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My latest attempt. @Knittingmommy, you'll be happy to know that I didn't just "slap this one together".
This one took advantage of the terrain editor, layered materials and dynamic ecosystems (for the trees on the distant mountains).
Found a good blog post online about render settings - was able to get good results in a fraction of the time that the default "Superior" preset gives. The original image was 3200x1800 and rendered in 24 minutes. The default "Superior" settings took 1 hour and 12 minutes to render a 640x360 image.
Like Bryce, Vue lets you render a depth map, which is extremely useful to use in postwork as a layer mask to limit painting to behind the foreground.
Additional fog and godrays done in Photoshop,
Foggy Mountain Valley
Vue 2015->Photoshop
Well, it certainly looks good! :) I really like how the mountains sort of fade into a valley of sorts. The trees in the foreground look really great. I really like that added fog. You're doing really great with this! I'm very impressed, but then I knew you had mad skills anyway! I can't wait to see what you manage to do when you've had a couple of months experience under your belt. You are going to have some even more awesome images!
The desert looks really good- it makes me thirsty just looking at it!
Thanks, @Novica!
Oh wow! That's gorgeous, Jack! It's so pretty it gives me chills. The trees look SO REAL and the distance haze is amazing!
I've never used another 3D program other than Daz, but you make me wish I had Vue. :) Can you use Daz figures/characters with the program or is it strickly for scenery and stuff?
Thanks!
You can import objects in various formats, but you almost always would need to adjust materials as no two companies ever seem to use a common format for those. It will pick up texture maps, but things like glossiness, roughness, etc don't convert automatically. They do have a direct Poser integration, but for now we have to export a static object out of Daz and import into Vue. That means all posing and stuff needs to be done beforehand. All you can do in Vue would be positoning and/or scaling.
Oh I see. That's a bit unfortuniate. I really love the Vue renders and have seen a few more in the Gallery that look AMAZING. Sadly Daz doesn't seam to do landscapes and environments as well - even with what's currently available with TerraDome (at least from what I've seen). I really like what I've seen with TerraDome but the distant rocks/mountains type of things don't look quite right to me and aren't "jaggy" enough (the look too rounded/soft to me). So I'm still waiting for a highly realistic landscape type of product that can also render the figures and characters that I love. The Vue renders look awesome, so it's too bad they don't support Daz characters/figures.
You can use Daz characters in Vue- there is a plug-in for importing.
There is a product called SkinVue that is supposed to be a good skin shader for Daz characters in Vue - I don't own it, so don't know how well it works.
I've been playing around with the existing Vue shaders trying to get a good balance of SSS off of the characters I've imported.
So, to recap - you can bring characters and objects into Vue, the texture maps come across relatively easily, but you still are going to need to tweak the shaders.
Well, whatever you're doing, you're doing it quite well!
The Limits of the Possible
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
-- Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)
Vue->Photoshop
Spacecraft model by Herminio (sharecg.com)
That looks nice, @TabascoJack! Was it easier or harder than the one you did in DS? Obviously, no planet with rings to worry about the shadows, but I'm curious if set up and rendering are similar or different to DS in time and complexity? I'm loving all of the images you are making in Vue!
@Knittingmommy, it's........different.
The planet itself was next to nothing. A sphere with a decent material. The asteroid field made use of the Ecosystem module, and it took me a while to figure out how to get it to do what I wanted. The idea of actually making a ring out of rocks really doesn't work due to the scales involved. I ended up doing multiple cylinders stretched across the field of view at different distances from the camera and didn't worry about the "ring" behind the planet. Then added a few single rock objects for the close asteroids and then built a simple terrain and put the ship on it. It probably took about as long to set it up, as I was learning along the way. Render time was about 30 minutes for a 3200x1900 render.
I'm looking into what it would take to take the render and make it into an HDR image and use it in DS. It should be doable.
Oh, making an HDR and using it in DS would be a cool idea! Thanks for explaining the process. I can see, from your explanation, that it's different! :) You're doing a great job with it. Keep it up!
Honestly Jack when I look at that last render I feel like I am in the movie Armagettion!!!! Great job kee it up!!!
I would be most interested in the process to make a render into an HDRI
You really got the hang of Vue pretty fast! I love all those renders you made lately, they have a crispness that make them special.
@Linwelly, Thanks!
Most of it is following tutorials at this point, although I'm starting to get comfortable enough to customize things my way even when using tutorials. Geekatplay has a lot of really good ones on their youtube channel.
@Knittingmommy and Sonja,
Attached is an attempt at an HDRI and a Daz render. I've learned that I still need to play more in Photoshop to get things balanced. The basic approach that I've been able to determine, based on googling a lot of stuff, is to take your hi-res, panoramic, spherical mapped render (8192x4096) and save it at the base exposure, and a couple of notches higher and a couple of notches lower. Then you can use Photoshop CC to import into HDR. You then need to tonemap it (which I need to spend much more time doing), and then save it as an HDR file.
I think I made my test harder, as it's a space scene with no atmosphere - that means no ambient light scattering from the sky. All the light is either a) coming off the sun, or b) reflected off something else. In my HDR renders, the sun wasn't nearly as bright as the terrain ended up, so that's a problem. I probably should have tweaked that in Photoshop before building the HDRI. Also, when I tonemapped it, I seem to have lost the nebulae and the stars (I don't think they were bright enough on their own). And non space scenes are probably easier, as I don't need to worry about ambient light from the terrain bouncing off a remote planet.
Conclusion: It's certainly doable, but it's going to take practice.
So when I fired up DIM this morning, I decided to check the download filters to see if anything showed up tagged with Vue.
Turns out that Stonemason included some Vue compatibility on some of his earlier works - both the Greeble city blocks and one of my favorites, Streets of the Mediterannean.
So here it is, tucked away in a remote Italian village.
That looks very good! I could easily mistake that for a picture. :)
When I first started here, DS had a version of Vue in the store. It was in my wishlist for a long time. But, something happened and it just disappeared from the store one day. I would assume anyone who bought it still has access, but I don't know since it was a stand alone program. I know there is still a version for use with Studio on Vue's website. I don't know why it isn't still sold here. There are still a lot of Vue products in the store here.
I've attempted to make a space HDRI with a bright moon by starting with a regular old 8-bit image as well. What I discovered was that there was a huge gap between getting the HDRI to light the scene how I wanted vs. how the HDRI appeared in the background:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1548076/#Comment_1548076
I ended up using a backdrop as a way to bridge that gap, but this means that no volumetric materials could be used because of how Iray handles things. Kind of lost interest in this project once I found that out.
- Greg
So who do I have t go through to get to this beautiful place Jack? Is it you??
Smiles big I really love this render so peaceful.
Been working on this one for a bit.
Sky and environment in Vue. Brought in Stonemason's Jungle Ruins, Kibaretto's Vanguard (which is an absolutely amazing prop), posed my G2F based character Kayla, and the outfit and gun from ArtemisX for Genesis.
Rendered in Vue, postwork in Photoshop. Click on the attachment for the full size render.
Patrol
Nice work! I really like this scene and I'm amazed that the G2F's skin looks so good in Vue. I didn't realize that the human figures did so well in Vue.
Picked up Mely's sailboat on the FastGrab a couple of days ago...
Vue2015 -> Photoshop
Sunset Sail
That's a beautiful picture, TJ! I love the colors of the sunset. The water looks really nice, too.
Thank you!
I've been having fun learning Vue (and it's still on sale until Oct 10....hint hint) The downside is that I'm not doing as much in Daz right now. I'd really like it if there was a better integration than just a .obj export.
On the positive side, Vue seems to do a relatively decent job of bringing in the exported materials correctly - as long as they were 3Delight shaders. Good thing I have a lot of older products that still have those.
Waiting to get more details on their new GPU rendering - it would be fantastic if it were also Iray based (but my guess is that it will be OpenGL).
I may have to wait for the next sale. I'm not going to be able to afford it this time around. I haven't even bought that much during the DAZ sales. For now, I'll just play with the free version and admire all of your great work as you learn more about using the software. :)
Stunning ocean scene! There is a free version?
Yes. Just do a search for Vue 2015 and the e-on software site should be the first one that pops up. Follow the links to the free version.