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Here's a first sort of 'concept sketch' for a jungle waterfall background. The environment was set up in Bryce 5.5 on my old computer, but after adding just 16 trees it was creaking under the strain! So I stopped at that, did the six cubemap renders*, and ran these through my GIMP/HDRShop v1 factory to get the lat/long background image (top). Applied this as the WorldBall background and IBL and did a few test renders.
Lots of work needed still... (and trees... lots more trees!) <== Edit: with the <a href="https://xfrog.com/150-free-3d-plants-and-trees/">free plants I just grabbed from XFrog and Bryce 7.1 Pro instanced populations working the game's on again!
*need to set FOV to 112.5° to get a 90° FOV render, because Bryce adjusts the FOV to 80% of the value you set.
Ah, sorry, I should have taken a look at the log file myself. Anyway, as I said it's about time I upgraded the laptop as 4.5 is so much better than 4.0 (and maybe 4.6 is even better still?) - I don't know how many people are still running 4.0, so maybe don't worry about it?
Anyway thanks very much for these as I really like them (on my main machine)
Hmmm... it seems that something odd was happening with DzPolyMesh at DS4.0 and I've dug about as deep as I can, but I just can't get DS4.0 to play ball. Looks like the WorldBall's not going to work in DS4.0...
...but on a positive note...
Poser WorldBall Now Works On A MAC
Thanks to feedback from Teri I sorted out the stupid little mistake I'd made. Version 2 available at ShareCG and Renderosity (replacing the original uploads).
The change shouldn't make any difference to PC users, so there's no need for you to re-download.
I've just uploaded a 4-in-1 'Misty Mountains' environment set to ShareCG (I haven't uploaded any of the environment sets to Renderosity yet - have to fix that). Exactly the same terrain but with different lighting, clouds and atmosphere.
I think it's about time to get back to some of the other projects that I put on hold, so this is probably my last WorldBall-related upload for a while.
P.S. That jungle background is going to take a lot of thought - I'm having problems creating half-way decent looking trees in Bryce (5.5 and/or 7.1Pro).
Looks great! Thanks for all the effort on this.
Yes, thanks for the ones you've done - they are great. Looking forward to your next project(s)...
Thank you Pete for anothe great environement. That different options daytime oprtions are a great idea too. If you do another worldball, maybe you could create one with a litle cartoon touch for those of us, who want give their toons a not so realistic environement. thanks
My pleasure - I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't having fun!
A toon environment, eh? I've never really been interested in toons myself, but I know lots of folks are - great idea! I'm hooked! So where do I start? For a non-toony like me my first thoughts are a simple two-colour scene with rounded green hills and a blue sky (if I'm heading off on the wrong track please rein me in quickly!), and those Bryce trees (with plain colours applied to leaves and trunk/branches) seem to fit in perfectly. The lighting and shadows give it a nice 3D feel, but maybe it's too plain? A bit of texture could add interest and detail, but how much?
The two renders below are 90° field of view cubemap renders from a quick experiment in Bryce 5.5. I'm not sure which is more appropriate to the sort of toon renders people do.
hmmm... so maybe I'll be doing another set before I get-back-to-what-I-was-planning-todo-before-I-started-this-worldball-stuff after all :lol:
...and here's a rough idea of what ta simple version of a toon environment (like the one above left) could look like.
Background image across the top, Poser light probe bottom left, and DAZ Studio 3 render (35mm focal length) using one of the Poser 6 toon characters I didn't realise I had bottom right.
(note: lighting for DS render is Sun + EXTRA DISTANT LIGHT cos I couldn't get the IBL to work. I'm on an old DS3.1.2.24 on my old machine - don't know what's up. So I've added a second Poser 6 render which uses the Sun and IBL - sun is 85° elevation and I set both Sun + IBL intensity to 50%).
Sooo... is this the sort of thing you're thinking of?
Also had a request for outer space backgrounds. Something like this perhaps?
(Poser render using a procedural texture - a noise node, two clouds nodes, four color-math nodes and six math nodes - applied to the WorldBall. No IBL or ground used, just a single distant light I think)
Strange, that my last post about the Toon World wasn't shown ... or may I forget to push the right button. looks like I'm getting old. :)
I loike your Toon-Environement very much (the one with the flowers and clouds is my favourite). For one, who's not interested in Toons, you have created a really wonderful and toonish environement. Thumbs Up!!!
The Space Scenario is also awesome. Thanks for keep on working on these stunning tool
Basic Toon-Style Background
I've just uploaded my first try at a basic toon-style background to ShareCG. RCT-Spanky - hope you (and other toonies) like it! A few observations:
- The orange 'flowers' didn't look good close-up - they're just part of a Bryce procedural texture and looked more like mud patches, so I restricted them to the more distant areas of the terrain.
- I set the lighting up so it looks more-or-less okay in DAZ Studio 3 from all angles, and it seems fine in DS4 and Poser too. But you may want to adjust the Sun colour and Sun/IBL intensities to get something that looks right for you.
- The IBL lighting is very 'flat' in DS (mainly because the DS WorldBall IBL doesn't support AO yet). You may find that an additional low intensity light or two adds some 'depth'.
P.S. I'm not a prima-donna, and I really do appreciate constructive criticism!
Aside: Back in post #31 I was saying that my jungle environment set had...
Seems like a friendly genie was listening - spotted opal42987's [LINKS] List of Plant Freebies by Genus thread here in the Freepozitory and grabbed 66 different XFrog plant species (OBJ, Terragen 2 and Vue formats) for free! Not sure how long they're free for - it says it's a limited offer and there's a sale that ends today (30th), so they may be part of that...
It's wonderful, thank you, will use it a lot.
Thanks for mentioning the Plant freebie link with the XFrog items. I just spent the last hour+ downloading stuff that "I can't live without". Now I just have to import all of them into Poser 7 and figure out how to get the textures to work.
I hope the jungle waterfall scene works out for you. It looks very interesting so far.
Still a WIP - an outer space environment set - comments appreciated! I've been playing with a different approach for this - Alex Peterson's Spacecape (thanks to theDuckPond's Space Box for the suggestion!) for stars and nebulae, Terragen 2 Free for planets, moons (and asteroids, not shown here), combining the two in GIMP. I figure that since nobody's likely to do a 90° FOV render then I can put something interesting at each of the 6 cardinal points (front, back, left, right, up, down), leaving plenty of areas with just stars and/or nebulae. I used a single planet at each for this example, but I'm trying to do planets with moons and/or rings, and a field of asteroids in TG2...
Top image is a reduced size version of the lat/long mapped background image.
Bottom image is a DS3 render (lower left planet is a DS sphere primitive, upper planet is part of the WorldBall environment). A couple of problems are obvious:
1 - the stars are much too big and blurred. This is a background resolution/JPG artefact problem, and I'm not sure this can be easily resolved. Increasing the size (8192 x 4096), improving JPG quality (already 90%), or using a lossless format (PNG/TIF) might work, but how huge will the image file be?)
2 - the 'Sun' lighting on the DS sphere doesn't match that of the background planet. Probably a Terragen 2 issue - the sun didn't appear in the TG2 cubemap renders where I thought it should be, so I probably set up something wrong. But also unless the camera is at the exact centre of the WorldBall the lighting won't match anyway...
This is a great concept. Have you looked at using images from NASA for this? They might be clearer & more realistic. I think nearly all (if not all) are public domain.
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/entire
Once you click on a photo, look for "Highest-quality download options" on the right-hand side.
(here's a link to the copyright notice. nearly everything is public domain: http://hubblesite.org/about_us/copyright.php)
Thanks to Rashad's 'How To Use The Instancing Lab In Bryce 7.1 Pro' tutorial here on the DAZ forums I've got instanced populations working in Bryce 7.1 Pro. So with those XFrog plants (still free as of 6am UTC Sat 6th July!) some basic forest/jungle environment sets should be ready soon!
I'm still playing and Googling to try and find a better way to do waterfalls though...
Great suggestion! I'm already using some of the NASA planetary maps for the Terragen 2 planets and moons I'm playing with (indeed I included them as part of my first ever freebie, a planetary globe, a couple of years ago) but I hadn't thought of using them for the stars and nebulae. I'm sure that I can put together a patchwork using NASA images, Terragen 2 planets, Spacescape starfields (it can render much higher resolution cubemap images than the example), etc...
Edit: The biggest issue is getting a convincing lat/long mapped overall result. Putting a NASA image that has more-or-less black edges (e.g. the Helix Nebula) at, or near, one of the six cardinal points on a cubemap render should work beautifully. But the further away from any of those six points it is the more distorted it'll look when applied to the WorldBall. Not sure exactly how bad - have to try it out...
Can't wait to see. :D
Okay, some of those Hubble images work really nicely. I've put together a test background with six different galaxies (the NASA and STScI photos I used are from http://hubblesite.org and all credited to STScI, i.e. public domain i.a.w. their copyright terms). I can't position them anywhere except the six cardinal points for reasons mentioned in a previous post (i.e. mapping distortion). The background stars and cloudy patches were done using Spacescape.
I've attached a scaled-down test version of the background, plus a test render:
- The render is in DS3 - Aiko doing a bit of intergalactic hitch-hiking... (I used a 4096x2048 version of the background on the WorldBall, and it's only illuminated by the IBL using an appropriately scaled and flipped version of that image)
- The scaled-down test background is 2000x1000 pixels (344KB) and you can try manually plugging into the WorldBall ambient colour channel.
My own thoughts?
- Three of the galxies look good, the other three don't.
- The background starfield is passable, but could do with loads more stars.
- The cloudy patches? Awful! I need to play with Spacescape a lot more - the examples included with it show that it can be done!
- The local environment (planets, moons and asteroids) can be easily done in Bryce 7.1 Pro and rendered out as a cubemap (Terragen 2 is also great for this, but the free version's render size limit makes it unsuitable here). This can then be easily combined with the the Hubble images and Spacescape backdrop using GIMP.
- I'm thinking that the 'directly below part of the background should perhaps be a close-up planet, so you can do those low-orbit style renders?
Feedback from anybody who tries the attached background would be greatly appreciated. Also any suggestions for the 'outer space' environment sets - I'm veering towards the following 'one-size-fits-all' outer space environment:
- A galaxy at five (back, front, left, right and up) of the six cardinal points.
- A close up planet at the 'down' cardinal point.
- Eight different planets at the eight corners of the cubemap.
- A reasonably large sun
- A second version with an asteroid field surrounding the camera (in addition to everything above).
Agree with all comments/observations. I love the idea of the planet for low-orbit renders.
One word: Nebulas :)
Progress report on the outer space environment set! ;o)
I think you're right about the nebulae - it's just a case of finding images that I can blend in seamlessly. I've tried out many of the public domain nebulae images from hubblesite.org, but only found two so far that work well for the way I'm doing things (in GIMP I crop the image and crank up the saturation to max. I then take the red and blue channels only, desaturate by luminosity, extend dynamic range to max and use this as a layer mask for the saturated image. The resulting semi-transparent PNG is then overlaid on a Spacescape cubemap render at one of the 6 cardinal points to avoid warping).
I'm having problems with the planets in Bryce though (see problems 2 + 3 below). (Edit: more-or-less resolved now)
I've attached another 2000x1000 reduced size version of my latest test background, plus a few DS3 test renders using a standard 4096x2048 (510KB) version and IBL lighting only from a corresponding 1024x512 flipped image. I'm very pleased with the results, especially the 65mm and 150mm ones.
However, there are three new problems here, marked on the test renders:
1 - the curvature of the planet below is very angular in the renders. I think that's the WorldBall geometry, so some SubD might fix that.
2 - the bottom face cubemap render I'm getting out from Bryce doesn't match up colourwise with the side ones.
3 - each of the eight smaller planets is on a corner of the cubemap cube, and is thus split across three Bryce renders. The lighting of each planet seems inconsistent across the three adjoining renders (this is very obvious for the four upper planets).
I haven't found out how to control the exposure settings in Bryce, so I guess problem 2 is due to different exposure settings.
Problem 3 could be sidestepped by moving each planet a bit so it's only on a single render (but I'm still puzzled by the inconsistent lighting).
Problem 1 only realy shows up with the huge planet directly below, so maybe I'll just replace it with another nebula and side-step that issue too?
Note: the yellow sun is just a semi-transparent PNG applied to a billboard (ambient/transparent channels) within Bryce...
Edit (later the same day...): Problems 2 + 3 resolved - I had 'Link sun to view' checked in Bryce :facepalm: D'OH! I unchecked that and the colours and light/shadow match perfectly. So it's full steam ahead with planets, moons and asteroids.
Edit (continued): Re problem 1 - In DS3 SubD improves the big planet's curvature to an acceptable level. However, in Poser 6 'Smooth Polygons' seems to have no effect. So maybe I'll have to update the basic WorldBall geometry by adding a level or two of SubD?
Another test render, exactly the same setup but facing the other way (DS3, 35mm)...
...looking lovely. I've pretty much avoided space scenes as there really wasn't much out there for Daz. (until the solar system set that was recently released). Now I can have nice backgrounds for "deep space" scenes as well.
As to mixing Bryce and Daz. I often create sky backdrops in Bryce to use in Daz as they work so much better than photographic ones (plus I also don't have to deal with usage rights). What I really need to do is learn how to make my own scalable skydomes to get more variety for the outdoor light sets I have.
...so one question, would these then be referred to as "SpaceBalls?" instead of "WorldBalls"?
...apologies, had to ask.
SPACEBALLS ! I love the idea - couldn't find a Dark Helmet in my runtime though... ;o)
Sooo... here's the latest Spaceballs progress report! It's going along rather well now. I've spent far too long today playing with some wonderful public domain earth and star maps (from the same places as the textures for my first ever freebie - i.e. Tom Patterson's shadedrelief.com and David Seal's JPL/NASA site) to try and create a near-as-dammit-accurate earth, moon and stars environment.
It's looking rather marvellous, even if I do say so myself!
Scaled-down current-state-of-progress background attached. I forgot the sun! Also I didn't tidy up the joins yet. And I'm not happy with the thin blue atmosphere layer ("What thin blue atmosphere layer?" I hear you cry... that's the problem - it vanished!). Also some issues with the clouds on the dark side *insert joke here* and JPG artefacts around the specular highlight.
Two DS3 test renders too (35mm with SubD applied to the WorldBa..... err... SpaceBall).
The POV for generating the environment is about 1,400km above the South China Sea (enough of the Euro-Americo-centrism!)
The sun's on the ecliptic (I forgot to put it in the current image, but the illumination's coming from the right place! SunAz=315° SunEl=12° - slightly below the second moon from the left iirc))
The moon's (all four of it!*) about 5°over the ecliptic with its dark side *insert similar joke here* facing away from the earth. But it's 20 times closer than it should be - if I used the correct distance it would only be a couple of pixels across!
The star's are aligned correctly with respect to the celestial equator, but I think I've got a misalignment between the celestial equator and the ecliptic...
*I reckoned that they're far enough separated so as not to appear in a single render (unless you use a 35mm or less focal length and point halfway between a pair).
Check out the PDF I did - Make Your Own Environment Maps And Light Probes. Although I was using Terragen Classic when I wrote this I'm doing the same with Bryce now (5.5 and 7.1 Pro). Just be sure to set FOV to 112.5° to get a 90° render (yep, that one had be stumped for ages!) and uncheck 'Link Sun To View'. (I don't use Bryce's inbuilt 'Panorama' document setting as this does a 180-ish° FOV render and you can't easily stitch two of those together!). And if you enjoy tedium try out my GIMP XCF To Help Make A Vertical Cross Cubemap!
'Earth Environs' WorldBall Environment Set released
Okay, I've tidied up the earth/moon/sun one from a couple of posts back and it's now available at ShareCG
- ShareCG 'Earth Environs' WorldBall Environment Set
- (awaiting approval at Renderosity)
In addition to the environment sets I've included updated WorldBall geometry (one level of Catmull-Clark SubD applied in Blender) to fix the large planet curvature problem mentioned a few posts back.
(Full-size 1024x1024 version of the Poser render (bottom right in the promo below) over on my Art Studio thread - "It's art, Jim, but not as we know it!"
I've used the Tycho star map (>1 million stars!) from the NASA/JPL Solar System Simulator site for the backdrop, and fixed the alignment problem from post #53 (it was also mirror-imaged!). Since that has so many other uses I've done a 'starfield only' version. (After verifying that the image is truly public domain! 'Owner' is 'Caltech/JPL', 'Unless otherwise noted, images and video on JPL public web sites (public sites ending with a jpl.nasa.gov address) may be used for any purpose without prior permission, subject to the special cases noted below.)...', and it's not one of the special conditions.)
Anyway, getting back to the nebulae and galaxies - still a WIP...
it's so easy to create the whole thing in Bryce! Put a star-map on a huge sphere, and put each nebula/galaxy on a billboard angled perpendicular to the line-of-sight. (Edit all images in advance to make the black areas transparent - well, a bit more complex than that, but not much! :o). Then do six 90° cube-map renders.
Anyway, here's a very small vertical cross and angular map presentation of the latest version of the outer space environment. I need to adjust the positioning/scaling of some elements to avoid overlap, and maybe sharpen up the star-map background (the same Tycho one as the 'Earth Environs' set just released). Maybe also change a couple of the images - you can't tell at this scale but a couple are too grainy.
The idea of this environment set would be that you set up your scene (e.g. spaceman and alien) and then spin the Worldball until you get a background that looks good. Of course,the two WorldBall (sorry, SpaceBall) lights (i.e. IBL and Sun) don't really make much sense here - you'd need to set up lighting to match your chosen section of WorldBall backdrop.
Also I'm double-checking that all the images I intend to use are public domain - hopefully I'll get an affirmative reply from STScI soon...
E14 ‘Grasslands’ WorldBall Environment Set released
Another request - hope this is the sort of thing you were thinking of.
Basically it's just this environment with the grass colour toned down and an additional 'evening' variant.
Now available:
- ‘Grasslands’ WorldBall Environment Set at ShareCG
- 'Grasslands' WorldBall Environment Set at Renderosity FreeStuff