Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 7

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Comments

  • RoygeeRoygee Posts: 2,247
    edited December 1969

    Hi folks :)

    It's been a long time...

    Bryce was dying on me bit-by-bit. Thought it was the usual instability and was about ready to pack it in, then installed a fresh download and it seems to be behaving - holding thumbs.

    This is my latest model made in hexagon - the suspension bridge at Clifton.

    I'm getting a better "feel" for terrain placement - would appreciate some critique on how t imrove it:)

    Cheers

    Clifton_bridge.png
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  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,632
    edited December 1969

    @Roygee - the bridge looks great. There's nothing wrong with your terrain. Perhaps you could work a bit on the material applied, but this one from the library isn't actually bad.

    I've been working a bit on island terrains. This one took me 2 days to get it the way I wanted. This is just a test render using it.

    C-Island04.jpg
    800 x 533 - 129K
  • STKyddSTKydd Posts: 59
    edited December 1969

    @roygee, Bridge looks really good, I have had Hexagon for a couple of years now, but I am just getting around to play with it.

    @Horo , Terrain looks great I saw the road right away and something that almost looks like a runway, Can't wait to see the final image.

  • dana365dana365 Posts: 131
    edited December 1969

    Horo:
    great terrain for sure,
    I have a question, if you always keep the global shadows (sun, moon shadows), at 100%, how do you get the softer/lighter shadows on the terrain?

  • RoygeeRoygee Posts: 2,247
    edited December 1969

    Thank you Horo and STKydd :) Yes, I really need to try to get a better understanding of the DTI - very confusing for me, although I've watched countless videos! My family says the ripples on the water are too big in comparison to the scale of the pic - I'll see if that can be corrected.

    @Horo - that is a really dramatic terrain - brings to mind a mountain range near where I live, which overlooks a bay and has a road cut into it. Very dangerous to drive and often being closed because of rock falls!

  • pagsovationpagsovation Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Horo: Love that island!

  • pagsovationpagsovation Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Ty Dana and goshtac!

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,632
    edited December 1969

    @STKydd - thank you. No airstrip but a road and a mesh tower.

    @dana365 - thank you. Sun/Moon Shadows 100%, Skydome colour black. There is indeed only sun light and black shadows. Several possibilities to bright them up. You can use dome lights, or fill lights, or IBL. I'm usually using IBL because I'm more familiar with it and it is simple to use. No need to find an appropriate HDRI, you can just create one from the sky and get nice ambient light for the sky. Here, I took one of mine with a prominent sun and rotated it in the opposite direction of the Bryce sun and also used it with 50% transparency for the sky.

    @Roygee - thank you. You don't need to venture into the DTE to tweak materials. A lot can be done already in the Mat Lab. In the case of the water, you can increase the frequency with the transformation tools (left button on top of the texture thumbnails), and reduce the amount of Bump.

    @pagsovation - thank you.

  • GoshtacGoshtac Posts: 0
    edited June 2014

    @Roygee - Love your scene and fabulous work on the bridge - I have had HEX for quite a few years now and still manage to do only real simple model work with it ( Program drives me a bit crazy to say the least and frequently hangs up on me ) All told, a great image and the landscape looks fine and works well with the bridge.

    @Horo As usual my friend, you have a great landscape ( You and David seem to be the Masters of Bryce Landscapes as you always give them that photo realism.) You always make fantastic landscapes look easy and I can only hope that in 10 years from now I might just even begin to approach your level of skill with Bryce.

    Bruce

    Post edited by Goshtac on
  • dana365dana365 Posts: 131
    edited December 1969

    Horo:
    thank you for getting back so quick, great tips, really seem like the back bone to shadow control, I will start working with these concepts. Thanks again!

  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 5,481
    edited December 1969

    Thanks all for the nice feedback and comments on the space scene and the klein bottle. I also love SciFi and surreal scenes. It’s thanks to David that I can achieve cool results.

    Roygee – beautiful bridge and the scene is very nicely done. I don’t mess with the DTE but tweak materials like Horo suggested. I found David’s tutorial Remixing materials very helpful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEIpziaLXlM

    Horo- great work with the terrain. The lighting is awesome.

    Here’s another attempt at the same tutorial. I exported the sky from my previous scene as an Hdri and then used it as an Hdri in this scene. I increased the Refraction of the lens to 40.

    space2.jpg
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  • cjreynoldscjreynolds Posts: 155
    edited December 1969

    Great terrains and bridges on these last two pages, and I like the 'expedition' render..

    I do a lot more lurking than posting in this forum, but after seeing your wall with the crosses, pagsovation, I couldn't keep my mouth shut, lol! Great render! Love the materials you used - looks like a photo (a very good photo, at that).

    The work I see in these threads never ceases to amaze me!

  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @Roygee: That scene really looks good, especially the bridge. Hope you'll post it again when you're done tweaking.

    @Horo: Two days setup was well worth it. For a trial render it's awfully nice. Took me a minute to find the road that was mentioned, but I found it.

    @mermaid: Love the sky in that scene. And your force field looks much better, though the texture of the sand isn't as pronounced.

    Downloaded a few bridge images, and tried creating one using Wings 3D. It isn't exactly like the image, but I like the results nonetheless. I created it with the thought of replicating it to add more spans, so the piers, main deck, and upper girders all separate entities.

    Girder_Bridge_w_2_Pierst.png
    1080 x 810 - 473K
  • Fencepost52Fencepost52 Posts: 509
    edited December 1969

    Hello fellow Brycers! Long time no see. I troll the forums several times a week, but work has been so crazy for the last several months, I wasn't sure I would ever be able to sit down and render something again. Finally worked on something last night and thought I would share.

    This render was inspired by this David Brinnen tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lISK6iLJKpM I didn't follow everything exactly, but as always, I learned a lot.

    Hope everyone is doing well and am keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to spend more "formal" time here.

    GlowTest.jpg
    750 x 750 - 430K
  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @fencepost: Good to know you're still holding down the ground. Interesting results from David's video.

  • Fencepost52Fencepost52 Posts: 509
    edited December 1969

    Thanks, GussNemo! Here's a few "pencil sketch" renders I did following David's tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfRzEydWRio)

    One regular black and white and a couple with colors added in. Not sure which of the colored ones I like better, but the results are quite nice. Thanks for another great tutorial, David! The black and white render uses one of the Heating Room materials for the floor from David and Horo's material set (http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro-50-metals-the-heating-room-set).

    PencilSketchAmbientLight2ColoredA.jpg
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    PencilSketchAmbientLight2Colored.jpg
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    PencilSketch.jpg
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  • cjreynoldscjreynolds Posts: 155
    edited December 1969

    Love the B&W sketch - Of the colored ones, I think I like the last one best.

  • GussNemoGussNemo Posts: 1,855
    edited December 1969

    @fencepost: Really like your pencil sketch results, especially the lightly colored two.

  • JStryderJStryder Posts: 168
    edited December 1969

    Over in the contest thread, I was struggling with memory limits for scenes with characters . . so driven to try out Meshlab & see how well it plays with Daz Studio/Bryce. The result is what you see here. Character created in Daz, exported as .obj, imported into Meshlab having 206,297 vertices. Export/import worked smoothly, except I had to edit the .mtl file to include the full path to the materials that D|S exported and make sure there were no spaces in the path names, otherwise Meshlab could not find them. In Meshlab, decimated twice @20% using "quadratic edge collapse decimation," resulting in a model with 9246 vertices. Exported as .obj, imported into Bryce. The textures came over pretty well, although fabric patterns were scrambled and eyeballs were white (white eyeballs are a common problem with character imports in Bryce, I have no idea why eyeballs have problems when other textures are fine). Low resolution clearly visible in close-up. but she is not for close-ups. Instanced the yoga girl about 200 times over a terrain (at this point Bryce was a bit sluggish, showed as using >1.2 GBytes in task manager), rendered. At a distance, she looks pretty good.

    So I am relieved to find a solution to the memory limits in scenes with many distant characters, from a free tool.

    YogaGirlMeshlabDecimated.jpg
    1400 x 467 - 511K
  • David BrinnenDavid Brinnen Posts: 3,136
    edited December 1969

    Been a busy week mostly every free moment sunk into Wings 3D trying to get to grips with modelling stuff. I tried a demo of Modo which is terrific - but also the price is terrifying! And besides, my attitude is that you buy the tool that suits your level of competence, which is why I've never bought a badminton racket for more than £45 - although I've been playing for... er... over 25 years now, I've never got beyond £45 badminton racket level of competence. I break the strings in about six months. Which if you know the game will tell you I'm not very accurate. One of the people I play with, and who beats me continually, breaks the strings once every 20 years. Although they have been playing for twice as long. I hope to be as good one day.

    So I see we have our first set of terrains in the store http://www.daz3d.com/new-releases/bryce-7-1-pro-high-resolution-terrains-set-1 which is nice. And here's a render with a few additions of my own made in Wings 3d.

    On the topic of terrains I see Horo's managed to incorporate a road into his terrains, this is very impressive, since I've seen many attempts at roads and terrains (made a few myself) and I know how difficult it is to get right.

    Mermaid, as ever keeping pace with my video's - thank you! Looks good.

    Jamie's Wings bridge is a very pleasing shape, you've done a good job there. Expect some more Wings tutorials from me in the future since I've discovered a lot of useful things in this last week at the expense of many hours of tooth grinding bafflement.

    Art, the coloured pencil sketches turned out very well. The grain really adding to the effect. I think of the two coloured versions I like the top one best.

    JStrider, yes I've used Meshlabs decimation tool too and found it very handy for fixing odd problems with models too - like Bryce's annoying habit of sometimes flipping the faces of entire objects when they are imported. As for eye problems with the models, probably because the eyes of the DAZ models are somewhat complex involving a few transparency layers which don't get ported over correctly.

    Picknick_area1.jpg
    1511 x 850 - 530K
  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 5,481
    edited December 1969

    GussNemo said:

    @mermaid: Love the sky in that scene. And your force field looks much better, though the texture of the sand isn't as pronounced.

    Downloaded a few bridge images, and tried creating one using Wings 3D. It isn't exactly like the image, but I like the results nonetheless. I created it with the thought of replicating it to add more spans, so the piers, main deck, and upper girders all separate entities.

    Guss-Thanks. I also like the sand from the 1st render. I tried many things, even using object mask to combine both images but the camera positions are different.

    The bridge is looking good.

    Art- So cool to see your renders again. I like the 1st render of the pencil sketches.

    David-Thanks for the videos. Unlike the others, I don’t have the grey cells to experiment much or think out of the box so to speak, so I really look forward to your video tutorials. Looking forward to the new Wings tutorials.

    The latest render is nicely done, I especially like the sitting area.

  • JamahoneyJamahoney Posts: 1,791
    edited June 2014

    Fencepost...great pencil effects...must give it a try.

    If it's of any use, JStryder...on the eyeballs’ issue, I only get that problem when using Daz 3.1 (not 4.6). You can, however, fix the problem in Daz 3.1 by selecting the parts of the eye and moving them ever so slightly towards the camera. For some unknown reason they import slightly (for my setup, anyway) behind the main eyeball, and if that isn’t a problem, the pupils’ group also comes in rotated by 180 degrees in the horizontal.

    Jay

    Eyeballs.jpg
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    Post edited by Jamahoney on
  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    edited June 2014

    Jamahoney said:
    Fencepost...great pencil effects...must give it a try.

    If it's of any use, JStryder...on the eyeballs’ issue, I only get that problem when using Daz 3.1 (not 4.6). You can, however, fix the problem in Daz 3.1 by selecting the parts of the eye and moving them ever so slightly towards the camera. For some unknown reason they import slightly (for my setup, anyway) behind the main eyeball, and if that isn’t a problem, the pupils’ group also comes in rotated by 180 degrees in the horizontal.

    Jay

    Is that a Gen 4 character or a genesis one. In gen 4 the white layer over the top of the eye parts can be set to a glass mat to give eye shine.

    Branwen_2.jpg
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    branwen_1.jpg
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    Post edited by Chohole on
  • JamahoneyJamahoney Posts: 1,791
    edited June 2014

    chohole said:
    Jamahoney said:
    Fencepost...great pencil effects...must give it a try.

    If it's of any use, JStryder...on the eyeballs’ issue, I only get that problem when using Daz 3.1 (not 4.6). You can, however, fix the problem in Daz 3.1 by selecting the parts of the eye and moving them ever so slightly towards the camera. For some unknown reason they import slightly (for my setup, anyway) behind the main eyeball, and if that isn’t a problem, the pupils’ group also comes in rotated by 180 degrees in the horizontal.

    Jay

    Is that a Gen 4 character or a genesis one. In gen 4 the white layer over the top of the eye parts can be set to a glass mat to give eye shine.

    Chohole...not sure - was it Vicky 4 or Victoria 4 that came with Daz 3.1? But with 4.6 it's Gen 2. I tried your glass suggestion (transparency, too) on the eyeball's sclera and eye surface on Vic, but you can only see the other parts (pupils, etc.,) faintly.

    I don't do much facework, let alone bodywork, too, but I do like the old Daz 3.1 model as it's possible to change markings on the face and body maps manually, using, say, a graphics software, as they are in .jpg format. I can't seem to find that format in 4.6, as they may be using a different extension to suit the code.

    Jay

    Post edited by Jamahoney on
  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    edited June 2014

    In Poser on V4 I have cornea, Sclera, eyesurface, Iris and Pupil, and these also when I bring the obj into Bryce, so it is the 3rd Eye mesh that I use.
    . It is the eye surface that I make into glass, not the sclera, that needs a Mat. I also tend to make the cornea transparent as well, so only the sclera, Iris and Pupil actually have a texture. In Bryce I find having both the cornea and the eye surface with a glass mat gives too much specularity in some lights.

    As you can see from my 2 quick renders it does make a lot of difference.

    You can still use V4 in DS 4.6

    Post edited by Chohole on
  • JamahoneyJamahoney Posts: 1,791
    edited December 1969

    Yeah, Chohole, the difference in your two heads really is effective and makes for a wonderful difference - the right-most one doesn't have that 'dead-eye' effect I've seen so many times in other head-shot renders. So your method is defintely working.

    Jay

  • GoshtacGoshtac Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Hi folks;

    Hope all had a great and safe weekend. Now that school is out, the wife and I get to have 9 of our grandkids here almost daily so my time playing with artwork will be limited to some degree ( At least during daylight hours )

    Have been working on a few props using primitives for my newest project. Thought I would post image of one of my WIP props. Still feel it needs a little work but this is my idea for a POP can prop. Can made with primitives in Bryce and graphics done with PSP9 and then added in the material lab.

    Have a great day!

    Bruce

    Cold_Rock_Cola_Image_J.jpg
    930 x 659 - 112K
  • Rashad CarterRashad Carter Posts: 1,799
    edited December 1969

    JStryder said:
    Over in the contest thread, I was struggling with memory limits for scenes with characters . . so driven to try out Meshlab & see how well it plays with Daz Studio/Bryce. The result is what you see here. Character created in Daz, exported as .obj, imported into Meshlab having 206,297 vertices. Export/import worked smoothly, except I had to edit the .mtl file to include the full path to the materials that D|S exported and make sure there were no spaces in the path names, otherwise Meshlab could not find them. In Meshlab, decimated twice @20% using "quadratic edge collapse decimation," resulting in a model with 9246 vertices. Exported as .obj, imported into Bryce. The textures came over pretty well, although fabric patterns were scrambled and eyeballs were white (white eyeballs are a common problem with character imports in Bryce, I have no idea why eyeballs have problems when other textures are fine). Low resolution clearly visible in close-up. but she is not for close-ups. Instanced the yoga girl about 200 times over a terrain (at this point Bryce was a bit sluggish, showed as using >1.2 GBytes in task manager), rendered. At a distance, she looks pretty good.

    So I am relieved to find a solution to the memory limits in scenes with many distant characters, from a free tool.

    The sluggishness is probably caused by the wireframe view being too densely packed with information. Best to remember to enable Show as Box before you begin instancing, so that the resulting group is already in box mode so that the screen updating remains lightning fast.

  • JStryderJStryder Posts: 168
    edited December 1969

    Jamahoney said:
    chohole said:
    Jamahoney said:
    Fencepost...great pencil effects...must give it a try.

    If it's of any use, JStryder...on the eyeballs’ issue, I only get that problem when using Daz 3.1 (not 4.6). You can, however, fix the problem in Daz 3.1 by selecting the parts of the eye and moving them ever so slightly towards the camera. For some unknown reason they import slightly (for my setup, anyway) behind the main eyeball, and if that isn’t a problem, the pupils’ group also comes in rotated by 180 degrees in the horizontal.

    Jay

    Is that a Gen 4 character or a genesis one. In gen 4 the white layer over the top of the eye parts can be set to a glass mat to give eye shine.

    Chohole...not sure - was it Vicky 4 or Victoria 4 that came with Daz 3.1? But with 4.6 it's Gen 2. I tried your glass suggestion (transparency, too) on the eyeball's sclera and eye surface on Vic, but you can only see the other parts (pupils, etc.,) faintly.

    I don't do much facework, let alone bodywork, too, but I do like the old Daz 3.1 model as it's possible to change markings on the face and body maps manually, using, say, a graphics software, as they are in .jpg format. I can't seem to find that format in 4.6, as they may be using a different extension to suit the code.

    Jay

    Thanks for the tips. I'm using Studio 4.6, and usually use the "bridge" instead of exporting as .obj and then importing into Bryce. Going through the bridge, sometimes the eye works fine without any tweaking, sometimes not; it depends on the figure. Sometime the same figure will work fine with Bryce sometimes, and sometimes not. I haven't been able to identify all of the different factors that might cause the problem for all the different models and the different materials that can be applied to them. But the suggestions here look like good ones, thanks everybody!

    I've never used 3.1, started out with 4.5. 4.6 still uses jpeg for textures, and these can be altered, renamed, etc., for kit bashing. I usually locate the relevant .jpg through the surfaces tab/edit material. There is a tiny drop-down box just to the left of each texture (diffuse, bump, etc.) that can be used to identify the location of the .jpg being used to drive the texture.

  • JStryderJStryder Posts: 168
    edited December 1969

    JStryder said:
    Over in the contest thread, I was struggling with memory limits for scenes with characters . . so driven to try out Meshlab & see how well it plays with Daz Studio/Bryce. The result is what you see here. Character created in Daz, exported as .obj, imported into Meshlab having 206,297 vertices. Export/import worked smoothly, except I had to edit the .mtl file to include the full path to the materials that D|S exported and make sure there were no spaces in the path names, otherwise Meshlab could not find them. In Meshlab, decimated twice @20% using "quadratic edge collapse decimation," resulting in a model with 9246 vertices. Exported as .obj, imported into Bryce. The textures came over pretty well, although fabric patterns were scrambled and eyeballs were white (white eyeballs are a common problem with character imports in Bryce, I have no idea why eyeballs have problems when other textures are fine). Low resolution clearly visible in close-up. but she is not for close-ups. Instanced the yoga girl about 200 times over a terrain (at this point Bryce was a bit sluggish, showed as using >1.2 GBytes in task manager), rendered. At a distance, she looks pretty good.

    So I am relieved to find a solution to the memory limits in scenes with many distant characters, from a free tool.

    The sluggishness is probably caused by the wireframe view being too densely packed with information. Best to remember to enable Show as Box before you begin instancing, so that the resulting group is already in box mode so that the screen updating remains lightning fast.

    Ah yes! I had forgotten about "Show as box," thank you Rashad. Will make a mental note of it, although my mental scratchpad is a bit cluttered these days. Now it's off to plan some epic scenes of vast hordes filling Bryce terrains.

This discussion has been closed.