Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 5
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@Trish: Shhh...Shhh...don't say that much louder. I could get a complex, or it could get more complex. A pro at the tutorials, naw, I just eat a lot of bananas. Thanks for the compliment.
To use that light probe you displayed is just like loading a program from a file. In this case the program is Bryce and the file is wherever you've saved the .hrd files. Those that you posted a picture of can be stored anywhere on your HD you chose, if I understand correctly. Look at Horo's large picture at the top of page 53, and right below Cloud Cover, is a preview pane(?) which shows you what the loaded .hdr file looks like. To load the .hdr file of your choice, click on the radio button to the left of Use HDRI then click on open. Then search the HD for the file containing the .hdr files. Chose the .hdr file you want, click Open and the .hdr file will load into Bryce. Using these is exactly like using the sun, you use the controls directly under the .hdr preview pane, and those to the left. You don't have to actually show the context of the .hdr image, that is show what the .hdr picture is as you did with the one with the tree, but you can if you chose. I mostly use the HDRI for added light, but David has shown in some of his tutorials using them without the light control settings.
@Gabriel: Love the water in your test image.
@Rareth: Thank you. You also produce some mighty fine objects, and images. I had trouble with that same bevel, until I figured out I was grabbing the wrong edge. And still I had to toy with it to get something nice.
@Dave: IMHO, the folks you're doing this for would be nuts not to accept what you've done so far. Again, IMHO, mighty fine work.
@Fire Angel: Nice job, and so love the colors. I've got some rattles that you go perfectly with those objects.
Ok, gave the icosahedron tutorial a try, several times, several several times; I so can't multi-task. The first image is from following the tutorial. The second is the same but I loved how the material turned out. Three and four and my own additions.
BTW, has anyone bothered to feed the squirrel lately? Or oil the squirrel wheel? Pages are loading slower and slower.
Guss; ok I got to ask this...The second one is the material made in Bryce??? or in wings then imported in Bryce...Its metal....ohhhhhh.....aahhhh......you know how much I like metal ...how did you make the material???????
ok so the HDR is extra light.....that's what I couldn't wrap my head around....I was thinking why do I want a picture of someones living room in my renders.....Man I am dense sometimes just hit me in the head with a rock....Poor Horo and David trying there best to explain how its made and how to load it......so that's my simple answer it is an extra light source......point me to a David tute where he uses this without using the light controls......Please.....This whole time I thought it was a silver ball.... or like a sky dome in Daz.
Fire angel, I suppose if anyone has to admit to having some kind of problem it should be me... The model on the left is really cool with the plasma effect material inside!
Dave, looks really professional now with all the graphics laid out.
Jamie, super renders, the last is the most interesting, you've got a good balance between your background, colour and lighting. Excellent.
So... here's one or two shapes I've been working on.
Yes, you're getting it now. When you load the HDR into the sky lab and use the IBL setting, it is a way of naturally lighting up your scene and therefore it acts like a 360° light, lighting up your model from all around it instead of a direct light (radial or spot) which will only light up the surface it faces.
But it is also a backdrop and a way of providing more detailed reflections and highlights on reflective surfaces.
So I've quickly knocked together a series of six pictures below demonstrating.
!. Standard render using the Bryce sun. You can see how the shadows are hard and solid because no light is hitting the bit's which aren't directly lit by the sun.
2. I've loaded an HDR into the IBL tab in the sky lab. Now you can see that there is no solid black parts as the objects are lit from all around by a series of lights provided by the HDR probe. You can see by the number of hard edged shadows that several light sources are used. Also any reflective surface will have a detailed reflection of the HDR.
3. To disguise the fact that several individual light sources are being used, there is an option in the IBL tab to soften the shadows. This gives a much more natural effect to the lighting.
4. The HDR file itself can also be used as a detailed backdrop for your scene and it's ideal as the backdrop will match your lighting conditions better as the 360° image is providing the light from all around, just like in the real world.
5. You can switch 'use as backdrop' off if you only want to use the light and not have any extraneous reflections or background clutter.
6. Different HRDs will give different lighting with a different colour casts, darker or lighter shadows etc. Compare pic 6 to pic 3 directly above it to see how the light colour and reflections all add to the mood you're setting up by using an HDR probe.
Hope this helps a bit more. :)
@GussNemo - very nice rings and nicely presented. Icosahedrons also look very nice. I like the second most, it's so shiny.
@GabrielMOREAU1968 - the effect came out fine.
@TheSavage64 - Zeus draft looks very good.
@Fire Angel - icosahedron-based objects look great.
@Trish - load "LR-n_rtre7.br7" which is in the folder "BryceScenes" and look a bit how it's done. Your render is a panoramic one, the camera is not level and that's why you have the room not straight, and if you tone-map and reduce Intensity in the IBL tab, it will look a lot better. As Dave pointed out with his excellent example renders, it's light and backdrop.
Just in case it helps anyone.
Image based lighting: Why.
In the early days of CG graphics all rendered images used point light sources. This gave the characteristic hard-edged shadows that can be a give-away that an image is CG and not a photograph. Later software started to allow soft-edged shadows when the computers became fast enough, and various ways were found to simulate ambient light; ambient light is the all-around light that comes from the sky or from the light reflected from the walls and objects in a room. Still, most of the light was from small lights placed in the scene; with careful placement of a lot of lights of carefully chosen colours, true photorealism became possible but it was a lot of work.
The problem of realistic lighting arose because in the real world very few scenes have point lights in them; a light bulb has a surface area and so creates shadows with slightly soft edges; the same is true of the sun because it is a disk in the sky not a point of light. In addition the light on an object doesn't just come from the most prominent light source in the scene, it comes from the sky or reflected light form the walls of a room and other objects. These differences between the way light bounces around to light objects and the way software was lighting a scene created all the difficulties that CG special effects crews had to overcome with loads of carefully placed coloured lights.
Imagine a scene outside in the countryside; one woman is sitting under a tree reading a book. The book is not directly lit by the sun because it is in shade, but light from all over the sky strikes the book, some reflected light form the woman's skin, hair and clothes, and even some light reflected off the leaves of the tree and nearby grass. So if we make a CG image of the book we would have to work very hard to light the book so that it looked real.
A software team one day asked themselves; "what if we take a photo of the scene around the tree, wrap it onto a sphere that surrounds our model and use that to light the book?" The idea is to simulate all that light coming from the sky, the leaves, clouds etc. by using an image wrapped around the CG model. It's tricky to program properly but this is image based lighting. It makes achieving realistic light much easier as the CG artist only has to use the single image to light the scene - in theory. However since the image is being wrapped around the scene it has to be mapped in a suitable fashion for the method used by the software, hence the strange distorted images you see used. There are several common ways to map images for use as an Image Based Light, but all of the apparent distortion comes from the way that the rectangular image is designed to be wrapped onto an imaginary sphere or cube (a few systems use a cube, Bryce and most others use a sphere) surrounding the scene.
Continued from my previous post.
HDR: Why.
So now we know why the IBL pictures are distorted, why HDR images and not normal photos?
Using a standard JPEG image we have normally got 24-bit colour, that is 8 bits red, 8 bits green and 8 bits blue. This gives 256 possible levels of brightness to each colour in the image. This is plenty for viewing photos on a computer screen or on paper, but when you want to use the image for an IBL system there's a problem. Let's go back to the book being read by that woman under the tree; some of the light falling on the scene is from the sun, some is reflected from leaves, clouds, the sky provides light, and there is light reflecting off the woman herself.
But now our lighting software has a problem; if we're using a normal 24-bit image we only have 256 levels of brightness. However the light from the sun is thousands of times brighter than the light coming from the sky, which in turn is hundreds of times brighter than the light reflected off the surrounding grass and trees. Early software for IBL used a special form of brightness remapping to solve this, with the brightest parts of the image providing the light multiplied internally before their effect was calculated. Images had to be specially prepared though, so that only the sun was at maximum brightness, or other light objects might provide too much light and cast extra unwanted shadows. Still these systems worked and made lighting complex CG models realistically much easier.
Then came HDR images. High Dynamic Range images don't just have a brightness range limited to 256 levels; depending upon which HDR format is used they can have hundreds of thousands or even millions of brightness levels in them, just like real life scenes. In fact they can represent everything from the blackness of a moonless night to the brightness levels in space orbiting the sun with no atmosphere in the way. There is so much more brightness information stored in an HDR image that no computer monitor can actually display them properly, since no monitor can make light colours millions of times brighter than their darkest black. What we see on a monitor when we view an HDR is a dynamic range compressed version that squeezes all of the brightness levels into the range of the monitor so that we can view it. Even the special HDR monitors used in some areas of the movie business can't display them perfectly, but they do a better job of it that a standard monitor. Those monitors make night scenes quite hard to discern as they should be, but people actually need sunglasses to view an HDR image of a bright sunny day on such a monitor. These monitors are thousands of dollars each and use a lot more electricity than a standard monitor.
So HDR images used for image based lighting allow the sun to be thousands of times brighter than other light sources and for all of the brightness levels to have a realistic relationship. This means that when the image is wrapped around the scene the light levels can be calculated much more easily as the levels can be directly taken from the image rather than calculated from a multiplication formula to stretch them as early IBL systems did. Rendering is faster because of the reduced amount of calculation that is needed, but the results also look better too.
Dave; thank you so much for the examples I have saved everything as a reference now I can start my experiments.......cool
Fire angel; good history
Horo; As always I appreciate your help
David; your shapes are great
@Trish: Glad you like the material but it came with Bryce Pro. In the Material Library go to Metals --> Christmas Balls --> 2nd row --> 8th material, Christmas Ball 17. I used the same material for the continuous rings in the previous image(s). So far it does look like metal when used, but if you look at it in the Material Library it doesn't look metallic.
As to a tutorial where David didn't use the HDR for lighting, I can't remember which ones these would be. Best you look at his tutorials on YouTube or at this site, which lists all of his tutorials; look under the tutorial section. Look at those tutorials that deal in any way with lighting. Basically, and Dave mentioned this, you can use an HDR for additional reflections by setting Intensity, Specularity, and HDRI Effect to zero in the IBL section of the Sky Lab; because I have an elementary understanding I may have missed some setting which must be unused. You still have the HDR image but it isn't broadcasting any light just providing reflections on any reflective surface. I hope my limited understanding is helping you understand how to use the HDR probes.
@David: Neat objects, just a few huh? Thanks for the work, it's been fun, and frustrating at times, giving them a try; the icosahedron was quite a challenge because Wings didn't watch your video and wouldn't "I" and "L" properly. Thanks for the compliment, I have been trying to remember composition in choosing materials and textures that compliment each other. Sometimes one eye likes it one way and the other eye likes it another other way, and sometimes they both agree on the same thing. I questioned if that object would display well because the shell extrusions were real clean. In default color there are some very rough spots but material seems to have hidden those places..
@Dave: Real good explanation about HDRs. Very helpful.
@Horo: Thank you very much. I tried displaying all three objects in one image, but somehow lost material for the chains when I Resumed Render and saved to render the following day. Nothing I knew would bring back the material so I made three images. The continuous material, in the individual chain image, didn't turn out as intended. I chose two materials but only one rendered. Very strange. I liked that material also, though I was unsure it would enhance the intruded parts well.
I continue my experiment of reduced transparency with depth ...
Tuto (in French - sorry) : http://www.3d-diablotine.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18799
Textures from pro-material (David)...
Whale in sculptris...
No post-work - just a color adjustment in Photoline.
Sorry Stuart, I missed this earlier.
Oooooops. Yup silly me for not double checking these things... thanks. :)
That's pretty cool, Gabriel.
So while I had the IBL set up open, I took the opportunity to do another render of a motorbike (I haven't done one for quite a while as I've been working on my own motorbike).
Dave; Beautiful paint job !! did you do that also??
Indeed I did. :)
The left one is my favourite too, in fact I have plans to make a variation of it that might be even more interesting to look at, just by changing the materials.
Nice, where was that taken? The stone reminds me a bit of Derbyshire, but I got the impression you were further "up North".
Jamie, I've been busy - er... or if you rather - unwholesomely obsessed.
That's Yorkshire sandstone that is... Though sandblasted to high heck (I don't know why they can't just leave it all soot covered black). :)
Nice Motorcycle.. both of them..
still playing around with Wings3D no tutorial results this time, just me noodling around with the software
Rareth; Great job on your own!!
Dave; Is that you garden in the background behind your bike?? If so looks like you can grow some nice plants also.
@Dave: The cycle in the image looks like a kit model, great work. And your real one is sweet, nice paint job.
@Gabriel: What a neat image. Were the whales difficult to create in sculptris? I tried something once and ended up with more polygons than I started with and still had a ball of clay.
@David: It does seem you have become a bit obsessive, or rather, going around in circles. They all are nice looking.
@Rareth: Neat objects, cool images.
No, it's not my garden. I don't have a garden. I spend too much time at the computer and bike riding to tend to plants. :)
@Guss: Yes, it's turned out looking like a small scale model hasn't it. I think it's the height of the camera that's added to that illusion.
This one looks more life sized, though it's not much bigger scale than the previous one.
http://www.renegademc.com/index2.html
This thread is moving very fast.
As usual all the renders are all outstanding. Thanks to everyone who commented on my last image.
Trish – all your renders are lovely but being a horse lover I adore the stable ones.
Dave – as usual all your renders are amazing, the lighting, materials, overall composition –all perfect harmony. Thanks for the screenshot and explanation about hdr.
Rareth and Guss – all your renders are lovely. Both of you have made some very cool interesting objects in Wings 3D.
Elvis- interesting expression – I wonder what she is thinking.
Fire angel- really cool space scene and the Icosahedrons objects Thanks for the cool info about hdr
Raindrop—really nice. How did you get the batman.
Gabriel-very nice effect.
David – Thanks once again for all the lovely videos and your renders are always top notch. I picked up the Icosahedrons video on YouTube. I don’t quite get the effect but here’s my take, a simple render, using Horo’s Rock and Tree Hdri once again. This hdri just seems to work for me. Thanks Horo.
I didn't do it on purpose... I created a terrain by pressing fractal at random, placed a camera, chose a sky, and rendered. Next thing you know... Batman.
@Dave - bike looks very cool. Your modelling?
@Rareth - great shapes, again.
@mermaid010 - that is a very nice model. I like the modest presentation. It draws the eye to appreciate the model, not the colours. Very well done!
@Gabriel - looks very nice. Have you tried to use a cube for the water and give it a high refraction velue? Here are the settings and the result. Si jamais ca t'intresse.
Merci Horo... Très interessant.
It looks like a swimming pool of nuclear reactor.
But I continue with my method ... The stack of layers gives good results I think.
Liberty form here : http://www.3dcadbrowser.com/download.aspx?3dmodel=2089
@Dave: Material used for the ground in your latest does give this bike a life size feel. Still, way cool looking bike.
@mermaid: Really like your results on the icosahedron. Extrusions really draw the eye to the object. Nicely done.
@Gabriel: Neat results.
I did a comparison for anyone interested on the mil. horse and the new horse2....Rendered in daz it does not matter he comes out fine.The only difference I can tell with them is the base of the tail is thicker on the horse 2 plus his mane is longer...but does not go all the way up his neck like it should. Otherwise to me its the same animal.............Trish