Show Us Your Bryce Renders!
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Since you are so friendly to me, I also help you.
Yes, there is. Select the object you want to change. In the Edit menu, you find a tiny left-right arrow (marked with a red up arrow in the picture). Hold down the left mouse button when the moise is over it, then the tiny thumbnails appear. Still holding down the mouse button, move the mouse over the desired object thumbnail, then let it go and you have your object changed.
Thanks Horo I'm not sure I ever would have noticed that tiny left-right arrow. :)
I am not the fastest person in the world answering posts. For my excuse I only can say, that I grew up in a pre internet era. ;-) Thanks all for the nice comments.
No, no. It is just a little trick. The base of the grass is made with David's material and then I added nearly 100 grass objects (grass 17 as a matter of fact) with the Instancing Lab.
No, no. It is just a little trick. The base of the grass is made with David's material and then I added nearly 100 grass objects (grass 17 as a matter of fact) with the Instancing Lab.
Not such a "little trick" - that's a brilliant idea! I wish I'd have thought of it. Good thinking.
New tutorial. Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - radial lights - a 30 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
For example, this scene is lit with some of those radial lights, if you want to know more about them - much more - possibly too much, commit 30 minutes of your time to watching the video.
More confused, David? Naw, can't be more confused if you're still confused. :lol:
I do understand each channel can be used independently, many of your tutorials have shown this. But my confusion comes from not understanding how to use the Material Lab. When to set which "knob" in which section, Color, Value, or Optics.
In your example here, you've shown setting "knobs" in the Value section. Yet if we use the Abstract Tutorial, some "knobs" are set in the Color, Value, and Optics section. Then when making a perfect mirror, no "knobs" are set but the rods on the left are adjusted.
From your explanation here, am I to understand the main control, if you will, comes from the settings in the Value section? While the Color section controls the aspects pertaining to how the color is displayed? And then the Optics section controls how these objects react to whatever light they encounter?
Are you also saying, going by your example here, that A B C D only control what you've listed, or can each control another aspect or combination of aspects?
Once "knobs" are set, texture windows appear, which correspond to the channel selected. Toying with the Material Lab while writing this post, and thinking about this entire area, I'm beginning to understand that whatever channel selected within which section, the displayed texture will affect the choices based on how the texture is setup. So if "knobs" are set in the Color section then the color displayed will be affected by how the texture is setup or adjusted. Likewise with Value and Optics. Am I on track here?
My other problem deals with making choices when pressing the bottom right button on the texture window. You spoke of object space and world space in your example but I'm not sure I really understand what you mean. Object space means just that, referring to the object? And world space the area around the object? But then you have all the other choices. Oy...
I have tried to find an in depth tutorial on the Material Lab and the DTE, but have only found instances where both were used to modify textures. I realize these are showing how the Material Lab and DTE are used, but they don't fully explain the individual components of each one in depth. Maybe I'm grasping at straws here.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings. David, thank you for the help you've provided.
GussNemo,
You are definitely on the right track. A texture can provide colour, alpha and bump (heightmap) information. Depending which property you put your channel "blob" will depend what output of the texture is used. So a diffuse will look for the colour component of the texture. Transparency will try to find alpha and finally, the bump height control (and in theory displacement - if it worked) - would be interested in bump/heightmap.
If you look at the video tutorials under my name in the list, you will find quite a few specific to material lab and DTE. http://www.bryce-tutorials.info/bryce-tutorials.html many of those cover the topics you have touched upon in a great deal of depth. Also, my latest video tutorials are working in this area.
Bryce 10 minute material project - rainbow texture - a tutorial by David Brinnen
Bryce 10 minute material project - using the rainbow texture and scene converter - by David Brinnen
Even if you don't have the Scene Converter, you can still watch the video.
Edit: I'll give some thought to trying to come up with an introductory mat lab video - but all the combinations usually result in an almost bottomless list of potential ever branching routes to explain.
Because Horo has given me the idea and also because it is just so hot here (we have a little heatwave) I changed my grass picture. Now it has not rained for a long time. The grass has got dry and brown and even the leaves of the tree are loosing their lush green. And above a sky without any clouds.
@electro-elvis - In my oppinion, the colour of this grass looks more realistic. At least at the place where I live we have not enough precipitation and have to irrigate. Grass tends to be more on the yellow than the green side. The sky colour, by the way, looks fantastically real.
You should come and live where I live. It is precipitating as we speak, and the grass is the thing that is doing best in the garden, if you watch out the window long enough you can watch it grow, and it is a really lush green colour.
Right Now
Updated: Aug 21, 2012, 7:45pm Local Time
Locations nearby are reporting rain.
From WSW 10mph WIND
82% HUMIDITY
54° DEW POINT
@GussNemo - perhaps it would also help if you look at the Bryce doc. http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/bryce/start - the Bryce 7 Artist Guide is still a work in progress (for 1-1/2 years now without any progress), the Bryce 6 Artist Guide I can also recommended to look at.
Aha - then the weather hasn't changed a lot since I was last to Wales (south) in 1971. People change, the weather don't. :)
Aha - then the weather hasn't changed a lot since I was last to Wales (south) in 1971. People change, the weather don't. :)
Well before we actually moved here, when we just spent our holidays here we did actually manage a couple of times to find some good weather. 1992 I remember the farmers were moaning about drought, when we visited the Ebbw Vale Garden Festival.
Of course there were other holidays when the weather was more typical. I can remember being up in North Wales on holiday when they were panicking about radioactive rain after the Chernobyl disaster...when was that ? about 1986 I think.
"Rain, rain go to Spain...never come back to Ireland again"...Jeez it's been non-stop here, too.
Don't mind the grass growing too fast, but as for the weeds...can't find my spuds anymore...hehee, and don't get me going on about the slugs...grrr :)
Electro-elvis's location is somewhere I'd like to be right now - at least, there's hint of a sun (shadow on wall) in it. Very nice render...I could feel the heat coming out of it ;)
Jay
David, good to hear I'm on the right track. Now I just have to wait for the right train; aka, being patient in my learning. Not a strong suit. I will watch the videos you mentioned, especially the scene converter, since I've no idea exactly what a scene converter is or does. I've a guess, but have been wrong before.
Horo, thanks for the advice. I'd forgot I saved a PDF copy of Bryce 7 Artist Guide some time ago. Reading tech manuals is another "not" one of my strong points. I did try to access the Bryce 6 PDF manual but for some reason it wouldn't load. I'll have to try again later.
Speaking of green grass, around our area it depends on the variety planted as to whether it looks like Electro's first image or the second. Our yard has a mixture, but a family down the street has the first image. And we've been without significant rain for months.
Now weeds, we can do weeds. No problem. Rain, no rain, weeds around here are like rabbits. Perhaps if we try to grow weeds we'll get grass instead. It's how it works trying to grow grass.
Well, I've stared pondering an introductory video to the mat lab... I can't make any promises, but if I have added it to my to-do list.
Fantastic render Electro-elvis! That big tall vertical slice of sky, nice touch. If I were pressed for a criticism it would be that the wall is a little bit too straight for those rugged looking blocks. Not that it couldn't be like that, to be fair, that's just being picky for the sake. If DAZ 3D still had a functional gallery I'd tell you to get it in there, it's a winner!
Experiment with Boost light TA scatter corrected rendering. Render time 5 minutes at 64 RPP. Setup time about two hours, searching for a combination of material properties and light that didn't result in an excess or either noise or render time.
needs some more work
More work... to get the quality of light I was looking for I've had to abandon Boost Light and fall back on un boosted scatter corrected TA. Here the scene is lit with TA optimised HDRI backdrop generated from a Bryce sky. TA optimised radial light. Direct softened sunlight for the highlight and two weak yellow radials. The challenge has been to try and get the shadow regions to shift in colour from the yellow to a more orange tint, this I hope gives the impression of a biscuit baked clay - that and the slight bit of bump that has been added.
I don't know still needs some thing .
When one talks about TA Optimized lights I assume they're talking about the TA optimization slider in the light editor? If so I was wondering if someone could give an idea about how to think of that when using it and setting it. I mean it goes 0 to 999 so if someone sets it half way at 500 does that mean the light is only 50% optimized? Also what exactly does it do? How is the TA optimized light different then the same light unoptimized? Also it was mentioned that the HDRI rendered sky was TA Optimized, how does one do that? The few times I've done an HDRI rendered sky I don't recall seeing an option for TA Optimization.
Anyway here is another render based on yet another BCF centered around the vehicle prop called ISS Omega. It's a bit unusual in that I believe it's meant to be a space ship and it was used as a space ship in the remake of Planet of the Apes yet the BCF author decided to make it a submersable. Anyway I added the pilot, the cockpit glow and the sea monster chasing the ship to make it a more complete scene.
good action
Worked through David's tutorial on making grass and came up with the following image. It's just the texture on a default terrian, and maybe because the render settings weren't set correctly, took a little over an hour to render. Took longer making the texture due to too many thumbs.
Well done GussNemo, making that grass is not easy. The render time is not out of the way either, depends on the resolution of your terrain to some extent and also the angle of the light and how much shadow casting you allow in your scene. What choices you make there will determine render time, but other than a test scene, those choices will depend very much on goals you have set for the rest of the image.
Mark, TA optimisation is on my to do list, if you watched my radial light tutorial you will have seen I offered a brief explanation... which might just have looked like techno-babble? Time permitting I will address this when I've done a bit more research into the way it behaves.
This variant uses 100 softened 16 quality IBL (Treppenhalle2 by Horo) primary light provided through the specular channel and secondary via diffuse and ambient via TA scatter. Render time 10 minutes. 64 RPP. Offers deeper contrast than previous tests.
Hmm, I actually think this one looks pretty amazing. My own theory has been that Boost Light will produce too much noise in a dark room type of environment, but alas that doesnt seem to be a problem here. For my tastes this is moving in the right direction. You have successfully limited the noise which is the only drawback to the Boost Light tool. I'd say this experiment is quite successful. You could have done many things to get even more light spread, such as the radial you added in the later test that create a transition in the shaded areas. I think this looks really great. I;m not sure what more Bigh would have wanted, but I'd be curious to know.
Nice work on the subsequent ones as well.
Mark,
The TA Optimization slider in the Light Lab does not function. It was originally intended to function as an intensity slider, but instead it has been made to operate like any other light so that increased diffuse intensity alone increases the brightness of the output.
When it comes to a radial, TA optimization works by tricking TA into seeing a white sphere. TA gathers the whiteness of the virtual sphere and bounces that around as if it were really there. The idea with a TA optimized light source is that it will render much faster than a typical point radial, because the light doesnt come from a point but instead is gathered from a virtual 3d surface. To put it another way, Point lights and TA speak different languages, so TA gets really slow when there are point sources introduced. So creating a key light source that speaks TA's native language means much faster rendering. So again, TA sees a white sphere when TA optimization is enabled. Why does this matter?
What David probably did for his experiment was to place the dragon inside the boundary of a TA optimized light source white means that TA is seeing s white dome around the dragon blocking out the Black sky entirely. TA will then gather this white sphere on all sides instead of gathering the dark sky. The result should be a nice light coverage without he black pixels that would otherwise be gathered from the sky. Is that making sense?
I wish my work schedule wasnt so crazy I would love to be useful for these discussions. Keep up the good work! All of you.
GussNemo,
That grass looks fantastic!!!!!! Too bad Blend transparency is one of the slowest render processes in all of Brycehood. 3d meshes will always render much much much faster, but will be costly in other ways such as polygon count. Your example looks quite good. so if you can stand the render time I'd say go for it and keep it up!!!!!
Thank you Rashad, yes the scene was set up along those lines, somewhat, although I put the TA sphere to one side of the dragon just to give the light source a bit of direction.
Well, I have to thank Mark for asking such difficult questions since testing of TA has opened up some new avenues of investigation. Up until now I'd have been quite confident that objects could not be excluded from TA light, but it seems they can after all and it is in fact a bug that this does not work in the IBL tab when the HDRI is being used in TA optimised form... yes... it does sound like gibberish doesn't it?
Also I've discovered that in the case of the new light sources the TA light provided by them is governed not by their wire frames but by the unseen wire frames of the light sources they automate.
Additionally, I was surprised to find that falloff has an influence on TA optimised light from light primitives (other than for None which seems to replicate a linear response).
Gels don't work on TA - at least I've not been able to figure out how to make them yet... I've got some hope that it might be possible somehow - there's plenty to investigate here. This could take some time.
Okay well I'm not trying to add to your to do list or get you to expedite it. I just thought someone might be able to give a brief paragraph of what it actually does when you adjust that slider. I'm mainly curious because in that one scene (Trinity Atrium) the two renders that turned out okay I hadn't done anything to that setting. When I did a TA version though I set that slider on 999 for the 4 radial lights that light that scene. My thinking being that if I fully optimize the radials in the scene the TA render will turn out better then if I didn't optimize the radials. Of course that's the one that turned out poorly. I'm reluctant to just change the settings to test if that was what caused the problem because it takes nearly two days to complete in TA mode.
I haven't looked at many of the tutorials you've posted here because my wife recently had surgery (Gall Bladder) and so between making that happen and the after care I've had my hands kind of full lately. Now that I know you touch on it in the radial tutorial I'll make it a point to get that one under my belt sooner rather then later. Although after seeing so many successful results from others on your grass tutorial I must admit I'm kind of eager to see what I can do with it.
Okay so am I understanding correctly that if I want to do an optimized scene that renders quickly I should either turn off or strip out other lights and replace them with primitives with the transparency turned up? Is all this and more covered in the Bryce Pro IBL v TA Landscapes product because I'm definitely feeling confused. :)
David,
Occlusion from TA will likely be limited. TA is designed to search for sky information in any way that it can, so hiding the sky from TA will never be fully possible.
Mark,
I wish your wife a swift recovery. On the subject of TA, it is the prohibitive render times that lead us to test TA on only the simplest scenes, not items as complex as the Atrium because one will have fear of testing new settings. I usually do it like David, with a simple target that is rich with geometric facets so I can see how shading response from the light is represented.
Mark, I too hope your wife recovers quickly. BTW, really like what you're working on.
David, Thank you very much. It was a lot of head banging on the desk because I was going from the tutorial to Bryce, doing this, back to the tutorial, and somewhere in that time YouTube and Bryce ganged up on me and went to lunch.
Plus, I had several moments of a stuck HUA relay, which caused me to review what I'd done and in some cases completely start over. One particular thing stymied me while working in the Terrain Editor. In the tutorial, when you introduced noise to the new terrain, the preview window in the tutorial showed immediate results. And, based on the tutorial I expected the same thing to happen. Unfortunately that isn't what happened. I didn't see anything in my preview window but did see it on the terrain when I exited the editor. So, I keep apply noise until I finally saw something appear in the preview window and when I went back and looked at the terrian, it looked like porcupine quills. I decided what the heck, applied the grass texture and you've seen the results.
I'm not real satisifyed with the results because it looks more like a painting than real grass. But that could be due to camera and light placement--or anything else I don't know about. I'm thinking of making some adjustments to see if I can get more individual blades. I've also been looking for something like this grass for another image I made, something for a ground cover in a valley.