Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 9
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The terrain shapes and materials are good. But I think the thing that really sells this scene is the light and the haze. Getting the haze level right is very tricky I find. I often set it too high to begin with and end up turning it down a bit with each iteration of a scene.
Speaking of iterations... I continue to faff around underwater. Probably because it is not something of my every day experience I find underwater a very difficult subject.
I've had a break from the caustics for a while and decided to explore some other effects. The streaming light rays are stimulated directly by the caustic light via a hypertexture driven diffuse response on an otherwise invisible surface, other light sources are excluded from interacting with this surface. Also a "wibbly" sheet of material sits in front of the camera to add some distortion. "Bits" floating in the water, again occupy an otherwise invisible surface and are likewise reveled by the streaming rays - hypertexture and boost light make them visible and sharp. HDRI lighting provides a low level of general ambient. Haze adds to this illusion. Two point lights provide "dappled" light via a gels (though this does introduce some noise do to a gel light bug I don't feel it is a sufficient issue not to use this effect) and the sun through specularity creates highlights on the waters surface, again an exaggerated response via hypertexture and also some ambient effect to lighten the "foamy" bits up.
But...
As clever as all that sounds, the question is... does it yet look like we are underwater? Having now sunk (I put that pun in for Dave's benefit) many hours into fine tuning aspects of this scene. I can't really be as objective about it as I should.
The Stanford dragon is there as a shadow casting test. An earlier iteration lacking this feature took me down a route that while promising would not work with additional props in the scene. So that's why that is there.
Render time has risen due to the addition of effects and light sources to around the ten minutes mark.
Another fun one. I used a few elements brought in from DAZ Studio again; the rushes, dead tree, the shield and spear; the Elf (below the bridge) and the lizard man I already had. The 'wave' below the bridge, that is supposed to be the sea or a lake, I made for another render but it never looked as good as it does here. The Weeping Willow is one I made in the tree lab and the bridge came with Bryce. Lighting is from the sky as HDRI and the sun.
Watching
i think that is very close to being a very convincing underwater scene :) ...the only thing i can notice that might sell it even more, is if the caustic effect had a tiny bit more of sharper lines, by sharper i mean more straight and pointy lines....if that makes any sense ? ....but otherwise i think it looks awesome :)
Thanks Vivien and Dragonfall. Very nice renders from everyone. :-)
Minor caustic update.
Fishtales, nice contrast in that render, lighting is working well. HDRI tends to bring out the bump better than GI solutions like TA. So you can get away with less. Apparently, according to the programmers when the topic of bump behavior was under debate, a level of 20 bump, for the full transition across the height map was the maximum "realistic" value. That's not to say don't use more, but it does offer 20 as a starting point for modifications. Sometimes though I end up using a bump of over 1000, as I have in the underwater scene for the underside of the sea. So it is not a rule I feel the need to stick to.
Thank you David.
The bump on the wall, if that is what is drawing your eye, is 72. I usually like to try some displacement too, normally 7 or below, but for some reason that scene wouldn't let me. Looking at the Task Manager is was showing a memory bleed that caused the memory to slowly rise to 3.8Gb and then Bryce would shut down. I am trying it again with the 0.3 displacement and so far it is rendering normally :) We will see how the wall turns out when it finishes, it says 55 mins for the render.
@ David, its looking better and better with each update :)
Good to know. It's a slow process. OK after gathering some feedback, light angles and distribution have been adjusted, the haze thickened and now DOF added.
This render took nearly and hour.
I then tried adding a material grass effect to simulate seaweed. This did not mix so well with Premium Effect - render time rocketed to days even at 16 rpp! So I'm trying that out now with regular rendering and maybe think about working on some postwork DOF effect using Bryce's distance masking as an option to have both effects. We'll see... the grass test is going to take "a while" by the looks of things.
@ David, i might have missed it or you may have mentioned it already, but I am just wondering how you got the tiny bubble effect...that looks really cool, and is something i would like to try :)
David- now it looks more like an underwater scene, looking forward to seeing the one with the grass.
I found this cool model on Tf3dm and revisited this tutorial Hypertexture driven ambient reflection mapping - by David Brinnen
Cheers,
David.
Edit. Thanks Mermaid, must of crossposted. Yeah, bit by bit, it feels a bit more underwatery... but it is a bit of a slog and each step raises the render time quite a bit.
@ David, thanks for the help with this, and Email sent :)
i thought i would share what i have been working on today :)
@David Brinnen: I see you are getting closer and closer to a great underwater scene. But, I think the light in the last one is (way) too strong. I do not think light shining through a layer of water can be that blinding.
@Fishtales: Lovely bugs you have there. The wood blocks are the least impressive part. Too smooth. Could do with some irregularity (displacement, if it does not crash Bryce?)
The bridge render tells quite a story. I would have missed the elf, if you hadn't told us. But then, that is the point of hiding, isn't it?
@mermaid010: Nice abstract. How about trying some very different texture to make it more colourful? (I know, I am such a lover of contrasting colours!). And very cool scene on/in that nice bowl. Great idea.
@Sean Riesch: Impressive air war scene.
@dragonfall1221: This is a very nice scene. I think that with the proper approaches, such as those indicated by Sean, there should be no reason why Bryce would not be able to do this scene. Keep trying to limit the size of the file. You can also use a Process Monitor (Horo knows the link) that can show you real-time if the memory use of a program rockets sky high. Then you know whether this is really the issue.
@Tim Bateman: the landscape on april 9 is a bit dark, or maybe very hazy. Clouds look great, though! The 10 april render is wonderful (though again a tad dark for such a tropical daylight scene, maybe).
wow awesome Bryce renders from everyone....
I however have been caught up in the IRAY craze in Daz studio 4.8.. free Physically based renderer. so I haven't ben able to devote any spare cycles to Bryce.
@Sean Riesch - thank you so much for the advice! I tried using instancing on my pomegranate tree file, and it dropped from 95 MB to 15 MB! can't wait to get to the oleanders (20 trees), or the forty different terrains I have to make up the grass patches. I now have hope that I can finish. thank you again!
@Tim Bateman - If you didn't tell me those were render I'd think it was a photo. Absolutely beautiful. Especially the beach scene
@vivien1 - thank you! My Bryce does the same thing. It's why I decided to do my project in pieces to avoid the wireframe horror
@fishtales - thank you! I do need to lift the shadows a bit. Hopefully with Sean's advice I'll have enough leeway to make changes like that.
@hansmar - thank you
@David Brinnen - Gorgeous underwater scene. All you need now is a snorkel :)
Fishtales. Nicely done.. I would persevere to do something with that wave if I was you.
David - Brilliant work . I feel the sun rays in the second one seem give the creature the sence of more movement. And the seaweed would certainly add to an already realistic underwater scene.
Mermaid - I like the reflection you have given this model.
Tim Bateman - Lovely beach cove.
Found a light ray texture in my Materials and had a play with it. It is on a stretched cube tilted back, also a volume Sphere with the Atmosphere Glow volume texture from the materials lab in front. Castle is Ivy Castle from DAZ Studio. Lighting is HDRI from the sky, Light From Inside, and the sun.
Castle Ray
I calmed the rays down a bit in this one :)
Castle Ray 2
Tim- all your renders are awesome especially the skies with beautiful clouds
Hansmar – thanks
Vivien1 – thanks. Is the farmhouse something you brought over from Daz
Sandy – the ray effect is nice, not sure about the castle though, seems out of place.
mermaid010
Just something to use up the empty space, as are the trees :-)
With the "grass" it took about eight hours to render. It initially claimed for less... but... once it hit the AA pass. I tried for DOF too and it hit a wall.
So I've gone back to the drawing board and restructured the scene to use premium effects and soft shadows and TA.
As much as I wanted to use Bryce procedurals for the caustics, there were two problems. One being that to apply a procedrual as a gel on a lightsource caused render noise due to a bug. A way around this was to actually fit the gel in front of the lightsource on a 2d surface. This then has the issue that the 2d surface might be visible in the render. The second and greater problem was in spite of trying for a few days now I had not been able to produce satisfactory results for the caustic pattern.
So this caustic pattern is rendered externally and brought in as a texture.
Lighting... I've stripped this down to two lights. One used directly to project the caustics (with a gradient applied to give a sense of depth) and a second used to work in the water surface and then through TA bring that light down into the water.
Render time for this at 64rpp. About an hour. Which for a TA render is quite acceptable to me, and gives me access to DOF and soft shadows at the same time.
The 2nd ray effect is awesome, I love the effect. I'll rather have the space than the castle. ;-)
The 2nd ray effect is awesome, I love the effect. I'll rather have the space than the castle. ;-)
Like this perhaps? Softened the rays a little more.
@ David, wow....they came out very nicely, great job :)
@ Mermaid, thank you :)
I experimented with volumetric clouds lately. The island could need a bit of work.
Beautiful cloud forms, very impressive!
@David : your undersea scene is very inspiring. Caustic effect is looking good here and I particularly like the render with grass. I wonder how it could look with xfrog undersea plants.
@electro-elvis : wow! Nice cloudscape!
@ David, I had a very good look at the scene file you sent me and set one up of my own using your settings, this is what i came up with :)
Thanks Marco, I think maybe Tim has answered that in his last render which looks very nice.
I've been focusing now on scene optimizations. For the same RPP I've managed to drop the render times from over an hour down to five minutes. Which is far more acceptable to me. And testing some variations, the first four are 16rpp tests and the last one at 64rpp. Another Bryce scene was used to process the caustics patter, splitting it into spectral channels and softening it. Those renders took a little longer to perform, but the resources once made can be reused in many scenes.