Post Your Renders - Happy New Year yall
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Tim - looks like getting your water right has turned into a community project. :)
I played around with the waves function in the bump channel and the attached is about as good as I could get. I think headwax's idea of using a caustics generator for the bump might be the way to go.
I did get the feet to show up faintly but playing with the water color and transparency - the transparency is only set to 40% here, which is pretty low for water.
Maybe use 2 planes for the water, one with high transparency for the surface, one below with much less transparency to denote the 'murky depths'? Just spitballing and armchair-rendering :)
nice work I thought it was a photo!
I also agree with headwax, that looks pretty convincing as is, MDO2010, good work.
nice idea, I think books by david did something similar in our first challenge?
MDO2010, that image is beautiful, and very realistic if that was your goal. I thought it was a photograph.
Absorption and in-scattering. Here's an image I did without reflections and refraction to give you an idea of how they can be used.
I have noticed that using colors, can cause an almost opposite reaction to the color of the effect. As an example, crank the blue color chips in my screen shot to a pure blue and the water turns red. In the past, I had assumed the absorption and in-scattering, alomg with refraction picked up the colors from the surrounding objects, so a brown terrain visible through the water "scattered" its light through the water tinting it brown. I now understand that the brownish tint is actually due to the blue color chips.
Your best bet to get the desired effect of those two setting may be to play around with the depth and just use grays, numeric sliders or noise functions in them. If the water needs a tint, use the color channel.
In my two samples I play with the attenuation distance in a medium scaled scene.
For those that think the effect is kind of inky and oily, yes it is, but I have it set to kind of an extreme value for demonstration purposes.
Here's an example with fractal noise in one of the channels and a slider in another.
The attenuation was changed to 1.5 ft.
I'm doing another with reflections and refraction turned back on with an attenuation of 3 ft. I'll post that when it is done rendering.
To hopefully provide a little light on what absorption and in-scattering are, I'll repeat my 2 cents on what they mean.
When light hits an object it can only do 1 of 3 things:
1. Bounce off
2. Bounce around inside the object
3. Pass thru the object
When it bounces off, it's called Reflection. All objects that we see have reflection. That's how we "see" stuff. The light bounces off the object and into our eyes. Everything we "see" is light reflecting off objects.
When it bounces around inside, it's called subsurface scattering, or in-scattering. It bounces around inside and lights up the object. Like how candle wax glows when you light the candle. Or your skin seems to glow when it's light from behind.
But sometimes it bounces around inside but never exits so it can't bounce into your eyes. It doesn't light up the object from inside, it just kind of dies. That's called Absorption. When some of the light gets Absorbed into the object. So, for example, if sunlight, which is, say composed of all the colors of the rainbow (ie, white), and it strikes a blue object, only the blue light bounces off and into your eyes. The rest of the light (everything other than blue) gets absorbed in the object.
Now the "Pass thru the object" is called Transparency or Translucency. Light passes thru. If it's clear glass, the light isn't altered, it just passes thru. But if it's colored glass some light of that color bounces back into your eyes.
So, Absorption means that when light strikes an object it Absorbs that color of light, and you don't see it. So if you want Blue water for example, and want to model the Absorption of water, you specify that the material absorbs all colors other than the blue you want to model. So the Absorption parameter you enter is White minus Blue, cuz that's what gets absorbed.
You can also enter what's called an Attenuation factor. That describes how deeply the light goes into the object before it bounces back out into your eyes, or gets totally absorbed. That's why deep water appears semi-transparent, and the deeper you go the less you can see of the submerged object.
In-scattering is the light that bounces around inside. Depending upon your setting, the in-scattering is a lot like SSS, in that it models how light bounces around inside an object, then into your eyes, making it appear to glow. Like if you have nice clear tropical water with some microscopic floating stuff that causes a faint glow to the water.
EDIT: Here's a simple setting to get a blue, semi-transparent object by having all light EXCEPT blue absorbed by the object.
very interesting, thanks for posting that
Great point Joe. For some reason I wasn't thinking of it absorbing the blue wavelength. That makes perfect sense. For some reason I was just thinking of it absorbing the luminosity as it were. I was thinking of it like plain transparency for example, where the darker the color the more transparent it becomes, so a very light blue would not be as transparent as a very dark blue.
Edit: So for absorption, I knew it acted as you said, but wasn't thinking of it absorbing the blue, just the brightness as I mentioned above, so I felt a darker blue would absorb less light and a lighter value blue would absorb more.
Edited again to say I'm babbling and it is time for bed.
Morning all. Gosh you guys were busy overnight!
Mark, for a minute there I thought you'd quoted my photo - I really had to do a double take to spot it was a render (and then it was mostly the fact that the ducks' tails are different). Superb.
EP & Joe, thanks for your comments on absorption and in-scattering. They're both really helpful and I think (!) I have a handle now on what they do and how they work. Your explanation on how the subtract modifier works with colours was great - I hadn't understood that before.
I did a render overnight using Howie's water shader from Stoney Creek. I won't post the render here - the water was more or less just a mirror with a hint of ripple. But it took 7 hours to render, so I guess that's the ballpark render time for a 'pro' shader. Anyhow, by hiding all the vegetation I can get a render out in 7-10 minutes, so that's what I shall do for the purposes of shader tweaking.
I had a play with "Ripple" in the bump channel before work, and it looks promising.
These three renders vary the perturbation setting 20%, 30%, 40%
I think I need something to mask that land-water boundary. I can see why Howie likes his pebbles!!!
I've coloured the water and reduced the transparency, and here are comparisons between ripples and waves.
Please excuse the world's shiniest ducks, but each duck has 75 (!!!) separate shaders, and frankly, life's too short ;)
That's it for tonight - I'm out for dinner now. TTFN.
Overall I think I prefer the waves, but the ripples look pretty good too. Surely there must be a way to combine both, so there are localized ripples around the ducks themselves and an overall wave pattern for the water?
My thing is that most of those sorts of things are going to be going on in the background, so doesn't need to be all that "real", for my purposes. But that's also why I haven't used this or that... which has been changing over the years.
My thing is that most of those sorts of things are going to be going on in the background, so doesn't need to be all that "real", for my purposes. But that's also why I haven't used this or that... which has been changing over the years.
You can use the Add mixer to combine ripples with waves also, although it's kind of a pain because you have to change the dials in the ripples shaders to get them precisely placed. Other than that it works pretty well though.
Here's water with just waves, and with waves and a ripple added together.
I feel you on that one - I discovered on a recent image that that line between water and land really sticks out as odd in 3D. Masking it with rocks, pebbles and plants seems to work pretty well though; you don't have to totally hide the line, just break it up enough that it doesn't stick out. Another thing I've been having some success with is using the 3D paint tool to add a little faux mud right at that line and a little bit out under the water so it doesn't look like the grass is running right into the water.
Brilliant Mdo2010, by that I mean both the use of the add function and also the use of 3dpaint for the waterline.
3dpaint is one of those tools that has humongous potential almost everywhere, and yet I easily forget I've got it, or where it can be applied.
i think I'm veering towards the wave version, but both are 100% better than my first try! I'll do a full render overnight with all the plants back in, and see how it looks.
Mark, I thought about positioning the ripples when I saw how the render came out, but I reckoned it would probably be quicker to move the ducks!
My terrain shader has a mixer in it that's keyed to a mask bitmap, so anywhere I paint white gets a dirt texture, and anything black gets the green (I hesitate to call that grass, at least close up!) It was originally intended to represent dirt tracks, footpaths and the like, but it works just as well for pond mud. And I've kept the replicated grass back aways.
Still thinking about the shore line, and those logs. I'll be out at the weekend with my camera on a fallen log hunt - some random bit of poorly scaled tree bark obviously isn't going to cut the mustard!
hi Tim_A, for the duck shininess Fenric has shader doctor which will fix all the shaders' shininess, bump etc in three clicks
to refine your water texture you could use baker http://www.inagoni.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.3
that way you could arrange the bump near the ducks and shore to mimic how waves spread from a source and reduce in size, and near the shore you could mimic how they pile up and stand up slightly higher. Amplitudes and frequency etc.
Thanks HW, I'll check it out.
Both renders are in, each took 7 hours 10 minutes (I know I forgot to reset the lighting...)
Really nice Tim. I think I prefer the second one with the waves personally. The log looks fantastic! Also, I laughed at the plate on the car - Iove it when people sneak things like that into an image. :)
I was off work yesterday and had some time to play around; here's a WIP of a UFO. This is actually my second attempt at this - the first one, the mesh was ridiculously over-dense and I couldn't loop select anything; there are still spots where that's an issue but I have it UV mapped already so I'm not going to worry about it anymore on this model. I want to add a bunch of greebles to the the rest of the upper surface to break it up a bit, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with it.
I'm posting the view from the modeling room too - I'd love any feedback on the modeling technique. I've been reading a lot of books on the subject recently but I still need a lot of practice.
Thanks!
Mark
I like that Mark, it's got a 'Lost in Space' vibe to it. :)
Nice work mark! Exporting the u v map, you could use the mesh image as a bump map to simulate panels
Good morning, here's last night's render (8 hours), just the 'ripple' version this time. I added some dead reeds, based on one of the photos I took the other day, and a bunch of pebbles. On seeing the render, I think the pebbles may need to be smaller. Tweak and adjust...
Having translucency on the tree leaves works great for the shade areas under the trees, but occasionally it throws out an undesired big green gel effect. Is there anything I can do to stop that? Or is it just a matter of tweaking the sun until it goes somewhere less obvious?
Looking much better. For Translucency I always think it best to use a grayscale value instead of a green color. While in real life light indeed does turn green as it exits a leaf that color tint is only perceivable for a few centimeters away from the leaf. But If the "shadow" travels any farther it's green color will readily mix with other colors such that by the time it reaches the ground it loses its perceived greenness. You've never seen green tinted shadows on the sidewalk beneath a tree in real life so we need to avoid that same thing in Carrara if possible and using a grayscale color should aid in that.
Rashad, I know it's not really important in this forum, and folks will just get upset at me again, but what you're saying is just not true. It's factually incorrect. I don't know where you get your information on this stuff, but whoever is telling you this stuff needs to go back to school or something... :) :) :)
Yeah, I know, for most folks here whether they use a green or gray translucency is pretty much irrelevant, cuz most people here are just having fun. I get that. But for those who want to understand the basics, I will give my 2 cents again. For those who don't care, please stop reading now so you don't get upset. :) :)
When a leaf is lit from behind, and your eyes see a bright green glow when you're standing on the ground, that means that green light is travelling all the way to the ground and into your eyes. If it wasn't you would only see gray leaves. That's how light works.
Yes, there's a lot of light bouncing around outside, and light and colors mix, depending on the environment. But if your eyes see it, then it exists. If you're lying on the ground and looking up at the leaves and they are bright green, that's because green light if being emitted from the leaves and lighting the ground below. And if there are a lot of leaves, and you're in a forest and light is filtering thru many of the leaves, all that diffuse green light will light up the forest and the floor of the forest and tint everything green. And depending upon the relative translucency of the leaves, the ground WILL be green shadows. But if the leaves aren't translucent enough, they will be whatever color is bouncing off the environment onto the ground. Maybe brown from the bark of the tree trunks, maybe blue from the diffuse sky color....it depends.
The color of the shadows depends on a lot of things. But first you need to understand how light travels and how direct sunlight and indirect skylight and translucency and scattering and bounce light works before you can determine what it will do.
And if the leaves are translucent green, then they should be modelled as translucent green. And let the other light sources do their thing and light up the ground and shadows as they will....
And I'm still trying to understand your "travelling shadows" concept. :) :) :)
Try a green value, bordering on black for the translucency. Or you could use a mixer with your desired green in one slot, black in the other and a numeric slider in the mixer. Adjust the mixer to the point where you have maybe 10% of your green coming through or even less.
I tried a gray scale and even just a numeric slider in the translucency channel in my Dells scene, and if the leaves were turned a certain way they looked gray. You need some color in there, even if it's very dark.
And Rashad, I'm really trying to understand where you're coming from in your understanding of shadows.
To be clear, a shadow is not a "thing", and it doesn't "travel". A shadow is the absence of light relative to its surroundings. Light travels, shadows don't. Shadows only exist because some things block the travel of light. And some things block it a lot, and others only a little.
If I stand outside on a sunny day, and the sun casts a shadow on the ground, the shadow is still light, just at a lower level. Unless of course there is absolutely no light whatsoever in the shadow and it's totally black. But usually that's not the case. Because light is always bouncing around, and even shadow areas are illuminated.
Now if you take a huge, blue, translucent sheet and hoist it in the air, it will block some of the sunlight, but it will also cast a blue shadow on the ground. Imagine a big colored parachute, and the wind catches it and "inflates" it, and it blocks some of the sun. But it's very colorful and translucent, so it casts a colorful shadow on the ground.
And if the canopy of a forest is composed of thousands of translucent green leaves, they will also cast green shadows on the ground, depending upon how translucent they are.
And here's just one example of how a translucent object, like stained glass or translucent leaves, projects a colored shadow on the ground, depending upon the translucency. In this case, highly translucent glass acts in a very similar manner to translucent leaves on a tree.
And yes, the bright colored patches on the ground ARE shadows projected by the translucent glass. :) :) :)