Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 6

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  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited November 2013

    After a week of Doctor Who, I really had to get back to Peter the Polar Bear.
    I eased myself back in to the project with this render:

    :-)

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  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited December 1969

    And then continued on with some Valentines, Easter and finally more Christmas designs.

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  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited November 2013

    @David: Nice render.

    @mermaid: Neon rabbits, nice. Love the third one, very cute.

    @Dangerlad: Nice first two images, love the results of the last two. The results you achieved with the ground plain are great.

    @Dave: Love this one, very very cute. Edit: You were posting as I wrote this post, those Peter additions are charming.

    @Horo: The fourth one is because I couldn't see any difference with the mirror behind the camera, so I switch to the director view to see if there were any reflections. And was pleasantly surprised at what I saw. Really strange how the mind wanders when you're having fun.

    Post edited by GussNemo on
  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,705
    edited December 1969

    @Dave - nice Peters.

    @GussNemo - Bryce is fun, that's why the mind wanders ...

  • franontheedgefranontheedge Posts: 342
    edited December 1969

    Here are the renders of the other two lantern glass designs: same lights, same everything – I just changed the designs in the lantern. Done in the ranged falloff scene, and I removed the terrain with the paving slab texture – leaving the unnaturally smooth pavement. It just showed the light being cast through the lanterns' glass better.
    Pics 1&2

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  • franontheedgefranontheedge Posts: 342
    edited December 1969

    Then... I went back to the hyper texture files, and had another tiny play.
    Still not having been able to find out how to create the mylar effect, but I think I'm getting closer.
    At least something's happening to the ground plane in this one:
    Pic 3

    I changed the bump texture to one with dots, and on using spherical mapping and – the moment I increased the repetition, bingo! I got lines!
    Pic 4

    Then I noticed where one side of the sphere had some reflections coming from the ported twisted looped pierced – whatever – thingie, which made me think, 'I wonder what would happen if I put some mirrors in here?'
    So I tried it and I got this:
    Pic 5

    Then I thought, what if I take the minus signs off now?
    And I got this:
    Pic 6

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  • franontheedgefranontheedge Posts: 342
    edited December 1969

    @fencepost,
    Yup I've been trying the different texture in channel B for the bump, see my last post, still no mylar, but... there's something going on there.
    Your post on page8, the middle image, looks a bit like tar, or black mud, add a little brown into that and it might look like chocolate, it has that sort of sheen to it.
    How did you get that effect?

    Also, are you ready with that tut on your springy looking armoured ball yet? (looks a bit like the plating on an armadillo) I keep checking your YouTube channel, but finding nothing there... (insert frowny face here) >:-(

    @GussNemo
    I'm so glad the reduced light and greyed out versions of the lantern had that effect of catching your eye, that's exactly what I was trying for, so thank you so much for telling me, I really appreciate it.

    Oh you had the same idea I had, only you had it sooner. (I mean using mirrors) I posted before I saw the next 2 pages – people's renders have been piling up while I've been waiting, or was it while I was sleeping? Lol!
    I thought of it because I noticed some reflections on the sphere that seemed to be coming from the object next to it.

    I still like the render you did – with the ball. It looks like a very heavy ball, sitting on a flexing thin sheet of copper.

    @mermaid
    I like that last render of the rabibit, looks rather like a white rabbit sitting on a gentle hill covered with snow, at sunrise. Nice.

    @DangerLad
    I particularly like those last two renders of yours, the 'water' effect is particularly good.

    @TheSavage64
    That pose of the little alien guy is really well done. You know one day I'll find someone who does rigging but they won't be able to explain how they do it... lol.
    I can model... er, not always very successfully, (I have a GreenPea character whose mouth is a bit... well it's not quite right. Again I'd like to be able to rig him too, oh well...)

    I haven't really got any great changes to post, this one was, interesting... a bit.

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  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited December 1969

    Last one for today.

    Peter the Polar Bear has fun making a slide.

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  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,705
    edited December 1969

    @franontheedge - the second lantern scene looks good. From the hyper texture series, I like the last best.

    @Dave - that's a great one.

  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited December 1969

    Thanks Horo. :)

    Here's today's... Peter sits and waits patiently for Christmas morning to open his prezzie.

    Suppose I should add these latest ones to my Gallery too. :)

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  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,705
    edited November 2013

    Suppose I should add these latest ones to my Gallery too. :)

    Sure, they look so cute.

    I've been experimenting and this may be of interest to all formites here. As a base, I took the second of David's render on Page 90 and replaced the dragon by the Alien Artefact 21 by MatCreator. Material on the object and the groundplane are the same, the HDRI as well as the render settings.

    1st image: regular low resolution HDRI.

    2nd image: same HDRI specular convolved with a Phong Exponent of 250 (that's quite high as far as specular maps go).

    3rd image: same HDRI specular convolved with a Phong Exponent of 100 (could be done in Bryce).

    4th image: same HDRI diffuse convolved (Phong Exponent 1; cold be done in Bryce).

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  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 5,539
    edited December 1969

    Thanks for the comments

    Fencepost – I forgot to mention that I tried the Satin and denim materials, now I need to find a way to use them in Bryce. I found Photoshop tutorials for them, so was easier. Thanks for mentioning them and sharing the tutorials.

    Dangerlad- wow these are outstanding, love the water effect.

    Dave – each of your Peter renders are awesome and so cute. I love the “Valentine” and slide ones. The snow is so realistic too. How do you achieve such great snow?

    Franontheedge – the lantern and the shape renders are very nicely done. Everyone’s getting lovely results with their experiments. What is rigging????

    Horo – your experiments are great, very colorful

  • David BrinnenDavid Brinnen Posts: 3,136
    edited December 1969

    More results of research from this side too.

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  • DangerladDangerlad Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    @David Brinnen - The second dragon kind of looks like it is made of plasma fire. It's a very nice looking render.

    I was, once again, trying out David's video Wings 3D project - icosahedron twisted loop - by David Brinnen. but on a dodecahedron and I think I did something odd and it didn't come out as I expected. I was able to seperate the object into two parts. The render attached is of the object as it ended up and the parts it breaks into.

    I light it with one of my Bryce generated Abstract HDRI files and the ground plane is one of the default bump selections made reflective. I think it looks a little like liquid mercury.

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  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,705
    edited December 1969

    @David - great effects, the random white pixels make it look a bit like bad smoothed. Render double and downscale is probably the solution.

    @Dangerlad - looking nice. I like the floor on itself but it takes the show away from the shapes.

  • franontheedgefranontheedge Posts: 342
    edited November 2013

    @horo,
    Thanks, I rather like both the last of the set of 6 with the radiate lines and the one on it's own with the softer speckled background – there's something about the dark edges of the ported holey cube thing in those 2 images that looks a bit better than the others. I'm not sure which one you meant.

    I liked the last one of yours too, that slightly softer look shows up the pale green underlight better in my opinion.

    @TheSavage64,
    Loved that render of Peter having fun sliding.

    @Mermaid,
    'Rigging', is what it's called when you place bones and/or joints inside a model, and then parent these to the outer 'skin' and give greater or lesser influence to how much of the skin each joint has power over – this is called weighting – probably more than you needed to know. Basically it's what you need to do to a model to get it to bend at the joints, in order to walk or otherwise move. For posing for stills or for actual animation.
    And I really wish I could do it.

    @ David,
    Funny but I like the last one of your renders too, I love the green tones in the reflection, where there are none in the colours of the model above.

    @DangerLad,
    I like how you've managed to isolate part of the centre twisted cube thingie, and give it a different material, good choice of colours for that too. I rather like putting glass and something else on such cubes, but it doesn't always work.

    Here are the 3 different glass designs now on the standard lantern but in a room – sofa included as per instructions, lol! but I might need to work on the sofa's texture a bit, it's a bit greyed out – but I like the effect of the different glass patterns on the light.

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    Post edited by franontheedge on
  • Fencepost52Fencepost52 Posts: 509
    edited December 1969

    A quick post before I head out....I'll comment on the newest artwork posted a little later....

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  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,705
    edited December 1969

    @franontheedge - nice setup to show the light that emanates from the lamp through the glass.

    @fencepost52 - that's a cool wooden sphere.

  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited December 1969

    Dave – each of your Peter renders are awesome and so cute. I love the “Valentine” and slide ones. The snow is so realistic too. How do you achieve such great snow?

    Thanks :)

    If you mean the snow that's falling, I use David's Volumetric Snow which you can find in the Pro Material under SFX. I usually reduce the frequency to make the flakes bigger.
    If you mean the snow on the ground, it's 'Melting Ice' from the Bryce Terrains materials under 'Snowy'. Each is then modified for the different lighting set up I use.

    Hope this helps.

  • Fencepost52Fencepost52 Posts: 509
    edited November 2013

    Thank you, Horo! Here's another quickie....

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    Post edited by Fencepost52 on
  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @franontheedge: Your first lantern images really look nice, though I like the second one the best because of how it light the scene. Your extreme images really look neat. The last two are my favorites. The lantern in the room is also really nice, though my favorite is the first one.

    @Dave: Very nice additional Peter images.

    @Horo: That "think" is so weird looking but looks great in all the images. Its color is really stunning.

    @David: Of your latest two I like the color of the second one best, reflection too.

    @Dangerlad: Objects look great, so does the material you chose for them. Yet I agree with Horo about the ground material.

    @fencepost: Sweet looking ball, and the neon image of this ball is sharp looking.

  • franontheedgefranontheedge Posts: 342
    edited November 2013

    @fencepost,
    How did you do that black tar or mud render? the one with the ball where part of it is segmenting? (hopefully you'll let us know how to do that segmenting bit when you get that tut done, nudge) and part seems to have hexagonal indentations, (maybe a texture in the bump channel?) – I'd really like to know how you got that tar-like silky look.

    Ooh and I love that latest render of yours, looks like someone with a sparkler where the sparks have finished but the end is still glowing hot, has elegantly drawn intricate shapes in the air. Smokin'!...

    Thinks... I wonder if you could do that and get a smoke effect?? probably could if you desaturate that render. Hmm, isn't it a shame that we can't know what effect will result from doing what to these hyper textures? It's all just hit and miss.

    P.S. I also like that Walnut and... Ivory?

    Now I on the other hand, seem to be rendering a black space... fool that I am, I set the lantern in the corner of the room to render on Fine, with True Ambience... sob!
    It says it's gonna take 8:49:36 to render... and that's not counting the antialiasing, which usually takes even longer... I wonder if it's worth continuing with this?

    Oh, maybe when I reduced the rays per pixel from 6 to 4, that's what made it go black – does anyone know? Horo? David? If that's so, I should stop it now and put the rays back up to 6 and go on holiday for a few days....

    Help?

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  • TrishTrish Posts: 2,625
    edited November 2013

    Just wanted to show what I entered in the new users contest......Alberts new clothes and ground created in Bryce and fence modeled in Bryce and rendered in Bryce.......BRYCE....BRYCE.....BRYCE....LOL ....Trish......Everyone is doing a really nice job with their shapes

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  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @franontheedge: What settings did you change? Do you mean Maximum Ray Depth, instead of Rays Per Pixel?

    @Trish: Albert is looking good.

  • Fencepost52Fencepost52 Posts: 509
    edited December 1969

    Thanks everybody! Just a quick response.....

    On the wood sphere, the dark texture is a default Bryce in the vegetation > wood and I believe it's one of the "walnut" textures with the scaling adjusted to better (IMO) fit the size of the shape. The lighter color is Bamboo found in BlueGenie2's wood set found here: http://www.sharecg.com/v/33965/browse/7/Material-and-Shader/Wood.

    I'm working on a couple of tutorials and should have them posted this weekend (at least one of them, anyway). I'm currently preparing the "rolled" sphere found seen in my hypertexture experiments and the armored (segmented) sphere. I have others in the queue including the "star" one used in my most recent posts. All of these can be created in 5 minutes or less, unfortunately that's not quite the case with preparing the actual tutorial! ;) However, if you want to experiment with the models until I get the tutorials finished, I certainly have no problem making them available for download.

    The tar/mud render is, I believe, the armored sphere with default Bryce textures (I'll have to confirm that) and the indents are a random bump I grabbed from the texture library.

    The neon/sparklers render was quite easy and fun to experiment with. I really think it has lots of possibilities and I'm sure you experts out there can figure out even better ways to exploit the effect. When I modeled the star sphere, I created a separate texture for all of the edges of the 3 different shapes. That way I could manipulate them as much as I wanted. The screenshot below shows the edge in a metallic color. In Bryce, I only turned it on and filled it with one of David Brinnen's "fire-type" textures in the Pro Textures that came with Bryce 7. I fiddled with the settings a tad and then I duplicated the mesh, changed the size by fractions of a Bryce unit and randomly rotated them fractionally, to give a slight blur effect. I kept doing this until I thought it looked cool.

    Y'all have some great posts here and I apologize I can't specifically comment on each of them right now, but I will later. Happy Thanksgiving!

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  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited December 1969

    Now I on the other hand, seem to be rendering a black space... fool that I am, I set the lantern in the corner of the room to render on Fine, with True Ambience... sob!
    I'm not sure quite what you mean by this.
    True Ambience will only work if the render setting is on Premium.
    If that's the case, try setting the Rays Per Pixel down to 4. You'll get an initial render with some grainyness, but it should be much quicker.
    Then your scene is looking OK, you can try some plop renders of the grainiest parts at higher RPP to see what is the optimum setting to use for the final render. Rendering above a setting where you are no longer distracted by the grain will only result in a long render with no discernible increase in quality anyway.

    It says it's gonna take 8:49:36 to render... and that's not counting the antialiasing, which usually takes even longer... I wonder if it's worth continuing with this?

    If you are using the Premium Render setting (thereby enabling True Ambience), there is no Anti Aliasing... It dies that as it goes and not in a extra pass at the end. So the Bryce estimated time is more accurate *because on the other Regular and Super settings, the estimate doesn't include the AA pass. But looking at your render, it's not worth continuing because there is obviously something wrong with the light.

    Oh, maybe when I reduced the rays per pixel from 6 to 4, that's what made it go black – does anyone know? Horo? David? If that's so, I should stop it now and put the rays back up to 6 and go on holiday for a few days....
    Presuming you're referring to the Max Ray Depth and not the Rays Per Pixel. It can have a dramatic effect on glass in that it doesn't allow light rays to pass through the transparent objects after a certain amount of bounces (determined by the Max Ray Depth), so increasing it back up to 6 may cure the problem yes.
    As for the render speed, it's going to depend on a lot of possible things. Do you just have a single regular radial light inside the lamp? or did you use the fill or dome light? (which gives a softer edge but is in reality lots of virtual lights giving a large surface area as opposed to a single pin point of light).
    Did you switch the sun off (in the sky lab)?
    Is there any HDRI IBL used?
    What is your Rays Per Pixel set to?

    Hope this helps. :)

  • franontheedgefranontheedge Posts: 342
    edited November 2013

    @bullit,
    Wow, you created clothing IN BRYCE??? That's amazing, I can hardly manage a torn shirt in Wings3d! wow!

    @ Fencepost, GussNemo & TheSavage64 –
    Yes, you are all right, it was the Maximum Ray Depth, NOT the rays per pixel that I changed, I said it without checking the label, well it was rendering.
    Here's a screen shot of the render options: easier than saying it all.

    The other pic shows the result of actually lowering the rays per pixel from 64 down to 4, the Maximum ray depth I returned to 6.

    This scene has a single radial inside the lantern, but there IS IBL, - I'm afraid you won't like this, but I'm using an hdri that I made from a favourite sky of mine, I called it BlueSkies2 and the sunlight is NOT disabled. The HDRI has been added to the sky and applied to light source.
    Pic 3 shows IBL settings

    This room in enclosed in that it has a ceiling, but there are two doors and two windows and all 4 let light in as both doors and windows have glass in them. Otherwise there's just the one radial in the lantern.

    Oops, I meant to say that the green arrow denotes the location of the lantern - otherwise you can't tell.

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  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited December 1969

    Right thanks Franontheedge, that makes advising you a lot easier. :)

    First thing you can check with regards to render speed is if the IBL is set to 'True Ambience Optomisation'
    You'll find the control for that in the little triangle button to the right of the HDRI Effect setting in the IBL tab of the Skylab.
    Though to be honest, I'm not sure what advantage you are getting from having IBL on this scene, so I'd try it without for a first True Ambient render.

    Another thing to note when you use TA as well as IBL is that the little nano preview will not give you an accurate representation of the result of your lighting set up. I believe this is because TA is only calculated at render time so it can not be predetermined for the nano preview. So bear in mind that your nano preview will usually have to look very over lightened in order for the your TA render to be lit correctly.

    David Brinnen has a good video in his tutorials regarding setting up a pure TA render, where he goes into detail about first setting the scene up so you get nothing but a pure black render. So switch off the sun, switch off the IBL, set the sky to black and haze to zero etc, until when you click render, you get pure black... Then you add your direct lights only (in this case your single radial) and because you are dealing with true ambience, the ambient light from the light available will bounce around naturally into your scene (in a similar way to how IBL works to light up areas not directly lit by the light source).

    Finally, like I mentioned, set your Rays Per Pixel down to 4 initially for test rendering to get your lighting right and then up it only for your final render... I rarely render above 36 unless there are strong reflections or odd shaded areas that exaggerate the grainy noise generated by the TA process.

    Then once you've got it close enough, you can play with the strength and range of your single radial light in order to get the perfect effect of your lantern on the walls and the rest of the room should be lit in accordance with that. If you get the lantern looking right but feel that the room needs a tad more light, re-enable IBL and tweak it up bit by bit (making sure it's TA Optimised).

    Another thing when using True Ambience is to make sure that none of your materials have any values set in the Ambient channel in the Material lab as it can leave them looking very odd. Also make sure that the universal shadow setting is set to 100 in the sky lab (this is labelled Sun/Moon Shadows but applies to any shadow cast in most situations it's default is 90% and that may also slow your render down, even if the Sun has been switched off.

  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @fencepost: Thanks for the link, new wood is always good wood.

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,705
    edited December 1969

    @fencepost52 - look nice, the orangy outlines and the metallic one as well.

    @bullit35744 - Albert reappeared with hist most famous formula.

    @franontheedge - if you want to get IB light into a closed room, you must disable shadow casting for the object(s) that surround your scene. If you want Obscure light, the HDRI must be inside and TA Optimization DIS-abled. For a normal TA render with IBL, it must be EN-abled. Dave gave you good advice. Start by using the lantern only and adjust the radial's diffuse. Use IBL only if necessary.

    Always keep it simple as long as possible. The more parameters there are, the more difficult it gets to understand which one has which effect.

This discussion has been closed.