it looks like you've adjusted the color for the dragon? Love the color on those three spheres in your experimental image.
@David: Those three creatures in the garage really look great, I watched the video how it was done. But, where are their parking passes?
@TLBKlaus: Wow, nnniiiccceee! Flames on the dice looks particularly nice. Guess someones having a hot streak.
I rendered several of TLBKlaus's Nexus with different colors, but kept the camera position each time. I wondered how the image would change if I moved the camera, so I pointed it up and moved it in between two of the cross arms. I rather liked the results.
I had been wanting to create an abstract that wasn't copied from a tutorial, and I have a hum dinger made Thursday when Bryce decided it was time to take a nap. At that moment I realized I hadn't save a thing, object, settings, nothing. Yeah, right, lesson learned. The ones below are the recreation of what I was trying to accomplish, the first two with radial lights, the third with them disabled--providing they're displayed in the correct order.
@GussNemo - the first one - becazuse of the camera setting - reminds me of one I made 9 years ago: http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=668. From the other three, I like the first best. The contras is best balanced for my taste.
A journey to the edge.
(Actualy I want to make an abstract, but then I could not resist to add a kind of spaceship.)
OK, haven't been able to play in Bryce for a while, so I decided to try one of TLBKlaus' tutorials, namely Colorplexity.
This didn't come out quite the way I wanted because I keep forgetting I need to have my wireless mouse handy, since it's hard to control the Camera trackball with my pen and tablet.
That said, I made up for it in PS. :-)
Be sure to click to see unsquished. You can also see the full-sized render here --> http://3dpixelzone.com/WIP/bryce/
@electro-elvis - but it does fit, the spaceship. The name of the image suggests what should be perceived.
@Miss B - nice shapes, nice colours. Yes, it looks even better in larger size.
@Horo: Glad you liked it. I'm just glad I could get it recreated to an varying degree.
@Miss B: That's one tutorial I've yet to work through. Yours turned out real nice.
@electro: Love the look and the colors you used. You're right it begged for a spaceship to be added.
This thread is moving so fast it’s hard time to keep up. All the renders are awesome and inspiring. My fav are Dan’s 9hr render on page 11 and Horo (Creek at Sunset) on page 12. I enjoyed going through all the post.
Horo and David-thanks for your lovely videos and experiments.
GussNemo –all your abstracts are awesome. I'm also having a hard time with landscaping
Horo I’m glad you mentioned the shadows..I missed them too, and checked my settings and everything seemed correct. Sky Lab shadows set to 100 and soft shadows to 100, Mat Lab cast, receive and self shadows are checked.
Talking about shadows, is there any way to get shadows for objects when using an Hdri as a backdrop. For this render, I used the Lake.hdr and a raft. I remember seeing a tutorial by David dealing with something similar but cant find it.
@Horo & @Guss - Thanks for the nice comments. I'm going to try again using my wireless mouse when positioning the camera, and hopefully the lights will wind up in the right places. It should be interesting to see if it comes out better without the need to use the gradient layer. ;-)
I was finally able to buy Susan Kitchens' and Victor Gavenda's Bryce 4 book, thanks to a birthday gift, and was really surprised by its size and the information it contains. Don't have a toe underneath if it's dropped.
With books like this I usually start off by thumbing through them just to see what's between the front and back cover. This book, while for Bryce 4, contains information applicable to Bryce in general, regardless the Bryce version. While thumbing through the book I landed on multi-replicate, using a Torus. Because of that section I created the following image. It's another reflection image, entitled "Want your fortune?" One Torus is thinned to 1.196 on the Z axis, stretch along the X and Y axis, then multi-replicated 100 times and rotated 15 degrees along the X and Z axis. As always, comments/suggestions are welcomed.
Yes, there is. Essentially, you have to have an object that can receive shadows. Easiest is to start with the ground plane. Place your object on it as you usually would. Them make ground plane transparent and give it a bit of Diffuse. Place a parallel light above the scene and set its diffuse to a negative value. This creates the shadows on the plane. With HDRI Effect, negative diffuse from the parallel light and diffusion of the transparent plane you adjust transparency and shadows. It's a bit tricky.
We use and explain it in several of our products. The best and most in depth tutorials are on these two of David's products: http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-pro-hdri-shadow-capture
and http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-pro-hdri-shadow-capture-2.
Here are free videos by David that should give you a good start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNRH9ttwH3w
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZM3dUt-suA
@GussNemo - congratulation to your new (old) book. All Susan Kitchen covers is still valid in Bryce 7.1. And I see, you made already good use of it.