Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 4
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that's nice - good work
I finally took the time, after seeing Miss B's results, to work TLBKlaus's Colorplexity tutorial. I also tried something I'd not done before in doing some post work using GIMP--didn't really know if it could be done in GIMP. I did the post work because using the radial light intensity diffuse settings per the tutorial the colors were washed out, regardless of the MRD setting used; well settings 6 and below, any higher and it looked like you had a spot light in your face. Here are three which I caught my eye after post work. MRD of these is 3, 4, and 6.
Great colours. I like the first one best, the last one seems a bit busy - though it is nice nevertheless.
Oh I like all three of these Guss. :-) I just checked, and I usually have MRD set to 6, so now I'm going to re-render my second one lowering the MRD and see how it comes out.
Once I again, I'm very late in responding to the comments on my last image (my apologizes!).
Thanks to Jay. Miss B, David B, David S for their comments. Much appreciate!
GussNemo asked "Is that a salamander to the upper right of the butterfly?"
Actually it's a Pike which I tried to turn into a Catfish in Modo by adding "whiskers". Waste of time 'cause you can't see them under water. Oh well...
Horo said "Could be a photograph, but the butterfly gives it away that it is not. It would have left by the time the camera was ready and the shot composed."
Agreed (LOL) - tried a bunch of different figures there (frog, snake, dragonfly and lizard) but the butterfly was by very the best looking of the bunch.
Here's two test images I did after going through David B's excellent Ivy Generator tutorial. I'd messed with it before but found the instructions rather obscure, like max the slider for no leaves (hmmm). Thanks David!
When I was applying the leaf texture I wondered what SpaceBones Alien Leaves (from ShareCG) looked like on the Ivy. I had to rotate the image 180 degrees and I also had to create a custom alpha trans map because I have to go through the DAZ Studio bridge to get images into B7 (Mac B7 won't read images and D|S doesn't read SpaceBone's PNG transparency). Three separate Ivy generations each with a different Alien Leaf. Top and side images. Not great but thought it was kinda cool looking. Rendered with TA about 3 hours to render @32 RPP.
Oh that's nice, Dan. I've just used the Alien leaves today on a Bryce tree - as a test. The plants you made with IvyGenerator are exceptional. Never thought it could be used for that. Great idea of yours!
Those are great Dan. I especially like the POV of the first render. ;-)
agreed, and now I am going to have to go find the alien leaves, shouldn't take too long as I do have a bookmark to Spacebones' share CG gallery.
OK, following along with Guss' thinking about using a lower MRD, I tried re-rendering at MRD 4 and I like the more muted background. However, I still prefer the more detailed central area, soooooo, I composited the two renders using the same layer adjustments as my previous render.
Don't forget to click to see unsquished.
@Dan Whiteside, nice alien leaf render! I didn't even think of trees when I was making my earlier alien contest entry.... hmmm... ::looks at calendar and deadline::
@chohole, I did a quick Google, and turned up these links, which might be some of what you were looking for:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/5759/gallery/7/Material-and-Shader/Alien-Leaf-2
http://www.sharecg.com/v/5760/gallery/7/Material-and-Shader/Alien-Leaf-3
http://www.shareaec.com/v/5740/related/Texture/Alien-Leaf-for-Ivy-Generator-or-common-use
Thanks Sean. THey certainly are different.
That's a great render Dan, you've done wonders with the custom leaves for the ivy generation, colour and contrast range are outstanding. Gives it a real sense of depth.
Miss B and Jamie, the abstracts are coming along - colourfully. I don't know what more I can say, you've certainly nailed this effect. Good work to achieve what you set out to. That's the most important thing.
I've been testing lighting and material setups. I've used a program called Grome 3 for advanced terrain filtering, and being curious, I worked out how the materials function, and noticed that it does some clever things with specularity. So I've had a go at reproducing that effect within Bryce.
Thank you David. :-)
@Guss and @Miss B ... I like them a lot. I like to up the MRD to increase the complexity, but it frequently means minimizing the lights... I use squared falloff a lot, or negatives or darkening the reflective surfaces, or eliminating lights entirely and using shadowless materials with just sunlight and atmosphere. It ends up being a tinkering process from project to project.
Thank you sir, I enjoyed playing with it. I'll have to come back to it at some point to try different shapes.
I also tried the Nexus tut, but I don't like what I'm seeing, so have to play with it some more before I post. My biggest problems is getting my "view" in the right position even when I use my wireless mouse instead of my pen/tablet. I guess I'll get the knack of that too some day.
Thanks Horo for the explanation, not that much of it makes sense. I’m copying and pasting this explanation for when I redo this render at a later date. By watching David’s and your videos over and over again things are slowly falling into place.
Bigh I see what you mean. One day I hope to make a similar scene in Bryce and not use the Hdri as a backdrop. However it was an interesting experiment.
Guss – great work with the abstracts.
Dan – all your work is amazing and this is no exception.
Miss B- I like the contrast of your last abstract render, very nice.
Thanks, Horo/Miss B/David/TLBKlaus.
@dan: Very nice images. I can almost smell the aroma.
@David: What's to say but, WOW. Such detail.
@Miss B: I had the same problem. If I reduced the output of the radial lights the image was too dark. If I increased them it was too bright. Too high an MRD, burn out. Too little, not enough detail. I remembered watching one of David's tutorials where he used Photoshop to adjust the contrast of an image, so I gave GIMP a go to see if it could do the same. And it did. The last of my Colorplexity images has a higher contrast setting then the other two.
I found another tutorial on deviantart, this one by c0ncepTualize-3D, and had a lot of trouble lighting my try properly. Used just the two radial lights of the tutorial but it was too dark. Added a couple more but it lit up like a spot light. Reduced intensity of the radials but too dark again. So I increased the radials again then added a negative radial light to cut down the intensity. Still didn't like the results so I turned the sun back on and once again played with the radial lights. Also played with the mirror setting of all the material, but still could get the images to really look right. I think, after a bit more tweaking, these three are the best of all I rendered. Comments gladly accepted.
Minor correction, Jamie, if it was my video you were watching then I'd have been using Paint Shop Pro 8 (which cost me £5 - as opposed to photoshop - which I'd probably have to sell an organ to be able to afford). And if it is part of the plan to use postwork on your images, don't forget that if you export your image just after it has rendered (and all in one go) you can save it in a higher bit depth colour format.
Miss B & GussNemo: looking nice.
Here's an image I completed for last month's contest over at DreamSlayer Artworks (contest theme was "green"). I'm not totally happy with it though. I was all excited when I made it, now it feels kind of ... bland. Not sure what it's missing. Perhaps better lighting, or more detail, or maybe I should have simply chosen a different subject to render.
One or two things were rushed to get it completed; I actually intended to put a very small bevel on the large green crystal, but realized at the last second it was a surface material, not a volume material, so I couldn't just negative boolean pieces off. (the crystal is actually a terrain.)
I also wanted to make one of those hollow carved stone or ivory spheres that has another nested inside of it, but my modeling skills aren't up to par and there's no way I could have gotten that done in time.
The little white crystal sprays were a pain because they used displacement on a sphere, which didn't render half the time, although luckily I found out that doing spot renders on them prior to a full render made them visible again.
@Horo and @mermaid - Thanks, glad you like it.
@Guss - Yes, I'm of the opinion that if postwork is needed to make a render "sparkle" the way you want, then by all means use it to your best advantage, especially for these abstract type images. If I can get a landscape/terrain render to look the way I want without postwork, all the better, but with the abstracts, there's so much more that might need fixing that just can't always be done by Bryce alone, though it's often nice to try. ;-)
Just my 2¢ FWIW.
@David: Oops, well I knew it started with a "P". :red: Besides, it was late and my gray matter was asleep, even though I was awake. :lol: I first looked at Print Shop and Photoshop but neither was in my price range. Then someone mentioned GIMP, which was at a price I could afford. I don't do a lot of post work, or creating in those type programs, so GIMP works just fine.
It's probably a given that no one knows if post work will be needed until the render finishes. The Colorplexity images were always too bright, no matter what changes made to the lighting. I think now I should have tried a negative radial light, as I did in the latest three, to see if that would decrease the intensity. Seems I remember a video you made where you mentioned using a higher bit depth when exporting an image for post work. Guess my storage bucket sprung a leak since I didn't remember that was possible.
@Horo: Thank you.
@Sean: I like what you've done, I'm easy to impress. :-) But you might want to have a second look at that image and notice two things I see right off the bat. You have light hitting those object from two different directions. The shadows on the objects are the give away. But there are no shadows for any of the objects. While the light isn't really intense, it would cast, or cause, shadows to be seen.
The other thing I noticed was camera position. Right now the ball on the left is clipped, and the space on the right is open. You could try swing the camera a bit to the left and that would bring the ball totally into view. Or repositioning the objects around the central object and repositioning the camera. But the biggest thing I saw was the lack of shadows. Still, it is a nice job.
@Miss B: I'm so new to all of this I have trouble knowing when post work should and shouldn't be done. I tried it on the Colorplexity images because I couldn't get the lighting as I wanted. It always turned out to bright and not enough contrast. I did, however, figure out that contrast might be accomplished by using a negative radial light, as I did in those last three images I posted. They too were to bright before adding the negative radial light, and I kept tweaking its settings until I thought the contrast suited the image.
I am totally not an expert, but a friend (and fellow Mod) has done some PNG overlays to aid compostion. This is the "Golden Spiral" I have put a t background behind it so it shows on the fourm, but did wonder if it would help you work out placing a bit. can obviously be revers horizontally and even vertically.
@Sean - generally, I like what you did here. The shadows are a bit of an issue, as GussNemo already mentioned. Since this is some sort of a still life, I'd try obscure lighting here with an uniform HDRI (you can make one from the white sky). Perhaps you'll need a radial or two (or spot), but without shadow casting enabled, to get specular. I think we would expect more blurry reflections or specular on the gems.
@Pam - that's a nice aid. Essentially, it follows the one-third rule.
Yup. Essentially What Jade has produced is a set of PNGs which show various aspects of the rule, but he has done it so that they can be parented to the camera in DS, which is really neat. So you can compose you scene with the grid there as a guide. He came up with the idea after we ran a New User contest on composition. Has had 400+ downloads so far at Sharecg
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/17976/ Thread about it and download link
Is it possible to do something similar in Bryce? He is quite happy to make just the PNGs availalbel if we could work something out.
Well, these are very handy props from Jade. Generally, this could be done in Bryce in the same manner as we made the filters. However, I'm presently not sure how we could assure it works with different document aspect ratios. This would need a bit of experimentation first.
Horo's HDRI backdrop and light source + Bryce sun. Island shape made in Wings3D. Five trees with their roots made invisible (so you can't see them sticking out of the rock). Trees excluded from HDRI lighting and the infinite light pointing up at the bottom of the rock (to give the impression of light reflected off the water surface). Some transparency on leaves - a trick poached off Rashad Carter. And a bit of carefully channeled ambient light so the shadows don't get too black.
Most of my time was spent capturing the material for the rock (which is hardly visible now). I started with a photograph of Horo's, cut a square out of it and arranged these squares around the Spherical Mapper to form four sides of a cube. I then used PSP8's kaleidoscopic function to create a lid and a base so that the patterns blended seamlessly across the surface of the cube - this took me nearly 2 hours to figure out. Indeed I think I will make a little video - at least so I don't forget!
I've gone for quite a high contrast almost burned out look to the sky. It's supposed to look like that, it's not an accident. So even if you don't like it, at least you know it was a deliberate choice on my part.
So that's how I spent my Sunday... I would have been out on my bike, the weather was lovely, but I lost my crank bolt on the last long run and it's taken three weeks and counting for them to ship another one out to me. I've ridden my bike to town and back in between and been rewarded for my trouble with cuts to the back of my leg when the pedal has fallen off and I've been stabbed with the spline. I'm hoping there's something in the post for me today! I don't want to use the car because petrol is so expensive, and I can't walk very far - I need my bike!
Well I have a complete set of the PNGs and a PDF doc explaining, which he is quite happy for me to pass on to you. In fact he has said he would be honoured if you felt it was worth experimenting with. It's a 12mb download so not sure how I could get it to you.
This sounds very interesting. I think my mail account accepts up to 20 MB. Or else, if you have an FTP client, I could make an account ready for you to upload to.
@David - that island is really something special. I like it very much.
Here I've made some tutorials for the Spherical Mapper.
Bit of an advert for the Spherical Mapper and a short tutorial combined - by David Brinnen
Bryce 7.1 Pro Advanced - Setup for SM texture capture cubic - by David Brinnen
Bryce 7.1 Pro Advanced - Setup for SM texture capture cubic appendix - by David Brinnen
Bryce 7.1 Pro Advanced - Using the texture capture cubic setup example - by David Brinnen
If it wasn't for the Wide Angle Lens (and filters) the spherical mapper would be my favorite toy, however it can still be my favorite Bryce made tool.