Show Us Your Bryce Renders!

Wilmap

@David Brinnen

I have just watched the latest two videos and I think they are brilliant even though I don't understand all of it.

Thank you for showing us what can be done. Will have to experiment.:-)

bombenleger58

A little play with DOF, thanks to Horo and David!!!!!

"Exotic Beauty"

David Brinnen

It is good to see the premium effect getting an outing!

OK here we return to the topic of HDRI. It goes on a bit, so arm yourself with a drink of something before you start.

Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - HDRI lighting project - red dragon in a white box - part 1 - a video tutorial by David Brinnen

LordHardDriven

David Brinnen said:

Well Mark, there are a few things to consider with respect to answering if your use of TA was correct.

1. have you managed to engage the correct options in Bryce - yes it looks like it.
2. has TA contributed positively to the quality of your image - yes in the case of the gone fishing image I'd say so.
3. did you get the effect you desired - only you can answer this.

Now you go on to explain correctly as meaning (following the proper steps to use it).

This is a more interesting meaning, since it moves just beyond stabbing at buttons and switching on controls.

Here then are the steps.

1. You look at your scene and consider what render method would best suit your subject. This then goes back to what I was saying about what scenes are suited to TA. TA's strength is the quality of ambient shadows it produces and the complex interaction of colours. It's weakness is render time and it being a bit fiddly to set up.

2. Empty your scene of all light sources - just render a black scene (you might have to turn the sky black to achieve this). Then switch on TA and TA scattering correction (set to 4rpp) and see what you get. Then turn on passive lighting like material ambience and HDRI backdrop - if you have one. Get it lit somehow in a global way.

3. Then start introducing your direct light sources and balance those with your global lighting - increase one and reduce the other until you get the lighting you were looking for.

As a rough guide those are the steps I would suggest.

Hmmm I guess the stabbing at buttons part is actually closer to what I'm looking for but perhaps I should explain myself better or why I'm unsure? In the Mech render there were 2 radial lights and I was playing with their settings by selecting one and clicking the edit option. In the screen that comes up one of the options is True Ambience Optimization so I checked that and set it at half strength (500) for intensity. When I rendered the scene though I noticed it didn't take any additional time yet I had heard from many people that using TA will slow your render time down. Then in your DOF tutorial I noticed there was TA options there if you select premium for the quality mode. So I selected those TA options (except legacy) and then rendered and bam I got my sudden increase in render time. Then I did the gone fishing one and in that one I couldn't find a light to edit so I just activated TA in the render options and it worked. So I guess I'm wondering what the TA optimization in the light editor is all about?

Rashad Carter

Lord,
I'd say the TA you applied in these scenes looks good. Here's the basic deal with TA Optimization.

TA gathers light information from the environment in particular the sky, but by default there is a sort of cap on the color values it will allow. One could say in a sense that default TA is in an Low Dynamic Range mode. There are many situations in which this is a very realistic starting point, especially if the day is overcast. Due to the low dynamic range of the color values being gathered, the accuracy suffers slightly but this is hardly noticeable in overcast situations. It is in more dynamic environments where the error becomes noticeable. TA without Optimization sometimes wont produce an adequate amount of illumination and depth of shading and richness of colors when confronted with more dynamic environments. To improve accuracy the cap must be removed. TA Optimization is basically telling the render engine to ignore the cap and allow any color value it can see in regards to the sky to be gathered and bounced. This is important because HDRI backdrops can have incredibly rich colors and intensity levels, and without TA Optimization only a few of those colors will be gathered. TA Optimization helps TA see the sky better and utilize it more effectively. But for it to work you must also enable Boost Light in the Render Options. Also Scattering Correction is essential for accuracy. Make sure Focused Scattering is disabled.

Once you enable both Boost Light and TA Optimization, You can now use the HDRI Effect slider in the IBL Lab to increase the power of the output of the sky to your liking. Suddenly, you can get more light without having the literally over-blow the visual brightness of your sky. Where you see a basic blue sky, TA can be seeing a sky three times as bright and bouncing that around your scene. The added control is extremely useful when it can be utilized.

Boot Light however is great for opening the door to high dynamic range light, but it can appear a bit noisy in certain situations so it cannot be used always. So it all depends on your particular needs.

LordHardDriven

Rashad Carter said:

Lord,
I'd say the TA you applied in these scenes looks good. Here's the basic deal with TA Optimization.

TA gathers light information from the environment in particular the sky, but by default there is a sort of cap on the color values it will allow. One could say in a sense that default TA is in an Low Dynamic Range mode. There are many situations in which this is a very realistic starting point, especially if the day is overcast. Due to the low dynamic range of the color values being gathered, the accuracy suffers slightly but this is hardly noticeable in overcast situations. It is in more dynamic environments where the error becomes noticeable. TA without Optimization sometimes wont produce an adequate amount of illumination and depth of shading and richness of colors when confronted with more dynamic environments. To improve accuracy the cap must be removed. TA Optimization is basically telling the render engine to ignore the cap and allow any color value it can see in regards to the sky to be gathered and bounced. This is important because HDRI backdrops can have incredibly rich colors and intensity levels, and without TA Optimization only a few of those colors will be gathered. TA Optimization helps TA see the sky better and utilize it more effectively. But for it to work you must also enable Boost Light in the Render Options. Also Scattering Correction is essential for accuracy. Make sure Focused Scattering is disabled.

Once you enable both Boost Light and TA Optimization, You can now use the HDRI Effect slider in the IBL Lab to increase the power of the output of the sky to your liking. Suddenly, you can get more light without having the literally over-blow the visual brightness of your sky. Where you see a basic blue sky, TA can be seeing a sky three times as bright and bouncing that around your scene. The added control is extremely useful when it can be utilized.

Boot Light however is great for opening the door to high dynamic range light, but it can appear a bit noisy in certain situations so it cannot be used always. So it all depends on your particular needs.

Ah okay, I think I understand. Thanks Rashad. So since we're on the topic of TA can you also answer for me when TA Legacy Mode should be used? Also you said to turn off focused scattering so could you explain when that should be turned on or off and why?

Peter Fulford

LordHardDriven said:

...when TA Legacy Mode should be used?

Very out of touch nowadays, but I think TA Legacy Mode is provided solely to enable scenes made using the half-developed TA in Bryce 5 and 6 to appear the same in Bryce7. If you only have Bryce7 or never used TA in 5 or 6, the legacy option is largely irrelevant.

As far as I can tell, despite slap-on augmentations like "boost" (which suffers from slap-on type consequences), TA is still limited by being colour based rather than energy based. I suspect this is because, fundamentally, Bryce raytracing is colour based rather than energy based.

Since this isn't a TA (or other process) specific thread, if anyone wants to discuss technicalities further (or just beat up on me), let's do so in another thread.

.

Rashad Carter

Lord,
TA in Bryce 6 and earlier had a few programming oddities and errors. To begin with it was implemented as an ambient channel input, which was counter productive. TA Legacy mode uses the Ambient channel as the intensity input, where as the new TA of Bryce 7 uses the diffuse channel for input.

Another one of the errors was with the scattering. Instead of firing rays in all directions with statistical fairness, it seemed as though rays were gathered along preferred angles while excluding other angles. Parallel faces would receive too much light from one another while perpendicular faces might receive too little light. It is a bizarre thing to say the least, hard to describe without a picture which I cant upload now as I am posting from work which is baaaaad.

Peter,
Yes, we can and probably should start and advanced lighting thread and hash it all out again, for fun and new discoveries. I wont go too far into it now but I do want to say that Boost Light is not at all a mere slap on augmentation. It is indeed a correction, as it doesnt add anything it only removes the arbitrary imposed cap. My thoughts are that without the cap to "fix" the values to within a small range adjacent pixels are allowed to vary from one another by amounts that are noticeable as visible noise. TA is already noisy by default and by lifting the cap it only makes the noise ever more visible. Boost Light lifts the veil a bit on what TA is really doing. I am hoping for a much better noise cancellation implementation for TA in general in the next dev cycle. The only problem with Boost Light is the noise. Otherwise, it works just the same as regular TA.

Energy based would produce unbiased rendering and that would be wonderful indeed. But alas, Bryce and TA are all about the shortcuts.

pumeco

I just wanted to say that I look forward to seeing the new thread, should be like old times, although I won't be joining in, just reading. They're rewiring the damn house shortly so I don't want to get involved in any more threads, just won't have the time for it.

Definitely look forward to reading though, just as long as Peter promises to be horrible to Rashad now and then, and that Rashad gets pissed-off and retaliates. It would get boring real quick if you was nice to each other all the time.

Peter Fulford

Previous post-apocalyptic behaviour was a luxury of zombie Bryce and the forum of desolation. Once DAZ reanimated the cadaver by injecting development, it was necessary for civilisation to be restored.

Now that it matters what we say, we might as well say it well. You git.

:mrgreen:

.

Sylverdali

Spent Wine something i did about a year ago

Sylverdali

David Brinnen said:

It is good to see the premium effect getting an outing!

OK here we return to the topic of HDRI. It goes on a bit, so arm yourself with a drink of something before you start.

Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - HDRI lighting project - red dragon in a white box - part 1 - a video tutorial by David Brinnen

@ David Brinnen, love the depth and perspective and the shadows

Sylverdali

bombenleger58 said:

A little play with DOF, thanks to Horo and David!!!!!

"Exotic Beauty"

@ bombenleger58 Gorgeous, i have not worked with DOF yet must give it a go

Sylverdali

@David Brinnen & Horo thanks for all your guidance in finding the free stuff in Bryce well in the end I downloaded the content to an external drive and wow i found the bleeden stuff LOL I am a happy camper thanks so much, the only thing i have not found is the 2D stuff

David Brinnen

You are welcome. Shame you split the wine... nice render - glasses a bit "bendy"? Or is that just the camera angle.

Here is part 2 of the lighting tutorial I was working on.

Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - HDRI lighting project - red dragon in a white box - part 2 - a video tutorial by David Brinnen

Render time reduced from one 6 hour render to three renders that took 15 minutes in total with a bit of judicious Paint Shopping in PSP8.

Horo

@silverdali - very nice render. I like the mix of natural and abstract (if that's the right word). Pleasing colours.

pumeco

_ PJF _ said:

Previous post-apocalyptic behaviour was a luxury of zombie Bryce and the forum of desolation. Once DAZ reanimated the cadaver by injecting development, it was necessary for civilisation to be restored.

Now that it matters what we say, we might as well say it well. You git.

:mrgreen:

.

I give you two pages, tops, before Rashad is tempted to re-ink his old "Peter" tattoo :mrgreen:
Personally, I think it's just an excuse to have the lady tattooist work on him!

Wilmap

Still learning Bryce, but here is a render using Skipper's model of Cromer Pier. Just used the Lifeboat Station portion and added some boats.

Chohole

I think you are doing really well Wendy, considering you are still new at using Bryce. Congrats on getting Skippers model into bryce, did you use DS or Poser to prep it ?

David Brinnen

Nothing wrong with learning Wendy, indeed we actively encourage it!

Here's something to try with your render.

If you feel things in your scene might be "glowing" and you want more contrast. Try setting the global ambient control to black (left hand arrow) and the shadow intensity control to 100% (right hand arrow).

The first controls the amount of ambient colour is available for ambient in the material properties.

The second controls how much of the direct lighting can travel through solid objects to light what is in their shadow. So, for example, if shadow intensity is set to 0% all cast shadows will disappear and only object self shadowing will remain.

Wilmap

@Chohole, I used DS, the imported it into Bryce.

@David Brinnen

Thanks will try that out. I di think the RIB was a bit bright!

David Brinnen

You may find for some materials some ambient light helps... but often it is better to leave the ambient for special effects and just provide more light sources to fill in the dark shadows.

Wilmap

Just realized some of the textures didn't carry over properly from DS.

Re-rendered after altering settings as David suggested.

LordHardDriven

silverdali said:

Spent Wine something i did about a year ago

Nice Render

David Brinnen

Well if you are open to suggestions... also consider ditching the default Bryce sky and trying something out from the sky library.

And maybe lowering your camera slightly and tipping it back so that the horizon occupies the bottom third of the image.

LordHardDriven

wilmap said:

Still learning Bryce, but here is a render using Skipper's model of Cromer Pier. Just used the Lifeboat Station portion and added some boats.

Nice, just one small criticism, the inflatable boat appears to be a foot or so above the water surface.

LordHardDriven

Well here's another old render I revived with a touch of DOF, also added some bubbles. The backgound or underwater cave scene was created by someone else (not sure who) and shared with me from David. I just added the diver and bubbles.

Wilmap

LordHardDriven said:

wilmap said:

Still learning Bryce, but here is a render using Skipper's model of Cromer Pier. Just used the Lifeboat Station portion and added some boats.

Nice, just one small criticism, the inflatable boat appears to be a foot or so above the water surface.

No, the RIB is in the water.

Wilmap

Thanks David, had another try with a different sky and moving the camera etc.

David Brinnen

So Wendy... how powerful is your computer? Will determine what I would suggest experimenting with. Are you with Pam, using the equivalent of a hamster lashed to a wooden abacus by an elastic band, or are you using something with more clock cycles per second than there are stars in the galaxy?

Oh and here is another tutorial... more aimed towards the advanced and terminally curious Brycers.

Bryce (TA) True Ambiance still life render of a red dragon - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen