Show Us Your Bryce Renders Part 10
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@Horo : oh thank you, the best is yet to come. You're not so far of Alsace from Switzerland and I'm about 200 km from this place I've render. It is called Mittelbergheim village.
The grape here are mostly composed of Sylvaner which is producing a white wine and in this region called Zotzenberg, it's the only place where it's classified as a "Grand cru".
"Alcohol abuse is dangerous for health. Consume with moderation."
@Electro-Elvis : thank you! The road is a photogrammetric model available for free at Sketchfab :
https://sketchfab.com/models/885a92364c684f2993158537994a0672
@C-ram - beautiful work, as ever, amazing level of detail and well, just breathtakingly good in every aspect. Perhaps you could explain what you mean about curvature working with bitmap pictures? I will experiment if you can point me in the direction of what you are after. As for displacement, yes it is as yet unfinished, it has great potential but could do with some polish. Curvature also has some issues but is in a state where it can be used to good effect with some care and attention.
@Elevctro-Elvis - great to see you have take up the challenge of going back to look at curvature. The comment about smoothing is interesting. I've observed this somewhat myself, but like many things about curvature it needs a deeper look.
I've made a start on turning some of my recent and weeks long researches into curvature into something concrete, here's a video which I hope will get some Brycers getting a bit more out of curvature and doing a bit of experimentation for themselves.
So... applying the concepts from the video. And modifying the curvature to adjust the spread of the transition (as opposed to scaling up the model - which is the other option). Here it is applied to something other than a terrain. This is a model from a Stanford scanning laboratary - processed either by Graham Dresch or Horo - I have from both sources, but both I believe were processed in Meshlab. This uses a very high resolution mesh. I've also added the material settings for those that with to replicate this curvature setting. Beacuse the model loaded in quite small the curvature filter need the transition area expanding wider than the thumbnail window can show otherwise the transition in overly sharp and the surfaces are interpreted as either fully convex or concave - or I could have made the object much larger and stuck with a more modest sized transition to get a simiar mixing effect for A and B.
Fascinating video, can only be recommended to watch - and then start exprerimenting yourself.
Thanks again, David, explaining such complex areas is never easy - text-wise especially: but the video-wise context is very applicable (of course, still complex, but more appliable and editable where viewers/users can re-run, pause, in-test...etc.,). That last model image is so gorgeous.
Jay
I'm glad you like it. Though I can't take credit for the model, it is a fairly blatent use of cuvature. Though sometimes the use of curvature can be subtle enough that it might not even be clear what effect it is having.
In the second image I've drawn into areas where I think the curvature is working particuarly well to expose geometrical feaures in an interesting and/or natural way.
So those exposed stony areas on the ground and pebbly transiations on the gentler slopes are where curvature has singled out subtle transitions in the geometric surface and exposed them with a texture colour transition. So not as harsh as the model above, which switched between shiny and smooth and bumpy and dark.
c-ram, your works refutes many of the previous views of ill-wishers about Bryce! Your works does not allow you to reduce
the bar of quality.
@David : thanks for this nice video explanation about curvature filter which seem to work fine on high resolution objects. Something very hard to improve while using and replicating many differents one (I think).
And for the question, is it possible to apply curvature using only a bitmap picture on an object in DTE?
Also, thank you for your comment on my last work.
David, thanks for the theme and for the video tutorial. This is very inspiring. The question of using the curvature function is long overdue.
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Nevertheless, I have long tried to apply this option in the landscape. For example: the top of the mountain is almost completely covered with snow. A little lower the snow on the slopes melted but in the ravines and on the northern slopes it still remains, since there is not enough sunlight. I saw this in other programs. Now I tried to do the same in Bryce. Look, that at me it has turned out. I spent a few hours on this.
I would be grateful for the critical feedback and remarks.
Here are render and textures for channels A, B and C.
Here are screenshots of the materials.
What is it like? You mean a map of heights? Yes, you can.
If you mean a texture, then you can not use a raster image in the DTE.
If you mean MatLab, then yes, in the compound texture of ABC, a mixed texture of DTE and bitmap is possible.
@Slepalex, Cool! You've got it going! My feedback would be to suggest that once you have something functional play around with filtering the terrain in various ways and get a feel for how the curvature responds. Also scale your object up and down and see how the curvature responds to that roo. That is a quick guide as to if you need to increase or decrease the transitional zone of the filter. Beacuse my first tests of cuvature were with Bryce terrains I was a bit disapointed, it is much harder (for me anyway) to get a good curve response with a Bryce generated terrain, external terrains or DEM's seem to be much easier to set up. Your results look good, an intellegent and natural distribution of textures. My approach is to have a library of a, b and c texures, say 10 of each and then swap them out with one another until I get a nice result. I know that sounds laborious but that is mostly how I work due to the unpredictable nature of cuvature it is not easy to predict what is going to work until I've tried it out.
@C-ram. It should be possible to filter between two bit map images (one in A and one in B) using a curvature filter in C. And even have another curve filter in D controlling other material responses. (sometimes you need an opposite alpha to drive some effects - eg, transparency v reflection) I shall have a little experiment. It should be possible to apply curvature to instances... I think... I don't know... instancing is not something I've ever got to grips with. As you might notice, I think I'm getting overly complex when I include more than a terrain and a water plane in my scenes.
Yes, I did it! Only I moved up / down not an object, but a texture along the Y axis in Edit Texture. I also cut / zoomed the texture in % by Y. I also applied texture curvature options for sources A and B directly in the DTE. I swapped not only the A and B textures, but I changed the direction of the filter in the editor by changing parameters a and b. I swapped the red and blue colors. I also applied small values of noise and phase. First I check only the texture C and observe the distribution of red, yellow and blue, then individually I check the effects of textures A and B. In general, I did a couple of hundred experiments, but there is still a lot of work ahead.
You gave a new impulse to the Bryce study!
Allright David, thanks for your lights! I've got some scanned objets available with diffuse, bump, normal, displacement and cavity maps if you like to play around with curvature applied to bitmap, so just tell me.
Sure, but you will have to give me a clue as to what you wish to achieve and also bear in mind that much depends on the resolution of the source object. A quick test showed that cuvature is happy to filter between A and B channels even if they are pictures. Or one picture could be dropped in A and filters dropped in B C or D to control varions channel levels or outputs. So many options...
Before me for a long time was the task of making such a material from bronze (brass, cast iron), so that it would glisten on convex places (here it is usually touched by hands), and on the concave it was dark and covered with oxide film. With the help of the curvature filters, you can do something. However, for this purpose the object should have a lot of polygons. Here's a quick experiment:
@Slepalex - yes, the more polygons the better the transitions. But I can see that you have it working. Depending on the size of the object in Bryce will affect how curved the surface will apear to Bryce. If you scale the object down the filter will "think" the object is more curved. And scaled up it will look "flatter" to curve, which is the same as making some modifications to the filter - but sometimes easier to make fine adjustments to response.
David, perhaps all the same, your remark refers to the world space. No? If the texture is projected in the object's space, then scaling does not matter. True, I did not check it.
Here is another application of the material with a filter of curvature. I created the head in Wings 3D.
Because it seems that cuvature uses an absolute mesurement of the surface then scaling the object within the scene has a similar effect to modifying the size of the transition area. Excellent modeling! A head is a really tricky challenge in wings 3D, beyond my skill. I can see the curature at work on this, very nice.
Regarding the slow renders: tons of transparency indeed, but also other elements. Both the NgPlant and the Forester tree use lots of transparency for the leaves. This is worse with Forester, I think. Of course, it may be that I have done things stupidly to make it slow. I am now doing some tests to see what the Forester leaves add to the render-time. I start with your EGDLS without other elements (no grass clumps, nor cumulus cloud layer, no plane). It takes 16 seconds at Regular anti-aliassing. One 2D-face with 'birch-branch leaves' from Forester does not increase the rendering time visibly. With 189 of these 2D planes, it takes a lot more: around 2 minutes 18 seconds. Adding the plane and the Cumulus layer from your EGDLS example scene adds quite a bit more. At the start, it indicates 1 hour 54 minutes and 57 seconds, but we know that this does not include antialiassing very well. After 31 minutes 10 sec, 25% is done and I do not want to wait for it. I guess, adding tree times grass clumps and several trees with loads of transparency will lead to hours of rendering. Still not sure why it would be more than a day. But I think that the very many leaves I used cost lots and lots of time for antialiassing.
David, I just did an experiment with scaling the head. Since all the components of the ABC texture were assigned in the object space, absolutely nothing has changed in the properties of curvature.
That is an interesting thing to find. In my experiment curvature was not modified by the mapping mode, but was modified by rescaling the object. Clearly curvature has more secrets to give up. More research...
Here is another application of the curvature filter. If there are many polygons (1078668 triangles) and small convex (concave) parts, then the effect of the curvature filter manifests itself in full. Here the material is the same as that on the head above. Compare the result.
David, Slepalex: Excelent curving work! I will have to study the videos to get any idea of what is going on, but the results look amazing.
Thanks David, Rashad and Horo for your comments.
C-ram – Wow another outstandingly, beautiful render.
Electro-elvis – thanks for the comment, nice curvature example.
David and Sleplex - beautiful renders and experiments with curvature.
David - cool to see another video from you, thanks, I have something to try with this weekend.
I re-visited David’s Realistic Grass Terrain tutorial for this render using the Sky from Rashad’s MgScp File.
Slepalex - great examples of curvature, snow mountain, the vase, the head and the Happy Buddha.
Mermaid - the grass came out quite nice. Good no one is sitting on the bench, otherwise we would expect traces on the grass and doing those would be another challenge.
Another triple stacked terrain with materials applied that make extensive use of curvature.
Mermaid...that lawn needs mowing
I initially couldn't see the curvature effect, Horo, but on close inspection it's obviously there (I'm supposing the curvature has also been applied to the water?).
Again, cheers to David...for the vids. I recall Easter Eggs sometime back (something I never knew about), then there is this Curvature thingy - I just wonder what other stuff we amateurs (you professionals) have yet to expose about in Bryce. Manna, I bet you - David, Horo and Rashad...and others..(forgive me, if I've not mentioned your talents) are enjoying the research.
Jay