How's situation with water sunshine?

akmerlow

Hi, i'm getting more and more interested in Bryce recently. Could you tell me how's water sunshine in there? You can imitate that? It's one of my favourite things to look at.

A photo reminder:

Horo

akmerlow - I don't have the solution but try to set specularity high and specular between 248 and 253 (white) and move up Specular for the sun. Using a Phased Hyper Texture (PHT) to boost specularity for the water material may help. The result also depends on the angle the sun shines on the water and the angle the camera looks on the water.

akmerlow

Thanks for sharing thoughts, i''ll try your advice when i'll get to that.

Rashad Carter

My advice is similar to Horo's but with a few added specifics.

Geometry

1. Try using s Slab instead of a Plane for water geometry. There are refractive and also depth transparency tweaks that can greatly impact the appearance of the water. In this manner it will be your bump mapping that will be creating your surface disruptions and bump is acceptable for this purpose, but depending on the accuracy level you are seeking might not go far enough.

2. Even better than using the Slab, is to use an actual Terrain. To do this you want to create a large map 4096x4096 using the Round Hills procedural function and then using the Invert option. You should play around with the procedural until you get one with a good amount of bumps on it that when inverted, the depressed edges of the bumps now become the crests of the waves. There is an option to make the Terrain a Solid object, and in this way behaves similarly to a slab. but now you have the added benefit of both the real geometric surface variations as well as whatever bump mapping you apply. The fully 3d surface variations will look really good if you place an object like a boat into the water.

Material

As Horo suggests, make certain the Specular Color is itself fully white. You want to use a Specular Halo that is close to fully black. This will get you the nice tight sharp edges on the reflections. Its also important to remember that the Specular Channle only reponds to specualr from light sources, they do not provide any reflections from the environment. for that you will need to enable real reflection in the Optics portion of the material lab. 

Lighting

Assuming you have set up the Specular channels as described above you are now in a postition to take full advantage of the incoming light from the Sun. The Sun in the Sky Lab  has separate intensity sliders for the Diffuse vs the Specular. Set the Diffuse level to your liking, and set the Specular several times higher than the Diffuse until you arew happy with your highlight intensity.

 

All the best!

akmerlow

Thanks for elaborating in details, much to experiment with.

..now if you won't judge me hard for an off-topic expression:

I've recently was reading some old threads on Bryce, and posts by you, Horo, bytescapes, David Brinnen, Joe Cotter, Chohole, estevez, c-ram and others' are very inspirational and a source of knowledge. Just wanted to appreaciate the flame that you keep warm (i heard there were some "old" dazforums which are now gone, though :( ), it's really priceless.

I notice that recently there was some debate (between wolf359 and kyoto kid, afaik) regarding how much Bryce "holds up today" (how it's still 90s CG dna under skin, how hollywood used Vue for something more believable, how game developers do crazy realistic nature for realtime too etc. etc. etc. ), but regardless of opinions each artist choose tool for himself, right? And there is certainly something magic in Bryce that inspires people who use it.

I liked following quote:

Back to the 'Except in Bryce' statement. Bryce's core concept of inspiring/exploring was well realized in it's interface design so people are able to create amazing stuff 'poking around.' Much more so then in traditional interfaces. It is not unusual for someone to come up with something amazing in Bryce and then for them to tell you they're not sure how they got that effect, because they did it in a freestyle method. You just don't get the "oh hey, that's cool" moments in traditional interfaces that you get with Kia's interface designs. What you do get is a much more predictable and repeatable experience on average. Basically, if one is really good with either tool they will get both, what they get while learning is almost opposite (imo.)

I don't know if anyone here can relate to, but this thought really reminded me situation with sound design / synthesis environment, especially if we talk modular synthesis enthusiasts. If you ever listened to "berlin school" bands and composers (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Shulze) or pioneers of electronica (W. Carlos, Isao Tomita, Morton Subotnick) or something more contemporary (Aphex Twin, Autechre etc), you might be familiar that they often used modular sound synthesis environment (be it analog hardware or digital software), which i think you can compare to node-based material creation tools in a way how you have many modules with specific function and then you connect 'em in different ways to achieve this or that. While some musicians use instead synths with fixed architecture (in which there are pre-wired routes between nodes), modulars gives freedom of wild sound exploration. And, as with that Bryce quote above, often it's about "way of sudden explorations and findings" rather than following known way. But, of course, guidelines and knowiledge how to achieve what are also important...

 

Horo

akmerlow - Bryce is my choice because it's not limited to photo realism. Photo realism is art, but there's much more to art than that. Coming from a technical/engineering background I struggled with the interface in the beginning but soon found that it has a refreshing concept. Before I attempted to make visual art, I created sound sculptures (as I called them) using voltage controlled synthesizers (VCEMS) where all parameters had to be separately configured just to make a particular sound, much like the Bryce DTE for textures. I'm still a great fan of Walter/Wendy Carlos, Isao Tomita, Kraftwerk, etc. It's not just the music they created but also the sound. Bryce gives indeed freedom to the artist even though a few things could be improved.

sriesch

I would be curious to see your results.  This is something I've always wanted to try to use effectively in a render, but never got around to trying.

Slepalex

Rashad Carter said:

2. Even better than using the Slab, is to use an actual Terrain. To do this you want to create a large map 4096x4096 using the Round Hills procedural function and then using the Invert option. You should play around with the procedural until you get one with a good amount of bumps on it that when inverted, the depressed edges of the bumps now become the crests of the waves. There is an option to make the Terrain a Solid object, and in this way behaves similarly to a slab. but now you have the added benefit of both the real geometric surface variations as well as whatever bump mapping you apply. The fully 3d surface variations will look really good if you place an object like a boat into the water.

Excellent results for Terrain gives "Shattered Hills". Here the resolution is 1024.

Here are two examples of using this technology:
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/images/283481
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/images/282436

Hansmar

Marvelous examples, Alex!