Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 4
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Very good, David; Octane certainly has a lot of attractive in and out bits. It's reassuring to know that you won't be leaving square old Bryce to die of old age for all that inny and outy goodness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBKGs_BtrJ4
Very good, David; Octane certainly has a lot of attractive in and out bits. It's reassuring to know that you won't be leaving square old Bryce to die of old age for all that inny and outy goodness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBKGs_BtrJ4
Good point, well made. But at the moment, clearly, Octane can't do folding, let alone - hospital corners - so really, it's just rubbish.
I've just spent most of this afternoon (Octane quietly cooking away in the background melting my GPU) reworking these scenes to match the latest TA theories (yesterday's videos) and reduced the render time of each by 25%. Now each of these renders, in Bryce 7.1 Pro, on my i7920 in less than two minutes. Not too shabby?
@Horo: Thanks for the comments. Proportions of objects in a scene is a real weak point when I create mountains, or just landscapes. Plus I never seem to have a clear image what I want the results to look like.
@David: Suggestions are always welcomed, as long as they aren't asking me to do things I physically can't do. :-) I enlarged a sphere and gave the sphere a mirror material, at least I think I did. I placed a radial light inside, enlarged it and placed it towards the top of the sphere. I then chose one of my two part woven cubes and placed it inside also near the top of the sphere. I believe, after seeing the results that 1) I don't really understand how/where light comes from when using mirrored material on an object and 2) if a surface has been set to mirrored where or not it's actually "solid" in that light only bounces of the surface. I've watched your videos about many of these aspects, but I need to watch them again and try applying that information to my latest mirrored image. Lots to learn, for sure.
I can't even find it - it does have a FoV control up to 180°.
You're doing great work in Bryce at the moment!
Bryce exporting experiment. Terrain exported OK including material. Objects without. HDRI exported OK too. Reassembled in Octane with help from Wings3D.
Bryce render above, Octane below.
Bryce render is definitely more like the real thing. The shadows are quite hard and the colour is indeed reddish (beech wood). I've just checked that, though I don't have such an interesting object to put on the table. Octane makes a mistake with the shadows. The object is near to the surface and the main light just above them. Shadows must have a harder edge. OTH, the darkness of the shadow is more correct in the Octane render. To be fair, the colour in the HDRI is a bit on the blue side from the white balancing. So the colour in Bryce looks more natural, Octane may interpret the colour from the light probe more accurately. Very interesting test!
Nice works and experiments, David...though I have to admit not knowing always the compelxities involved, but the results are somthing to strive towards.
Below, the coffee (it's a mocha...c'mon, nothing else taste's better) work was having problems with.
Title: "Aaaaaahhhhh..."
Jay
@David: The experiments look really good, though I do see color intensity difference between the two images.
@Jay: I like the look of that image, though I was unaware coffee was drank any other way but as a mocha.
David, I tried your suggestion of turning off the atmosphere and adding an HDRI that came with Bryce, and I raised the MRD to 12, the first time. Eh, still didn't get what I was hoping for, so I thought I'd try a different reflective material for the sphere. Eh, still no go, but ended up with the first image. Something I thought, whoa, neat. Next try I upped the MRD to 24, moved the camera right below the two part woven cube object near the top of the sphere and pointed it downward. The second image is a really turquoise blue colored, but it's a reflected image. I believe the turquoise blue color comes from the center cube of the two part woven cube since it is the same color.
But where did the light come from? One of David's earlier tutorials showed that by changing the reflective setting of an object, clear to fully reflective, light acts differently on surrounding objects. This tutorial was done with an open sky, if you will, so I understood light does not pass through an object set to fully reflective. Shouldn't the same thing apply to the inside of a sphere? Or, is the space inside the sphere the same space that surrounds the sphere, in that the light that's outside the sphere is the same light that's inside the sphere?
Jay, coffee for me - black no sugar - but that would be far less interesting to look at than your frothy topping. Looking at your literature, I have to ask do you work at Magrathea by any chance? http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/magrathea.shtml
Jamie, without seeing the scene it would be difficult to say. If it is small enough to email I would be happy to take a look and answer your questions.
Another scene transfer experiment. Bryce above, Octane below.
...Magrathea...
Hahaaa...must have been there that the idea subconsciously came from...:)
Cheers also, Guss...none of that weak, milky stuff ;)
Btw: Just received my copy of Bryce for Dummies today, and sitting back enjoying the read...suits me just fine (what?...doh!). But, WHOA, it gets very controversial on P.60 when it talks about the Bryce Forum where, apparently, all the members are...
Jay
@Jamahoney - mocha looks good. You seem to have had a sip already. Reading the HHG at the moment, the nth time. Bryce for Dummies is also good. Can you send me the copy once you've finished with it?
@David - for the glassy Stonehenge, Octane is definitely better. The glass looks glassier, so to speak.
Jay: You don't happen to have a copy of "Ventriloquism for Dummies" do you? :cheese:
This render isn't up to much really (I did try to add a character but it crashed, apparently two Vickies in this scene is one Vicky too many), but I'm posting it because of the (what I think is a) good effect on the lamp bulb when reflected in the mirror. When I originally made that lamp I added a fuzzy edged sphere over the bulb part to give it a kind of halo glow. That glowing sphere doesn't show up at all under OL, but in the mirror reflection it shows very clearly.
But it's for Dummies, Horo, why would [you] need it ;)
Savage...that's unusual with the mirror reflection thingy...like it's acting like some kind of diffusion filter (mirror refraction settings?).
If you look far, things that lay near can escape you :)
@Dave - the light came out fantastic. I like how the light is illuminates on the walls and how the lamp looks in the mirror. Strange that the halo is invisible directly and only in the reflection.
Is this a reminder that you have the Caps Lock on, or just a quirk of Bryce.
Select a Torus, click on the E to edit it then switch the Caps Lock on.
On my PC it's an animated Torus, spinning around.
That's why I need that dummy book. Just checked, this was already the case in Bryce 4 - though the torus spins much slower and is quite nice to watch.
@David: Stonehenge(s) really look great. To my eyes, both have a glass appearance, though the tops in the Bryce image capture the black background. I'll look into sending you the files.
So... concentrating on the caustics effect, you can see in Octane the conversion to mesh has shown up the faceted nature of the mesh in the caustic response. The Bryce primitives prove their worth here. Octane also seems to struggle somewhat with bump - though maybe that is more my fault. I do know a lot about bump in Bryce as anyone who has access to Bugtracker can attest, this was probably the thing I spent most of my time testing during the Bryce 7 testing cycle. The HDRI also exported straight out of Bryce shows a different colour response, but I've not yet looked closely at Octanes colour handling. Bryce I think we decided was sRGB? Frankly I find colour space, gamut and gamma all a bit baffling. What is more promising from the perspective of the challenge I set myself, was that this entire scene was exported from Bryce without the intervention of any other software and I learned out to make crude metals in Octane. I still don't know how to simulate anisotropic specularity - which, like bump, works very nicely indeed in Bryce. So... as I started out by saying, the caustics in Bryce seem to be verified by Octanes engine. The main difference between the two - that Octane render took two minutes to get to that point. Bryce took about an hour to complete.
Bryce at the top, Octane at the bottom, but I think you'd know that.
Hmmm...would go for the Bryce ring anytime over the Octane in this instance.
Playing around with meshes:
Is it possible to add a material simply to just a mesh alone in Bryce, and then render it out as a mesh? There probably is, however, as no Google results returned anything, had fun anyway playing around with trying to do so. How? Changed the Bryce background to black, took a PrntScn shot of the mesh model, re-brought it back into Bryce as a terrain, which then allowed any material applied to it. Surprising results with several mats applied, but stuck with the one shown.
Jay
Yes, Jay, if I understand what you're asking, there are a few 'mesh' materials which when applied to an object will allow it to look like a mesh, though not the mesh.
I did something similar in Wings last week, where I inadvertently exported the unfolded UV map with the mesh layer still visible and then re-mapped it onto the object. That gives you the actual mesh imposed back onto the model. So if you have a mesh template for making your own UV maps for a particular model you could do it that way.
Today's Renders:
The first one was how it started out, the second was how it finished...
... Funny how stuff rarely ends up how it starts out. :lol:
@David: The ring in the Bryce image looks like that of a newly wed, while the Octane one looks like that of one whose been married for some time. Still, both are nice.
@Jay: It looks as though your model is going to pieces, or there something wrong with the transporter.
@Dave: In your first image I want to see a candle in the object on the right. The one on the left makes me want to get a fly swatter. And I'm not sure, but in the second image, the one with the skulls holding up the huge marble, there seem to be a few pieces missing from Atlas. By any chance is the huge marble in the second image used to play jacks with the jack in the first image? Really like all three.
I did another render of my mirrored sphere with the turquoise color but with 360 Panoramic Projection set. It's still bright turquoise, but the results are much different.
It is possible but very difficult and fiddly to achieve, this topic is covered on the Bryce Mentoring DVD if you have got it. The video is under the topic of Materials. This wasn't possible in earlier version of Bryce, and as I said, it is not easy to achieve. Here is the example scene from the DVD.
Dave, beautiful render, I particularly like the glass sphere and the convincing draped cloth effect. The light also is very good. Indeed, it's all just very good.
Dave Savage,
Beautiful purple room you created. I assume this is an Obscure Light implementation? Same with the direction thingy and the wonderful skulls. Your materials are always so very rich and respond incredibly well to the lighting techniques you are using. Very inspiring work!! I literally love everything you make!
Guss,
This makes me think of gravitational waves interacting, folding, and even snapping in certain areas. Though at first glance the formations are all seemingly round, there are a few sharp corners as well which catch me by surprise. It feels transparent yet I know I cannot see actually through it. The level of distortion seems very carefully selected. I don't often perceive much in abstract artworks, but this one does speak to me in its way. Very nice!
Brinnen,
Hyper-Scattering could solve many problems, but to do so you'll have to resort to using maps to control the intensity of the various effects at differing areas of the face and body. The idea of using ambient glow and allowing the blurred reflection process to gather it to lighten certain areas where flesh folds in around itself is fantastic. The only problem arises in that there are areas which receive ambient which should not and that may receive reflection that dont really need it. The immediate solution that comes to my mind is to apply a map the effects, dont assume them to be global. Naturally there are many reasons to avoid using maps, primarily memory, But a specular map that simply shades in a general way brighter areas such as foreheads and cheeks and dimmer areas such as jawbones and earlobes can appear to respond as expected in regard to the faked SSS.
This is one of the reasons I was so pushing for some sort of basic UV mapping in Bryce that could pave the way for future texture and shadow baking tools native within Bryce. What you need is a map of the model rendered with ambient occlusion on a basic fully white material. You need to bake that in DS at this point, a powerful now ability of DS4.5. I have some maps I've baked for V5 so if you want them I'll lend them to you. Anyhow the result will be an image where sunken areas are darkened. The next step is to negative the image to create a map that now has whiter areas as those hidden within geometry while the darker areas would correspond with areas which are more exposed. Apply this uv map as the ambient color. It probably doesnt need to be high resolution since it isnt very detailed. In the same line of logic, a map would need to be applied to the reflection channel restricting it only to the areas where it would be needed for faking the SSS. This map also need not be terribly large.
So long as we figure out a way to render the darned hair. Male figures are nice because hair can be overlooked and it is easier to focus on the skin. But eventually out skin techniques will need to play well with our hair rendering techniques in terms of lighting if we want to keep render times acceptable. So much to consider
Caustics tests are most promising. Now the task is to somehow marry your caustic process with Horo's mirror bouncing process and we might be even closer to unbiased. There has to be a way to get them both going. The Bryce caustic is nice and bright, very acceptable I'd say, even surprising. I admit, I'll have to do some catching up in the way of the caustic video so I will probably come back to this sometime soon. Looks great!
Dwsel
Amazing atmosphere you created there. Looks about photo -real to me. WOW!
Brinnen,
I should also add on the subject of hyper scattering, if the Curvature Filter of the material lab was functional in terms of smoothness we would not need to use lights to derive a shading pattern for the folding parts as I described above in DS. Even today one could in theory import a high resolution Genesis Model with V4 UV and import it into Bryce. The high number of polygons means we could then apply a curvature filter which would "find" all those folds in the skin and darken or lighten them as needed in acceptably smooth gradients. All we'd need then is a way to bake that onto the UV map. Hoping for Bryce 8000!
@David - the caustics examples show that you have learned to know your way around octane. The Bryce render is definitely better. Octane treats the HDRI colours differently. If you export the HDRI out of Bryce, try to transform it in HDRShop from angular to spherical. If the colours stay tinted, Bryce export can be ruled out. Unfortunately, neither Bryce nor Octane have a colour gamut control. Bryce's saturation is more usful then the gmma control in Octane.
@Jamahoney - David already gave you the answer. Nice workaround, though, and probably less fiddly.
@Dave - yes, sometimes we get an interesting effect when doing something wrong. As long as we remember ...
The skull render is very good, lighting looks superb. I particularly like the material on the table cloth.
@GussNemo - abstract is looking good.
@Rashad - thank you for sharing your experiences. I know you're the guy who invested considerably in this skin thingy and I remember that you pushed for uv mapping in the SC. As so often, our calls were not heard, but - luckily - others were.
RE: Mesh mats etc., - cheers all. Just wondered if Bryce can do it, and it looks like it can from David's/Horo's DVD.
Had in mind something where you take a real object render and then combine it to its mesh render; resulting in a real-mesh object with a kind of x-ray image feel to it (like you see in such images of car-engines where part of its innards are seen underneath the casing etc., - very cool).
Jay
You can also do this by just faking the wireframe with volumetric materials. http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=1451&mode=search
Again Rashad, I agree with what you've said. As you know, being extraordinarily lazy I do like to find global solutions before starting having to resort to more labour intensive ways of producing an effect. UV mapping would be very useful indeed, and texture baking too, and AO. And Bryce 8. But as things stand, I want to push through to finding out more about Bryce's render engine at the moment rather than getting bogged down on a solution that needs to be hand crafted for each and every figure.
Horo, I don't know yet if there is a problem with Octane reading Bryce's spherical map hdr output - I just might not be doing it right.
I can always send you a spherical one. After all, that's how the originals are.
I've been playing around with Wings3D lately and made the woven cubes following David's great video. I set the camera inside. The cubes have high specularity, a third metallicity, taking green and red from the diffuse colour and then, there is 20% reflection. The cubes are more or less at world centre and light and specularity come from the IBL inside. There is no other light.
To the right, the cubes from the outside, differently lit as a comparison.
@Rashad: I'd like to say what you see was planned, but can't. It was another experiment of an idea I had, plus adding the 360 Panoramic Projection setting after watching one of David's videos. The day may come when I can create an abstract that has a predictable outcome. Still, thank you for the kind words.
@Horo: Thank you. Love the results you achieved with the woven cube. And thanks for the idea of putting the camera inside the cube. I've said I always learn something reading these posts.