Show Us Your Bryce Renders Part 10
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Electro-Elvis . You certainly know how to pose your characters. Your lighting is perfect, although I'm not jealous of her tan, her skin is so believable.
C-ram - Thank you, , Another fabulous render, so tranquil ,the path is just fantastic By the way Marco, I've sent you a PM
Mermaid, Hansmar, Horo - Thank you for commenting
Horo - Very nice results . I like the translucency
Slepalex. I'm glad you found her. The second one looks much better. And the experiment on the mens skin looks flawless. I love your creation of the field, the vegetation seems to be swaying in a light breeze.
S Ray - Thanks for sharing your findings. I do like the materials finish
Launok - You do them so well... The finished product looks amazing. The addition of the hazard lights put a smile on my face
Dan - Sorry to hear about your eye.. Really nice render. She delicately looks like she had no time for the poor guy
Rashad. - Thank you for your encouraging comment. I'm following the lighting thread you started to see if my poor understanding of the subject can grasp some insight
DZiles - I saw the two different renders in the thread and this one is certainly much better. Nice work.
Trying to learn a little bit more about lighting, so I followed Slepalex suggestions on the lighting thread about using 2 dome lights to light up the scene,
@Horo + Vivien: Thanks a lot.
@Rashad, Peter: You are on the right track and you have already written it. It is an SSS map. For months now I have experimented with an SSS map, but I assigned it to the transparency channel and did not get really good results. In the worst case, which occured usually quite quickly, when the transparency value was only a little bit to high, suddenly underlying structures appeared, for example the teeth. Not really good. So I left the SSS experiments. But three days ago, when Rashad wrote about SSS and the ambient channel, I thought that might work. You have seen the result.
The good thing is, you must not draw an SSS map, it just comes with the Genesis 2 characters. Besides the surface, bump, specularity and other maps, there is SSS map in the texture directory of the genesis2 male and female. I found it there and simply tried it out. Maybe it is not perfect, and better map could be drawn, but it is a start.
Of course a drawback, Rashad had mentioned it, is the use of the ambient channel. It is quite likely that the ambience settings for the skin and those of the other materials in the scene are not compatible. Of course in my simple scene with my single character, Gene, this is not a problem. Therefore I wondered, how it a more complex scene would look like. The scene below is not carefully created, I simply arranged a few objects around my figur, but lighting and ambient settings remained the same as in my first scene (where just Gene is). To be honest, I expected a orange tinted scene, but surprisingly the result is not too bad. But for sure, further investigations must be done.
Here the Material Lab settings of the hand of the guy below, then the general settings and the more complex scene.
Slepalex - I find the render of the head quite good. However, I'm really not in character render, I even don't like to photograph people. I've read your's and David's comment at Deviant Art. You discussed PNG and JPG. It doesn't matter, Bryce must expand the compressed images before it can use them. There is no difference in memory used if you take a BMP or a compressed JPG. I've tested this yesterday again: loading an uncompressed BMP at 7500 KB and the same one as JPG quality 80% at 663 KB, both took 11.5 MB to load and display.
launok - animation of the night shot looks goo.
Dziels - your indoor looks great in my eyes; great modeling skills are evident. My experience is also that you get a lower contrast with TA. Without TA light and shadow can be better controlled with lights. However, it all depends what mood the artist wants to achieve.
vivien - thank you. Your render shows a very nice place.
Electro-Elvis - thank you for sharing. Gene looks really very good to me. Is it mandatory to have global ambient also the same as the skin colour or could it also be neutral white?
I experimented with another idea of David's: terrain-in-terrain. A 4000 BU square double stacked terrain in a 12,000 BU square double stacked terrain, each one with a different material. Only change: sky and the sun position.
Electro-Elvis: Good work on Gene!
Slepalex: This guy's skin looks quite good.
launok: Nice animation with the flashing lights.
DZiels: That is a wonderful render. Great modelling and superb light.
vivien: Very nice render. Maybe a bit too light at the front, but sufficient light in the shadow.
Horo: Wonderful renders. Great idea to combine terrains in this way.
Horo, I am aware that Bryce is no difference between the files JPG, PNG, BMP and others. You just do not know the context of our conversation with David. Together with the file geometry had two files: bump.png (32,2 MB 6000x6000) and bump-lowRes.png (368 KB 1024x1024). I thought that the bump-lowRes.png will be enough for the quality and convert it to JPG. You agree that only 32 MB Card "bump" this is too much.
Scene and model files is lost, but but kept a link to the free model. I would now like to make a new rendering.
Here's a new rendering of the head. There is no fake SSS. Render Premium TA 16 rpp, soft shadows, time 23 minutes.
Lighting: Sphere Dome Light for GI, Spotlight - the main source of illumination and Spotlight for illumination on the right behind. Bump-map with a resolution of 1024x1024. The same map in Specularity channel. The atmosphere is disabled. Since the color of the atmosphere affect the illumination of the object in the case of rendering a TA, I chose gray with a value of 127. Behind the head, I put dark gray 2D Face with disabled shadows.
Aha, I still know so little about Studio that I didn't know the figures used maps for SSS (or if I did, I forgot). I would certainly have tried that, which beats scribbling over the texture map hands down. Good find and smart implementation!.
The problem with using the ambient channel is that, even with the official SSS map, body parts are going to glow come what may. A black cat in a coal cellar (on a dark night during a power cut) is still going to have lovely backlit ears. That's why I turned to the lights method, as it can be applied directly and only where needed per scene. Might take another crack at it someday, as the lights in B7 can be made much less expensive in rendering times.
Vivien – Thank you. I really like your final temple ruin image. You did a great job with the lighting and plants.
Another lighting technique you might want to experiment with (if you haven't already) is a fill light. I sometimes put a standard radial light directly behind the camera and link it to the camera so that the light moves if I move the camera. Set the Falloff to None and set the light's Diffuse and Specular very low, about 1-3. That will show a little more detail in the shadows. The effect is very similar to a material's Ambiance property but the fill light affects everything in line of sight. No need to tweak every individual element. Thanks to Rashad, I've just started working with the 3D fill lights and those may yield even better results.
Horo – Thanks. I've been working with Bryce off and on since v4, over 15 years. I've learned how to build quite complex models out of the primitives and booleans. I could probably get even fancier with something like Hexagon but that's a whole other program to learn... I'm putting the finishing touches on an outdoor scene that I hope to post soon.
You seem to have a very refined technique for creating the stacked terrains. I'm always amazed at how naturally you get them to flow together. More often than not, when I try it, the results simply look like material A poking through material B.
Hansmar – Thanks. I really like your abstract work.
@Hansmar: Thanks a lot
@Peter Fulford: Thanks. Backlit ears ;-) that's the problem with ambient. You must carefully consinder how and when to use it. On the other hand, it can let the skin look quite smooth. I think, but have not doublechecked it, that DAZ3d studio uses ambient as well.
@Slepalex: Looks very good. Specularity driven by a bump map, Hm, nice idea, which did not came into my mind yet. I'm still not sure if I should ever use special specularity maps or not. When you have a close-up of a face it might be useful, but as soon as you use a long shot and you see the whole character, it is better to abandon the specularity map and use Bryce's specularity.
@Horo: Thanks. No global ambient must not have the same colour as in the ambient channel of the skin. But the global ambient has a big influence on the final look. As I have seen so far, black let the glow effect vanish, and white let it look quite pale. Strong colors e.g. blue could your figure turn into a smurf quite swiftly. Therefore I used quite similar color or shades of grey with a bit of red or brown.
Very convincing double stacked terrain. I'm afraid, I must have missed the terrain in terrain concept.
@Vivien: Beautiful scene and nicely lit. Inspires me to use dome lights to lit outdoor scenes once, too. Your result is promising.
@DZiels: That's a wonderful Bryce scene. The blurry spheres are intriguing. Good to have you in the forum. I'm a bit late but... Welcome!
@Launok: One thinks almost to hear the alarm horn of the theft protection in the rhythm of the blinking back lights.
Hansmar - thank you. The great idea is again from David, I'm too dumb to come up with such a concept.
Slepalex - thank you for the clarification.
DZiels - stacking terrains is also an idea of David. I have a video on David's YouTube channel and a transcript of the video on my website: Bryce & 3D CG Documents > Videos > Horo; 20. Stacking Terrains at the bottom of the page.
Electro-Elvis - thank you for your answer about ambient colour. David's terrain-in-terrain concept is a new idea and I still have to familiarise myself with it.
Electro-Elvis & Slepalex Your example and techniques have show me I need to start taking a new approach to texturing my figures in Bryce.
Horo Your explanation of Bryce uncompressing image textures files, I found very intuitive. But I do have a question. I combined the texture map's alpha channel in Photoshop, then save as a Tiff file. Instead of loading the color map in the first library window, then the alpha map in the second library window of Bryce's. So does Bryce have to uncompress the two different JPEGs the one loaded in library window 1 and the one loaded in library window 2? Where the Tiff texture image already has the alpha channel embedded (baked ) into it. So does Bryce only have to decompress just the one Tiff file? I have also started lowering all image dimensions. Anything over 2048 Px to 1024 Px and anything over 2048 Px to 512 Px which has really help when saving project ( less crashing}.
First one is 2 jpegs ...second one is 1 Tiff
This outdoors scene was largely done last winter but I was never really happy with the mountain stone texture. I reworked it recently and am much happier with the results. This was also originally done with TA but I think the 3D fill light handles the castle overhangs better so this version does not use TA. The TA also tended to give everything a bluish cast, picked up from the sky. It didn't seem that noticeable to the eye on the screen but was especially bad when printed. All colors looked washed out and muted. The 3D fill also solved that problem. I think this represents one of those “four days of summer” in the UK that David Brinnen mentioned in Rashad's thread...
It was rendered at 4k using premium effects at 4rpp and reduced to 1200. Render time was just over 5 hours.
Horo – This image does use some stacked terrains but they were a struggle. Thanks for the refresher of your tutorial.
Electro-Elvis – Thanks for the welcome. Yes, the spheres are fuzzy. It was a simple solution to convey the idea that they are not solid objects in the normal sense. You have done some really great work with figures. The human form is so complex it is difficult to get the skin and poses looking natural. You have done an excellent job.
S Ray - Bryce needs an image map to work with. Additionally, it must remove the pre-gamma that is in every 8/24 bit image, because Bryce adheres to a linear workflow. TIFF, BMP, PNG are image maps, maybe compressed; JPG is a data stream, not a map (96-bit TIFF and HDR have no pre-gamma, they are linear). Once an image is shown as a render or in a library, pre-gamma is applied to the pixel data again, which the display unit removes and you see the picture correctly. Linear workflow means no gamma, doubling the diffuse value of an object makes it double as bright and halving the diffuse of a light makes it shine half as bright. So there is no way around creating the picture map in memory.
I performed some tests which may or may not answer your question. I used the Leo as object and loaded a picture into the pictures lib, measuring the memory increase of Bryce only. I restarted Bryce anew for each measurement. We have to consider that opening the picture lib also loads it into memory.
Imgae 1: a colour picture (RGB) with 2.8 MB of data (a leaf from an Xfrog tree).
Image 2: a monochrome (grey) copy of image 1 with 0.9 MB of data.
Loading Image 1 into slot 1 increased memory usage by 14 MB (the library with Leo seems to take up 11 MB).
(A) Copy Image 1 from slot 1 and paste it into slot 2 increased memory by another 3 MB. This seems to indicate that the copied image stays im memory. The image in slot 2 is indeed monochrome.
(B) Loading the same colour image into slot 2 increased memory by 0.9 MB. It appears that loading a colour picture into slot 2 converts it first to monochrome.
(C) Loading Image 2 into slot 2 increased memory by 0.9 MB. Same result as (B), the picture is already monochrome. No change in memory usage.
An image with an embedded alpha map would be 32 bit (RGBA). If you load a 32 bit RGBA image (BMP/TIF) into slot 1, the Alpha channel gets removed and the memory usage is the same as when loading a 24 bit RGB image.
DZiels - you are welcome. I like your landscape render with the shadows of the clouds, lighting is very good. I also seldom use TA on landscapes but often IBL.
S Ray, in addition to Horo conclusions. Indeed, in terms of memory space and the size of the file is no difference between one TIFF file and 2 JPEG files. The only thing that the TIFF conversion to JPEG can be loss of quality, which could affect close-up with hair rendering. Especially if the black-and-white image is used in the transparency channel. Even on your screenshots, this difference is visible. From this standpoint, better use TIFF file. But this is my purely theoretical reasoning.
DZiels, a great landscape in terms of composition, texture and lighting! Even noticeable shadows from the clouds!
A sharp boundary of the shadow on the round tower of the castle - is the result of excessive values in the "Bump" channel. To me have pointed to this circumstance here at a forum in my scene with a lighthouse. In theory this boundary should be smooth. This contradiction exists in Bryce. Render with TA negates the value of "Bump", but increasing this value gives the sharp boundary of shadow.
Yes, I too have noticed long ago that in case of render with TA all scene gets a sky shade that contradicts subjective perception of the surrounding nature.
And further. Render this open scene is best done with the Dome Light, than with Fill Light from considerations render speed.
Electro-Elvis
This test is very good. As Horo suggests, it is almost always better to control the ambience of a surface by tweaking it at the Material lab level, rather than with the Sky lab. The Sky Lab Ambience color swatch provides the "potential" for colors in ambience, so the swatch should always be left as fully white. Consider if you apply a fully red color to the skylab swatch R255 B0 G0, and then you try to make a blue LED screen to glow on a sci-fi computer screen, it will not glow at all because no blue potential has been provided in the fully red sky ambience swatch.
The problem with "Ambience" is that it tries to do too many things at once. On the one hand, it wants to be a quick non shadow casting approximation of the indirect light scattered by the atmosphere striking a model, this is the SkyLab swatch. On the other hand, it wants to represent thermal excitation and faked transparency effects, that's the Material Lab. It can only do one of these two things at once and do it well, it cannot really do both. The foot on this guy is odd, but I assume its down to something with the ambience not being setup the same on the foot as the other areas of the body. Minor detail not worth mentioning since this was just a test.
Generally speaking, the lighting for all its warmth looks really good in this example, really good. It just demonstrates that for all of ambience's weaknesses, it can be very useful as a final tweak when more advanced light methods like TA or 3D Fills are doing most of the heavy lifting. Ambience cannot do much on its own.
Vivien- Nice landscape! Nice bright sun, good shadows. Good sky as well. You even have some sea foam, on the advanced side for sure. And a waterfall that looks natural. I'm curious as to where you got the dead looking plant type thing in the forground left corner? That mesh is fantastic, very natural looking. You're doing quite well with lighting in my opinion.
Horo- Both of these tests are successful. Seems almost cannibalistic. As usual, I want more. I wonder how far this ideal can be extended, could we have extended this to fill in the entire horizon? Sometimes these high res terrains cn soak up so much memory. Just curious how much ground this technique can cover.
Alexey- Great looking skin. It looks about as good as one could hope for in the current situation. The only thing that is lacking is the "softness" that skin is suppoed to have, that can only come from either SSS or some sort of fakery of the SSS.
Dziels- Great landscape! Im a stickler for scaling, so the only crit can offer is that the tree looks pretty big in relation to the castle, but both seem well lit to me. The 3D Fill is very useful in this example. But now sir, we need to talk about those volumetric clouds. First, you seem to have managed the impossible, the bottom of the clouds are flat (probably too flat, but no mind) while the tops of the clouds seem to be fully dynamic. HOW did you do this? Please please explain. Thanks Dziels!
Peter- The SSS maps I suspect are useful for 3delight renders, not for Iray. Iray should not need SSS strength maps except as a time saving hack compared to applying the appropriate physical settings.
First, yes, I agree the scaling looks odd. That has puzzled me for some time. I think the problem is that the entrance arch is too low and small and the battlements are too massive for such a small castle. I think that combination fools the mind. I built the castle to a scale of 1 Bryce Unit = 1 Foot, about 30cm – yes, I'm a backward American but not completely metrically challenged. I built the whole scene to that scale so the mountains in the background are a terrain 15,000 x 15,000 BU! The walls of the entry block stand about 36 feet (11m) above the waterline. The tree is 45 feet (14m) tall, perfectly reasonable for a big, old tree.
I stumped a Bryce Master?!? LOL!!! Thanks Rashad!
If you only knew how many hours I fought the DTE to produce those clouds. I was calling it the DFT – I'll let you puzzle out what those letters stand for. The DTE is incredibly powerful and flexible but sometimes it seems to function on Voodoo magic as much as computer logic.
As counter intuitive as it may sound, the solution to getting the flat cloud bottoms was to apply the material to the infinite cloud slab using object scaling and then add an altitude sensitive component to the cloud texture. At first I tried applying a component to subtract the bottoms of the clouds but that didn't seem to work (at this point I don't remember exactly what the result was but it wasn't pretty). In desperation I tried adding the altitude component and that ultimately worked. You can see all of my material settings in the attached image. I didn't use any Phase.
I think it works this way... The altitude component should be adding a solid uniform bottom to the cloud slab but the combination of density, edge softness, and fuzzy factor cancel out the solid bottom edge. What little density of the altitude component that remains simply adds to the density near the bottom of the volumetric clouds and fills in the gaps as it were to give the appearance of flat bottoms. I think it also explains why some of the clouds appear to have a lip or bumper around their bottoms. Volume materials seem to be very sensitive to density. Two components by themselves may not have enough density to fill a pixel but add the two densities at a pixel and you cross a threshold that fills in the pixel.
…Or I could be completely wrong and sound like I've been smoking some of my rejected prints... or it really is Voodoo magic.
Slepalex - Thanks! I guess the shadow on the round tower does look a little sharp. I may not have the shadow softness set high enough for the sun. I think I tried the dome light at one point and wasn't satisfied with the results but I'll give it another try. You have certainly produced some beautiful renders using dome light.
Thanks. I'm certainly no master of all things. The description you've provided makes sense, and it seems like things I've tried before, none to any level of success. I know there are recipes that do it but none of them look as good as what you've done here. The graphical images you've provided above will help me but I do still have a few other questions. But I'll see what I can come up with.
It would likely end up in more cursing, but the trick that aorks for the dissolved tops should be possible to rig for the bottom as well, so that the cloud produces only those pixels located in the middle of the mesh, in this case the volume slab. Object space and inifnite volumes are a very interesting study. Thanks so much for sharing this!
Those rejected prints must be comprised of hemp fibers. I'm sure those acrylics oxidize pretty well too. Yeah, count me in!
Electro-Elvis – another excellent person render, the second one is nice too except for the foot, something went wrong there.
Slepalex – nice head renders, the 2nd is much better.
Launok – the night animation is very nice, especially the hazard lights.
Dziels – Welcome to the forum, excellent lighting and awesome modelling in Bryce. Castle Tollie is awesome, love it. It’s really cool having an experienced Brycer sharing his renders and ideas with us.
Vivien – lovely place for a vacation
Horo –outstanding, beautiful landscape renders.
A Simple landscape using one of the Cloudscape presets from www.daz3d.com/bryce-pro-cloudscapes-5-example-one
@Hansmar - I have indeed called the police, lol!
DZiels, you probably do not understand my clumsy English. We are not talking about soft shadows from the sun! We are talking about the object of his own shadow. It should be smooth even if the softness of the shadows from the sun or any other source is set to zero. It's all about the value of "Bump"! Tell me, what value for the "Bump" is set for the material of round tower, and I'll tell you what to do.
Suppose that the value of "Bump" is 25. Then reduce this value to 5, and a own shadow of the object is smooth.
launok, do a very simple thing to objects in the shadows were not completely black.
1. Select the camera in any known way to you.
2. Copy of its matrix (Alt + C).
3. Create a Radial Light.
4. Paste the matrix (Alt + V).
5. Set the parameters for the Radial Light: Diffuse = 1 (more or less), Falloff = none, Cast Shadows = can be turned off.
These actions will help create the illusion of global illumination. That is, there must be an imitation of a secondary bounce beams from illuminated surfaces. In this case, all the shady areas of the objects are little lit and the scene will look more harmonious.
S Ray - Slepalex is completely right about the quality (or lack of) of compressed images. We would probably accept the trade-off if we could save memory when using compressed images, but we cannot. Additionally, what we seldom know is how much the image is compressed. Since there is no change in memory usage, using TIF or BMP is always the best bet. Depending on the size of the object(s) and the final render, images can always be downscaled to save memory.
DZiels - Thank you for sharing your volumetric clouds setting.
Rashad - thank you. I haven't tried to scale a terrain to 102,400 BU max size. Generally, terrains are not overly heavy on memory: planetary 4096 takes 32 MB, gigantic 2048 8 MB and massive 1024 2 MB. A triple stacked terrain will come to 42 MB and in the case of my tests above, the bigger terrain which is farther away has a 1024 and 2048 terrain and the smaller one closer to the camera 4096 and 2048. The memory usage is therefore 50 MB.
Mermaid - thank you. Brilliant render, I like how the shoreline looks.
launok - the coppers are a cool addition, looks like a real urban scene.
Horo, you probably would like to address this message S Ray, but not DZiels? :-)
I mean the file format...
Slepalex - you're right, thank you. I corrected it above.
I see some really good usage of Bryce, and I see alot more folks using it than when I last came around these parts
Wonderful work everyone, I have enjoyed catching up on all the Renders (and discussion) thats been done in the past year or more.
Rashad - I've had another idea about trying to subtract the cloud bottoms and I'll try some experiments when I get a chance.
Mermaid - Thanks for the welcome and the kind words. I love your latest image. I'm ready to dip my toes in those tropical waters right now...
Slepalex - Now I understand what you meant. I had too high a bump value. Could be. The stones are supposed to be rough. They are not finely finished blocks. They are rough stones pulled out of the fields and cemented in place. I did reduce the bump about half 34 down to 15. I think if I go lower it looks too smooth. I'll think about the results. Thanks you for the suggestion.
The mesh breaking with bump is a common occurence in a lot of rendering software. Octane only just recent fixed it. Something about the bump breaks the smoothing along the shadow terminator. I agree with SlepAlex, best to use a lower value than typically assumed for bump settings.
Also I look forward to your volume cloud studies. Thanks for sharing!
Hello there!
It's been ages... at least one anyway since I've been here. So many new artists on Daz3d's forums, some people I know from good old bryce5.com. Nice to see you Rashad, Horo, how are you guys doing :)
Got a bit nostalgic and decided to see what's new here. When I saw this topic I decided to dig up some works to share, two of those were revised just for fun - 'Deflection' spheres with 4k repainted texture so it could render at higher res and the bane relic cross I made creepier. The rest of the pics you most probably know from before. 'Morty's best friend' I'm placing with its actual original res, which is larger then what I uploaded back in '08. I hope all of that can make you ppl smile and perhaps bring some nice memories to those that we know each other back in the day. To all the artists here - keep the creativity torch lit and close by, be patient and inspired! Cheers!