ThePhilosopher's New Mountains of Altair
Sevrin
Posts: 6,313
in The Commons
Well, someone took a long nap! After a year of absense, ThePhilosopher is back with the Mountains of Altair epic environment. The video's a bit difficult to get a hold of - had to DL it - but beautiful to watch.
I'm curious if anyone has started playing with it and checked out how it looks from ground level. From the air it's fabulous.
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Comments
I was curious about the video but it tells me it is in the owner's trash.
sorry not interested in the product though as I use Carrara for such scenes
Would be cool if there was a vignette you could use for closeups - but there are no good snow environs in the store.
In before someone tries to chime in with one of the bad ones.
How big is it in terms of file size?
i like the way this vendor did it: https://www.daz3d.com/highlands
I am getting this tonight after work and can't wait to take it for a spin! Looks absolutely amazing. As soon as I get a chance I'll try to post something here, unless someone beats me to it - which, hopefully they do.
yes and that is precisely why I want to see the video
many DAZ environments look good as stills, an animated render of one is a rare thing
maybe this link works, not sure: https://drive.google.com/u/0/uc?id=1YN13uJnYFRzkGnI8xHwKgxqfD4njyAgu&export=download
guess they never heard of youtube.
None of his videos seem to be working. I'm sure he uses/used Vimeo but there is nothing showing there either.
I downloaded it too and it works but none of the videos in his shop here are working.
ThePhilospher's video demos are always stunning, including the music selection. Looking forward to iReal Flock of Birds shown in the video.
Edit: Although there are no camera presets, a set of cameras loads with the environment preset.
that link worked
I must admit it looks as impressive as a Carrara or Bryce render
Hm, wants me to buy a new codec
Worked fine for me.
Try downloading this and see if it helps. I have been using it for years so it is quite safe
https://codecguide.com/klcp_update.htm
i downloaded the clip, and it wouldn't play because "an invalid sample description was found in the movie".
so...this is basically a gorgeous background prop? good for panoramic backgrounds and flyovers and so on, but not exactly a scene location as such.
when you load a character or an object into the scene, where do they land?
j
oh BTW Windows media player plays it, the default Windows 10 app wants to sell me a codec from the Windows app store!
both come with Windows 10 sneaky buggers
this is not unusual
I tried VLC Media player, worked fine.
Worked for me without issue using Windows 10, Windows Media Player, VLC and Media Player Classic (my usual player).
Daz needs to standardize video playback on product pages, ideally hosting videos on a dedicated Youtube channel.
DIM says 447.4 MB.
Well, I just did some playing around with it. I'm amazed at how quickly it loads and renders. Definitely makes use of instancing. It's a beautiful set...color me impressed. I'm very much lacking in mountainous terrain, so hopefully I'll get some great use out of this. I'm curious to see how well my GPU will hold up if a instance a bunch of pines into the landscape.
It's gorgeous, and the use of instancing is really REALLY smart. It's actually one big, complex mountain, but instanced and rotated so it really convincingly looks like a bunch of distinct mountains.
Working on a render...
Same here.
It's fine if the kind of images you want to make are the ones in the promos and the video. If you're looking for a set for your characters to trudge around in though, chances are that you'll be disappointed. Yes, it has 16k textures, but they are stretched over very large bits of geometry.
This is a render of the view from one of the included cameras (Front 1). Even without zooming in, you from the mountain on the left that this is not made for anything but long-distance background use. This isn't a knock or anything, but it's good to know what it is you're buying.
Also, just get the K-Lite Codec Pack. You don't need to buy anything. Or get VLC.
Same viewpoint as Sevrin, but added some water and a biiiiiiiig tree
It was a cloudless sunny day in the Mountains of Altair...
Here're my two quick renders. I was impressed with how quickly it loaded and how easy it was to move around (in the second image). These are good enough as rendered, or as seen here can be just the first step in your art process. I'll be playing around with this a lot more! Post processed with Photoshop and Topaz Studio.
{Edit] Also, used Filter Forge : "Night" to generate a starfield to use in screen mode as snow/particles.
Here:
Anybody have issues rendering the mountains in 4.15? As in, the planes for clouds and lens flares are showing up in the renders. I attached an example showing the problem with the clouds. I played around with the surface, but no resolution yet. Any ideas?
Tim
You're right. There's something wrong. It's no longer working correctly in 4.15.
As loaded. Promo 1 cam
Atmo blue, hid some clouds
Render done last August.before post work
Same scene in 4.15
Perhaps @PA_ThePhilosopher has an idea?
Hey guys,
Thanks to Sevrin for notifying me of this discussion.
I was not aware of this issue in 4.15 until you guys discovered it. Taking a look over the set now, it appears there was a change in how Iray renders opacity maps on objects within a volumetric light cube. Even when I turn the opacity down to 0, those black tints are still present on all objects, which doesn't make sense. 0% opacity should mean that the object is invisible. But for some reason, Iray is now rendering all objects with opacity set to 0 in the scene.
You can confirm this by creating a flat plane primitive in the scene, and turning its opacity to 0. It looks exactly the same, with that black tint. Strange.
I must admit, this is discouraging for me to see, and a significant step back for Iray, in terms of being able to render objects within volumetric cubes. Half of my products utilize volumetric light, so I would expect this problem to be present elswhere as well.
-Davide
I wonder if Studio 4.15 has some type of transparency bug? I've noticed other transparence issues in older versions of Studio as well.