Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 7
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Here is where you can find it: http://www.uvmapper.com/ (on the downloads page, you want "Download UVMapper Classic for Windows" to get the free version). Then start with the tutorial at http://www.uvmapper.com/tutorials/tutorial_classic_win.html to see how to use it.
Apologies for my latest absence (it seems to be getting regular ooops).
I've been travelling and working and playing and gigging too much.
But now I've got a paying job in, that hopefully will include some Bryce animation (whoopee!!!!)
I've already started putting some very basic ideas together though I've not gone far because the job isn't 100% confirmed yet.
These are low render quality clips, not edited together very cleverly and show just two of the ideas so far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ-pzMSd-00&feature=youtu.be
Great renders from everyone continue to pour out and it's all great stuff. Especially happy to see SilverDali back again.
@Dave - hope you'll get the job. Great preliminary work already.
I've been doing a bit of backyard astronomy lately. Below two galaxies (HGC1481 and HGC1482) and three nebulae (Dog-Head Nebula, Dragon Nebula and Odd-Twins Nebula).
CJ, I think I have your answer. You say you placed the light inside the O. I tried that. It literally becomes inside the O ... I meant the terrain. The "bulb" of the light is trapped in the solid part. No light gets out. Position your light directly behind the O.
Since I went to the bother, I also made some screen shots that might help you.
I apologize that I did not render the entire image, but those volume lights sure bog down render times, don't they? However you can see if this is the result you were after.
I didn't have access to any of your source, so I just started from what I remembered seeing here. Since you used a terrain for your O, so did I. (If I was doing this project, I would have used a lattice instead of a terrain. Same process.) Once I had your O duplicated, (more or less ... had to guess on material), I put a spotlight inside of it. No light, just like yours.
I then moved the spotlight back and the light was there in all its glory. Too much glory, in fact. I moved it too far back so light was spilling outside the O a bunch. Once I shrunk it down and placed it just barely behind the O, I got the effect you see.
I also noticed in your parameters in the Light Lab, that you had "Use Gel" checked. I had no idea what gel you used, so I kept that turned off. If you were just altering the color of the light, you can do that without the gel. If it was some other reason, once you place the spotlight correctly, your gel will probably also work.
I include here the parameters for my spotlight, my O, and what I ended up with in the Light Lab. As you can see, I also changed it to "Infinite Light".
If the beams coming out of your O are too wide, to narrow the beams, you can stretch the spotlight along the X axis, (in the example I provide. May be a different axis in your project, but compare with my spotlight attributes).
You already know how to change the brightness of the light, so get to it.
Hope this solves it for you.
Here is where you can find it: http://www.uvmapper.com/ (on the downloads page, you want "Download UVMapper Classic for Windows" to get the free version). Then start with the tutorial at http://www.uvmapper.com/tutorials/tutorial_classic_win.html to see how to use it.
Thanks, Sean. I did go to the site. The price is GREAT! Gotta love freebies. However, it's more than I want to wrap my brain around right now. I'll stick to old school Bryce until I need a bit more texture, such as David's extremely realistic looking radio.
@Dave: All the objects in that test animation are really nice. Do hope you're hired for this job.
@Horo: Those are beautiful images, what I'd expect to see from a spaced based telescope.
Messing about again. Trying out lights, sun positions and render times.
Lion Pride.
Image 1
The first pre-render with just the sun. It rendered quite fast but it had too much shadow.
Image 2
Added a 3d light and turned off the sun. Lost the shadows :-)
Image 3
Moved the sun round which helped the shadows but I didn't like the sky :) Took for ever to pre-render, something like four days.
Image 4
Moved the sun and eventually settled on this. Pre-render didn't take too long but a full render is going to take three days so it can wait :-)
@Fishtales - hard to believe your render times if I look at the scenes. Stick to the first scene. A possibility to make the shadows less dark - which I do NOT recommend - is to reduce shadow intensity for the sun in the Sky Lab. Render is fast but shadow regions lack the bump because the objects get partly transparent to sun light if sun shadows are not 100%.
To remedy the black shadows and get a better result without much increasing render time: (1) you can use a dome light but switch off shadows for it. (2) You can also use a week radial with no fall-off and no shadows at or near the camera position. (3) Or you can create an HDRI from your sky (switch the sun/moon visible off to do that, then switch it back on) and use it as ambient light. Set it to not rendered as backdrop and switch the shadows off. Adjust ambient light with HDRI Effect and set quality not higher than 64.
Generally, the more light sources that cast shadows you have in your scene, the longer the render time. Shadow rays are separately calculated.
@Fishtales - Following up on Horo's advice. You can thank Rashad for this in his post:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/656020/
He points out that; in real world lighting, "there is always a ton of light flying around in all different directions, not just downward". He goes on to discuss Skylight Domes and Earthglow Domes. It's well worth reading.
I'm not advanced enough in Bryce to do it the way Rashad describes and Horo suggests at first, (or it could be just because I only have Bryce 5.5 ... not sure). However, what I did do to an outdoor scene with trees, where the tree trunks in shade were almost mere black outlines, (even though the "viewer" would have also been in shade with eyes adjusted to see trunk details), was Horo's second suggestion; to add a single radial light, casting no shadows, just behind the camera. The intensity was only 2. Kept the falloff, though so shaded items in the distance remain black. Just wanted the area close to the veiwer more viewable. Amazing difference. Try it.
I'm not through with it ... only have the left half of the screen built, (and it looks like I have a Douglas Fir sporting Oak leaves ... haven't even started mucking with Sky Lab, yet), but I'm posting it anyway, just so you can see the huge difference it makes. Also posting the parameters for the radial light. Render time with the radial on my Pentium4 2.52gHz 1 Gig system was 50:37.
@TheSavage64 - If they see that prelim work, you should get the job.
@Horo - Wow! Just, Wow! Space ... the vinyl frontier.
BTW, would you drink from this stream? It has a bit of a byte.
This is a really nice scene in several ways. You've gotten some great advice from Horo and CTippetts.
A few more considerations;
1. Your tree roots are above ground. I assume you want those roots submerged.
2. Render Settings: One big mistake people often make is turning on advanced render effects at times when they are not needed. Make sure that at this early stage you stay in Standard AA Mode, avoid Superfine and Premium for now. From the looks of things you don't need any of those settings, standard will do fine.
B. The Manes on the male lions are certain to be a real render hog. Generally speaking, any object with a Blend Transparency mode will render slow as all heck, and that is on a single layer. The manes on these animals are made of several sheets all overlapping, so the render time will be extremely long. This is unavoidable and what is worse is that the more point light sources in the scene the slower it all becomes.
As Horo states, you must be careful in how you manage your shadow rays. If you are open to it, I'd like to toss out a few concepts about how Bryce renders and this might help explain why some approaches work better than others. I am not an expert, so my own understanding might not be perfect, but I get the general idea so I will share that with you.
Raytracing Basics
Not all RAYS are the same.....
Step 1, The camera is a point-like item similar to a radial. The camera fires initial rays into the scene to determine which surfaces in the scene will be relevant to this current shot. Surfaces outside of the view of the camera are generally treated as irrelevant.
Step 2, the geometric surfaces determined to be relevant within the shot will then fire "feeler" rays looking for any potential light sources such as radials. Usually the Sun is active so most surfaces (except for those facing downward) find that they can see the sunlight, as well as any other point light source you've added. It is all a matter of angular relationships at this point.
Step 3, Once we know which surfaces the camera can see and which of those surfaces can see the light source, it is now time for the light source to fire its rays toward those relevant surfaces. These light rays carry color, intensity, and directional vector information.
4. Once the light rays are fired they will strike the relevant surfaces lending them their color and brightness.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Once a ray strikes a surface it is absorbed by that surface every time. If a surface is "transparent" then after the initial light ray is absorbed a secondary light ray must be fired from the model itself while carrying the same vector information as the original to give the impression that the original light ray never stopped moving. These secondary light rays are why basic transparency increases rendering time so much. But Blend Transparency is even worse.
5. If the model is solid geometry, then when the light rays are absorbed the model itself must then fire shadow rays to create the impression of occlusion. If however the model is Blend Transparency, then technically speaking, the geometry is no longer solid, so the calculation of the secondary light rays and the shadow rays cannot be assumed, each ray must be individually calculated.
The same is true for a reflective surface. The initial light ray is absorbed as it comes in from a certain direction, and a secondary light ray is fired from the absorption position traveling in the opposite direction of the original light ray creating the appearance of a specular reflection. But back to shadows.....
Another way to think of it is like this. Shadow rays tend to greatly outnumber light rays. Look carefully next time at the render time report and you will see this for yourself. Generally speaking, Light sources fire light rays; but transparency/ reflection/ and shadow rays are all fired from the geometry of the models themselves. So when you turn on sunlight and it strikes a cube and a shadow is formed on the ground plane, do realize that the "shadow" is only present because the cube has fired shadow rays toward the ground plane that are cancelling out the illumination the ground plane technically still receives from the sunlight. Shadow rays cancel light rays.
3. What this means is that for every 1 light ray fired from a point-like light source, several thousand shadow rays must be fired from the geometry of the models. Radials can fire single rays because they are infinitely small points. Models are always bigger than infinitely small points, so to create a consistent shadow each point on the cube surface must fire rays independently, and it usually takes thousands of them to cover an area. If the geometry is solid at all points, then the shadow ray firings are all the same intensity, color and travel in the same direction, so the calculation of one ray is then shared with the others making it all very fast. But if the model has a Blend Transparency based material, then Bryce has to calculate a great deal more. First it has to reference the image map of the transparency just to know where the edges are, and worse, each of the shadow rays fired will have a different intensity based on the opacity of the map.
All of this is exacerbated even more when you increase the Render Settings to higher rays per pixel. The higher rays per pixel setting means that the camera is now firing many more rays into the scene, each selecting slightly different surfaces as relevant. It also means that there are more secondary light rays and more shadow rays being fired. So do keep render quality at standard unless you really have a good reason to do otherwise.
Typically, one has to make a choice early on. What's more important to the piece, good lighting or clean lines and curves in the final render? Turning up render quality means the render will be very slow, and adding in more lights only slows it even more. I tend to be on the side of better light, while accepting standard render quality. To have both is possible, but it will cost a ton of time.
In Bryce 6 onward, Bryce will use multiple cores during rendering. This alone would cut your render time down by 75% if you're on a Quad core. Additionally, Bryce 7 allows the user to define which lights are affecting which surfaces, minimizing impact on render time by telling light sources to ignore models that are reflective or transparent or whatever. Bryce 7 really has a lot of practical tools that speed rendering substantially.
Hope this helps
While Horo's been making great progress on the galactic and nebulaic front. I've decided to have a go at something on a more modest scale. Planetary!
Here curvature filter are used somewhat exotically. There is clearly no geometry for them to work with, however, they can be coaxed into recognizing bump if the right buttons are pressed.
Oh, that moon/planet looks great.
Thank you.
Here's some more...
They get even better.
Ohhhh, nice planets. I like them a lot David. :coolsmile:
Thanks for all the tips and help (most of which I knew but it is good to have a refresher course )-) )
I turned off the shadows in the 3d light and the pre-render time dropped dramatically as did the full render (20 hrs) it also improved the shadows :-)
First image is the pre-render settings.
Second image the full render settings.
Third image is the full render.
I'm not really bothered about the full render times but the pre-renders were doing my head in :-) The thing is though I tend to do more than one thing at a time when on the laptop. I do DAZ Studio renders at the same time, or set up scenes, characters and I am also surfing online :-) The four cores are always maxed out and I can have Bryce taking 1.5Gb and DAZ taking 2.5Gb of my 6Gb, as they were today :-) The DAZ renders are a lot quicker than the Bryce ones so I can get a lot more done with DAZ.
The fourth image is what I was working on in DAZ today just to illustrate what I mean. The background is one of my own images and there are five lights in it and rendered at the default 3Delight settings. I have two laptops and a tower but not in the same place at the same time so using each to do something different isn't an option. My tablet I use for the tutorials and user guides and have it beside me as I go through different scenarios.
@Rashad I used your Group Instances tutorial on the trees in my last render, the Elephants and the 'weeds' in this one and @David's tutorials on the DTE and @Horo's tutorials so the ground work is there I just have to put some of it into practice :)
Again, Thank you for all the tips and help.
Fishtales,
Looks like you've made sense of it for sure.
Horo,
Those nebulas really look quite amazing! The effects you and David are producing look as good as the hdri backdrops you guys developed previously.
David B.
These curvature plants look incredible. However, I notice something odd is happening at the poles, something is weird with the shading or maybe with the fuzzy used for the atmosphere, I'm not sure what I'm seeing but there is a sort of dimple occurring.
Savage:
Really nice video and great looking models!!!!!!!!
Oooh, Fishtales, I like that last work...very evocative, intersting indeed - surely a photograph with models added in etc.
Jay
Thank you Horo and Miss B and Rashad - thank you also for your keen observation. What you see is the interaction between a volumetric material and the shadow cast by the planet. Possibly this could be overcome by turning up the quality on the volume material. There is something curious about lighting planets. If you look at actual images you see mostly a gentle transition where the shadow is cast, but in Bryce with the default sun the line is always harsh. To overcome this I used a point light source much closer to the planet than the sun would be. This means that the pole instead of casting parallel (effectively) shadows through the atmosphere are casting cones. The volume material is built up like an onion skin, a series of concentric spheres, the cone shadow crosses these spheres and creates some kind of intersecting geometry which is what I think this is.
Having experimented with quite a few bits of different rendering software that supports some procedural texture functions, I still maintain, old though it is, Bryce has the edge in this respect. The only thing that I've used that has anything like the potential for random wonders and creative delight is Mandelbulb 3D, thought renders with that are often almost entirely abstract, where as Bryce has the capacity to be harnessed to create more realistic effects with its procedural functions.
I love checking this thread there is always brilliant scene's from everyone :) ...here is my latest work in progress, its not finished yet, but this is were i am at so far :)
Those look amazing, David.
I agree with you, Bryce's procedurals are useful to do a million things other than mere abstract art. The high end apps took to the UV mapping paradigm rather than procedurals likely due to limitations found in file sharing. If Bryce had the ability to bake the texture it produces onto the models then Bryce's procedurals would be highly sought after in my opinion.
Wowzers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@Rashad carter- wasnt the reply i expected :D ...but thankyou :)
@Sandy: Latest two are very nice.
@David: Planets images are very convincing.
@Tim Bateman: That's only a WIP? That's quite a finished looking WIP. Make sure to post the finished image.
Thank you.
It is one of my own pictures of a hill loch in Argyll, Scotland as the backdrop with models added as you say.
As is this one I did a few years ago.
This is the original image I used (it is either six or eight images stitched together).
http://www.ftscotland.co.uk/gallery/inchnadamph/05_2005_inchnadamph_114_pano.jpg
I resized it to 800px wide which squashed everything up giving the 'Mordor' effect and added the two Dragons.
New and wonderful product by David and Horo.......
Wowzers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'll second that.
Compliment Fishtales on his composited scenes. The dragons fit nicely indeed and the stretching of the backdrop works unexpectedly well.
And also thank Trish for mentioning our new product!
Thank you David. I call the dragon one Happy Accident, watched too much Bob Ross :) It was done in Photoshop after I accidentally re-sized it to 800px by mistake and that was the way it came out :-)
@Sandy - much improved. The Studio render with the backdrop looks great. I see that you have cleverly posed the lady so that the shadows cannot be seen. Happy-accident003 with the dragon looks very good.
@Rashad - thank you.
@David - planets look quite convincing. I've noticed the oddity Rashad mentioned, too but didn't gave it the necessary attention. Good to know it is clear where it comes from.
@Tim Bateman - well, if this is a WIP, the final render must look incredible.
@Trish - thank you very much!
Here's a sneak peek using Island-C with three stacked terrains in different resolutions and material.