UltraScenery - new territory [Commercial]
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Ah. OK. Should be able to find that.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/464181/released-alienator-pro-commercial/p1
Cheers,
Alex.
@barbult
Not only a lovely render as always, but your instructions are clear and gratefully received by me.
Thank you for all your work adding in our knowledge of this and other products.
Mary
You are welcome. I want other people to enjoy UltraScenery as much as I do, so I help whenever I can.
This'll be my experiment scene I think for learning Alienator Pro.
But yikes, what an ordeal this setup turned out to be. Not so much on the USC side, but working with an older LAMH figure. They don't take to being much distance away from Zero for the fur/figure to sync it seems, nor is re-applying a fresh preset to a figure that already had one always reliable. So, I used an unfurred figure parented to a Null to pose, saved out the pose, made a new scene & brought in a fresh figure with the LAMH Preset, applied the pose, genrated the fur, then parented those to the Figure, deleted the Preset items, then saved that out as a scene. I then opened the main scene & performed a Merge with the freshly posed & furred Jaguar at the Origin.
I wish they'd fix that issue with the Main scene's Enviroment settings getting changed to that of the incoming Merge scene.
Anyway, I then parent that to the position null with In-Place off. I can't do any reposing with the figure of course, just simple transforms with the null. But I won, this time.
Where all this started was when I flipped to the current WWF (Wildlife, not Wrestling) June page and thought that'd be a great image to recreate, and I already have the parts.
A fine example of what I was wondering about! Thanks for the tutorial!! It gives me a great idea of how to do the workflow. Awesome!
the smaller render is really fantastic!
I feel your pain, Doc. I'm doing the same thing - refactoring an image I made several years ago that had half-a-zillion individual plants, some Big Cats and an intrepid explorer. It just begs to be a real US Jungle. And the cats need fur. I've just spent the entire day (so far) trying to get fur on just one of them. Even saving a temp file takes forever...
Making some inroads with Alienator Pro. Trying to find suitable flora in my library.
I got somewhat lucky on the Jaguar's placement. The time of day window where there's not major shadowing on a nice spot by the water with this thick forest is narrow. Trying to sort out Pebbles from Rocks from Stones that you can't see w/o test renders is always fun though.
What's the fur issue?
Here is my project for today. I wanted to see how hard I could push the scene. I wanted to see if I could achieve a wide open landscape look. To break away from the "small world" I generally end up with in my renders.
There are two UltraScenery terrains, one is used twice, the other is used three times. There are a half a dozen imported OBJs (the city in the horizon), one Dragon 3, two Spiked Dragons, Torment 8.1, half of the Rage Armor and half of the Elven Royal Armor.
It just barely fit in the memory of my two video cards.
Hello
Pacific Northewest is an amazing product to do really dense forest and, at last, I found a more or less easy workflow to render in Octane stand alone with my old 680 GTX . It worked smoothly even with the use of extend forest.
Thousand thanks Howie for these amazing products.
An old oak gnarly trees forest "The Lord of the Ring" style would be great :-) !
Here is a fresh render still not sure about the postwork
Very nice. Not sure what your concern is over the post work, the detail looks great for a fantasy setting. The subdued pixie dust and fog really work well too. The duller background colors really give the impression of a dense, deep forest.
The only area of improvement I see is the colors on the rider and horse. The single ghost texture seems to lose a little impact, the details get lost in the single tone... Try rendering a second time with a traditional shader on them, then layer it over the ghost image. Using a transparency layer, plus some judicious eraser work you can give the figure more definition without losing the over all ghost effect.
Setting the transparency to a barely visible 10% can give just enough definition to make it more ethereal / spooky.
Thanks Jason!
and very good idea! I redid 3 times my "ghost effect" and not completely satisfied. You nailed it ! I will definitively try your solution. That's typically the kind of feedback I'm waiting to try to improve :-)
Thanks again
You're welcome and I am glad that it helped. I was dancing around the words; I didn't want it to be read with an intention that I didn't mean. Honestly, the image you got is pretty impressive all on its own.
The compositing trick is something I do with almost every image. I always feel like one pass will never give the depth of colors / detail that I am looking for.
Another trick you can do is to turn on the Canvas settings and have DS generate a Beauty canvas and a Distance canvas. These will produce a pair of EXR files along with your standard JPG / BMP / TIF.
Most image editing programs will allow you to "develop" the EXR file as if you took the photo with multiple settings. You can use those as the modification layers in your post processing. I did this in my last image to create the fire on the horizon effect of my last image. You can use the "lasso" selection tool, with a very fuzzy / feathered edge, to delete out the areas you don't want the effect to appear. This will give you a fairly smooth transition from one layer to the other.
The Distance EXR is very useful for creating a Depth of Field effect without trying to get the effect to work in DS. I stopped using the DS DoF only because of how painful it is to render and then see that the effect is not what I was looking for. Doing it in post processing allows you to make mistakes and experiment without having to re-render.
Don't worry : positive criticism is always good !
One advantage in Octane is that depth of field doesn't cost much more in term of render time. I must said that the number of renderpass that Octane can generate is impressive (60 approx ) but I don't know what's the purpose or "how to use" for most of them :-) !
So I'm always trying to get the best results in the renderer as I my postwork knowledge is pretty basic. May be not always the best strategy!
Ah, I don't use Octane. I experimented with it years ago and didn't have a good experience. Most of the things I had issues with have been resolved now, but once burned...
I have this crazy idea that the cats need LAMH fur. But I'm using a non-DAZ big cat that doesn't use the LAMH Iray Catalyzer, so I have to do the pose, generate fur, figure out how many hairs my pc can handle before it crashes, export to OBJ, test render, rinse, repeat. That part alone is as much fun as test renders with US. And I'm not sure my poor old pc is going to handle 3 cats with fur and a US jungle anyway. I may have to settle for photoshop fur. But I'm plowing ahead and learning a lot about how to create a custom terrain.
If you run into non-compliant plants that you want to use with Alienator Pro, I did figure out some shortcuts for converting poser content, old .daz files, figures, and groups into plants that work.
I use Octane since version 1 and yes the first version was difficult to use. In term of performance it fulfill my needs: final render 6000x4200 on my GTX680 4GB: 2 hours and I didn't optimize the Ultrascene generated scene, added fog , vdb files, ... Now I'm stucked because my graphic card is too old and not suppported anymore with the last version. Must plan for some hardware upgrade but not the best period to buy a new graphic card. .
New version with more contrast and my Valkyrie upgraded with more color following your advice. I prefer this one !
Unless you've a Sphinx, ya cats pretty much need fur. So basically what I'm having to do as well.
At the moment, I'm just trying to find suitable water's edge type plants & not having much luck. I might try bamboo later on todeay. Painted a mask to tone down the water edge pebbles. Swapped out a couple things with Alienator, but will most likely use Ultra Scatter & masks to fine tune things.
Yeah, it seems to be a bit slow. But I've got a older system and I'm still on a GTX 970 with 4gb so I'm not sure I'm a good test. The last render I did with Heather & Moorland took 2 1/2 hrs (left it to run overnight).
The Martin J Frost plants in the Heather and Moorland are not very optimum for UltraScenery, in my opinion. The heather plants use displacement, which I think is a complete waste in a large landscape like UltraScenery. Because the plants are at base resolution, I can't even see that displacement is even visible in an Iray render of those plants. The Wasteland plants are pretty dense mesh (lots of polygons). All this stuff is slow to render. I wouldn't be surprised if it took 10 minutes before any visible render progress showed up.
I am pretty sure I read something about one of the modules having fish. Doesanybody know which one I have to buy to get those props?
I am seeing a 'cfTrout' in https://www.daz3d.com/ultrascenery--country-ford
Yes, Country Ford is the one. You need the required product https://www.daz3d.com/country-ford-for-daz-studio-and-carrara, which has the actual fish prop that UltraScenery scatters instances of.
On my image here:
I made a vegetation mask for the trees and a second one for the grass so the obalisk went on bare ground. They were made using PaintShopPro 5.0 which I got on a CD on a magaze in 2002 or thereabouts. You could, in extremis, use something like Windows Paint. Masks can be very simple. The ones for the image above were simple black rectangles on white backgrounds.
I calculated the size of the ground (6400cm square) and then did a monochrome map 3200 pixels square, so each pixel was 2cm square. Then as I wanted the obalisk offset X1000cm and was 200cm square, it was possible to work out the position of the corners of the mask squares.
I actually put the obalisk in slightly the wrong position, meaning I got vegetation inside it, which made for much more interesting reflections inside the obalisk once the raytrace path length was dialled up to 9.
Regards,
Richard.
I've gotten to the point that anytime I'm including alternate plants in US, I load then up before I start and take a look at their materials. I usually remove things like bump and displacement maps, possibly even specular if they're really huge maps, make sure they aren't grouped or have "bones" in them. Then save them back to my content folder as Low-Res. It's kind of a nuisance but it's only once and then I never have to worry about it again. I can always add single plants back in for close-ups, if they're needed.
That's a spectacular image, all it needs is a few kids on the boardwalk getting ready to do some exploration.