Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 9

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Comments

  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,632
    edited December 1969

    @Art - I see. Noew consider that the camera is far away and not all fine details are visible. If the coast is rather steep, you get a fine line, except when there are waves crashing on the coast, which is not the case in your beautiful landscape.

    @Dave - I can't put my finger on it either. It is just a tiny bit odd, I might have even missed if you hadn't mentioned it.

    @vivien1 - that's sweet.

    @CTippetts - ha, I also always forget those little tricks and I have the therefore several on my website. What you look for you can find here: Raytracing > Hints > Anti-Aliasing. There, you can read:

    Select the object and open the [A]ttributes dialogue. Without changing anything, hold down the key combination

    - [Ctrl]+[Shift] to disable, and
    - [Alt]+[Shift] to enable it again.

    ... then click on the OK symbol to close the dialogue.

  • CTippettsCTippetts Posts: 162
    edited December 1969

    Horo said:

    @CTippetts - ha, I also always forget those little tricks and I have the therefore several on my website. What you look for you can find here: Raytracing > Hints > Anti-Aliasing. There, you can read:

    Select the object and open the [A]ttributes dialogue. Without changing anything, hold down the key combination

    - [Ctrl]+[Shift] to disable, and
    - [Alt]+[Shift] to enable it again.

    ... then click on the OK symbol to close the dialogue.

    @Mr. Wernli - There it is! I'm sorry I didn't mention your site in my post you replied to. Your site is a fantastic resource. I did look there, but I looked in the Bryce Documentation section at
    http://www.horo.ch/docs/mine/pdf/BryceKybdShorties.pdf
    Well ... almost. Fact is, I didn't think of looking under Ray Tracing. A long time ago I saved your PDF I linked to above, and I did look at the copy I saved, but as it existed a long time ago. You've updated it since. Either way, this particular keyboard shortcut isn't discussed there, but it clearly is where you pointed me to in your Ray Tracing section. Thank you!

    I did some minor experiments in Bryce 5.5, and found out this anti-antialiasing trick does NOT work with trees. I also found out, if you use it on a group made up of primitives, the neutral primitives in the group still antialias. However, if you use it on a primitive alone that is neutral, it still works. You can even go into the attributes for the neutral primitives in a group and do it to those individually, and it works. Even if you make the tree a positive, it does NOT work. Too bad for me. I've yet to test it in 7.1.

    I also did a test to see if this property is memory cached, or saved in the .br5, and it is saved in the .br5.

    No matter what, the part of this puzzle I did not have, that you provided me, was to use Atl-Shift to undo the anti-antialiasing. Thank you, again.

  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 5,483
    edited December 1969

    Art- the shoreline looks nice. Thanks for the comment

    Vivien1 - that’s so cute.

    A few more gemstones. Gemstones 2 - The Hall Set

    The Eiffel tower and Colosseum are Sketchup models. The Colosseum I downloaded a very long time ago but found it very time consuming to add the textures and thus never completed it. I think it makes a nice gemstone. ;-)

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

    Marsh...

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  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,632
    edited December 1969

    @CTippetts - yes I know, my site has grown a bit chaotic over time and things are sometimes a bit difficult to locate. Documents came after I removed the named light probes. With Bryce 6, you didn't know what HDRI was loaded so I had a catalog with all of the probes that came with 6. There's a lot to clean up. I spent the last fortnight to redo my gallery: new javascripts, new PHP scripts, new data base, larger pictures, larger QTVR panoramas and adding Flash.

    @mermaid010 - very beautiful renders, all models are great. Excellent lighting.

    @Dave - the march came out great. Looks like there was quite some instancing involved.

  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 5,483
    edited December 1969

    Horo- Thanks

    Dave - nice render, I like the lighting.

  • Dave SavageDave Savage Posts: 2,433
    edited March 2015

    Horo said:
    @Dave - the march came out great. Looks like there was quite some instancing involved.

    Thanks Mermaid & Horo... Yes 2000 clumps of grass, most of which I don't think you can even see. :cheese:
    Post edited by Dave Savage on
  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,119
    edited December 1969

    A quick one trying out some volume clouds; using the sky for IBL; sun on and visible.

    Gathering Storm

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  • Fencepost52Fencepost52 Posts: 509
    edited December 1969

    Thank you, Horo and mermaid for the nice comments!

    @Mermaid: Good choices with the models. I particularly like the Eiffel tower. Great work.

    @Dave: Nice marsh. Looks like a fun place to play in!

    @Sandy: Interesting effect with the fog/haze that slopes down into the valley. Is that a cloud material on a sphere?

    Decided to take my recent landscape and try my hand with the eagle again. Increased the frequency and bump of the water plane and made some other material changes to, hopefully, fit the scene.

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  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,119
    edited December 1969

    Thank you, Horo and mermaid for the nice comments!

    @Mermaid: Good choices with the models. I particularly like the Eiffel tower. Great work.

    @Dave: Nice marsh. Looks like a fun place to play in!

    @Sandy: Interesting effect with the fog/haze that slopes down into the valley. Is that a cloud material on a sphere?

    Decided to take my recent landscape and try my hand with the eagle again. Increased the frequency and bump of the water plane and made some other material changes to, hopefully, fit the scene.

    It is a Volume Cloud Material in a sphere and the sphere is stretched using the Alt key on the x axis and squashed a bit using Alt y axis, then I go to the material lab and adjust things in there. Then I move it up, down, in and out and rock it forward back and left and right in the scene to position it all the time tweaking the different parameters to fit.

    I just keep playing about with different things until I get something that I think looks right. Half the time I don't know what I did to get things the way they turn out :)

    The eagle looks good. The one thing that seems out is the plants in the water at the left. They appear to throw the perspective out as they look too big for the terrain. The rest looks like a distant shore but they are trying to make it look closer, to my eyes anyway :-)

  • vivienvivien Posts: 184
    edited December 1969

    Thank you Horo and mermaid for your comments

    @ mermaid - Nice choice of models, I like the lighting on the gemstones

    @ Dave - Great looking marsh. It has such a realistic feel to it.

    @ Sandy - Interesting effect. I haven't really used volume clouds yet.

    I had made the courtyard a while ago. This is the revisited version after learning a little bit more about the material lab.

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

    Beach Huts...

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  • CTippettsCTippetts Posts: 162
    edited December 1969

    @David Brinnen - I saw your post:

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/784745/

    in another thread, that I didn't want to clutter with this, and said to myself, "Self, why would The David Brinnen, an absolute MASTER of Bryce, use some other program to create such a simple object?"

    So, I said, "I dunno. Perhaps this can't be made out of Bryce primitives. Why don't you try it?"

    I then replied, "Why don't you try it? Making it is your suggestion."

    Then I said, "Me? You try it. It was your question."

    (This is why I don't like talking to myself. It always becomes such an argument, I can't even look myself in the mirror for a week.)

    Anyway, as long as I was making something, I thought I'd try it with the tips in your walk through:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo7wVzmZ4oo

    on Photorealism using HDRI, since I don't have a dragon, and I can't download that one without being an official student or educator, (though I've been both my entire life ... just not officially).

    I also didn't have the HDRI you used, so I sneaked into your house with my camera and a silver ball while you were away. (Your dog is very nice.)

    Not really. I got this HDRI from Mr Blue Summers. I guess he sneaked into your house.

    I've never seen one of these sockets before, and only had your image to go by. This also took a little less than an hour to build, and was easier than I imagined. It's all Bryce. I can see there are many differences between mine and yours. One was, while building it, I lost one of the screws, and had to use an old brass one I found.

    As you can see, I didn't do so well with the lighting, either. Too much graininess was a real thorn until it was overcome by too much brightness. Seeking the happy medium between sunlight and HDRI effect was eating way too much time. So I took myself to eat while this rendered.

    Thanks for everything you do.

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

    CTippetts said:
    @David Brinnen - I saw your post:

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/784745/

    in another thread, that I didn't want to clutter with this, and said to myself, "Self, why would The David Brinnen, an absolute MASTER of Bryce, use some other program to create such a simple object?"

    You could have just asked. Though I believe it is better to test than it is to speculate, so I entirely approve of your approach. Now I can supply you with a couple of things, one is the answer.

    I want to generate a UV map for this object. While it would be possible to model in Bryce, as you have shown, Boolean modelling has never been something I've really been very good at (before I used to use Wings3D for my little models now I use Modo) and having made a model withing Bryce to get a UV map for the model it would require to be converted into a mesh and exported. The conversion process can be a little bit unpredictable and for UVing, unpredictable is rarely helpful.

    The other thing you can see is my reference image.

    As for lighting, the challenges of lighting remain constant no matter what application you use. There is much vaunting of unbiased rendering because of its apparent simplicity however, I'm not convinced of that argument, I've been using Octane for a while now, and while it can simulate light nicely, if you really want to control your scene and not just be at the mercy of the simulation, you need to put in quite a bit of work behind the scenes shuffling around emitters and nudging at the controls this way and that. So do not be disheartened by struggling. I certainly try not to be. Good results take a combination of a lot of time and a bit of luck.

    And finally a Bryce render, to go with the theme of the thread. This one I hope shows one of the issues of not having a UV map. I want the grain of the wood to run in specific directions, which I plan to organise through using UV's, in the "raw" state I am at the mercy of a combination of how I drew things in Modo and then how Bryce chooses to interpret that arrangement. Which sometimes works... but often does not, without intervention.

    The Piano also reminds me that the bounding box in Bryce is bigger than the model and although I set the feet at y=0 Bryce does not consider this the lower limit of the box. So much for me being the absolute master... moving from one piece of software to another, even one you know well, still confounds. Would it be better to do everything in one piece of software? I don't know.

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  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    edited December 1969

    David, curious mind wonders why you chose to make a model of such an old style socket.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/index.php?&ACT=50&fid=38&aid=189749_vHYdBH0Lg0C49bKCPOvT&board_id=1

    Surely you don't really have any of that style left in your abode?

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

    chohole said:
    David, curious mind wonders why you chose to make a model of such an old style socket.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/index.php?&ACT=50&fid=38&aid=189749_vHYdBH0Lg0C49bKCPOvT&board_id=1

    Surely you don't really have any of that style left in your abode?


    My living arrangements may not be as exotic as you imagine... Which might in some way be connected to spending all my free time faffing around on the PC... The model is part of a neglected living room with an odd mixture of old mismatched furnishings. It is based on a real room, though some artistic liberties have been taken for the purposes of lighting and space for cameras to be positioned.

  • Tim82Tim82 Posts: 859
    edited December 1969

    I have no idea why i did this, but i just thought it would look cool and thought i would share :)

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  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 5,483
    edited March 2015

    Sandy-Gathering storm is very nice. I was going to ask about the clouds but Art beat me to it. Thanks for the explanation.

    Art- Thanks for the comment. I like your render, the eagle is awesome.

    Vivien1 – Thanks for the comment. the courtyard render is very nicely done.

    Dave – cool render, I really like the lighting.

    CTippetts – that’s a very nice model.

    Tim- another very nice render.

    Inspired by Dave’s Marshland, (post #124) I tried something similar because it looked so simple and easy to do, but actually it was not; :lol: I spent the whole weekend trying to get a nice render. It was a good exercise to get familiar with the Instancing Lab too. Everything, trees, grass, materials are from the presets except the croc that’s from Sketchup.

    I experimented with lighting 1st rendered regular and it took only 5 mins. 2nd Regular Render Ibl using the sky dome only 7hrs11mins. Although the 2nd image does look better, I think the render time is a bit too much.


    Thanks Dave, all your renders are so inspiring. :-)

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    Post edited by mermaid010 on
  • Tim82Tim82 Posts: 859
    edited December 1969

    @ Mermaid, thank's...and I love the new render, it looks great :) ....nicely done

  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 5,483
    edited December 1969

    Tim - thanks :)

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

    This sounds perhaps more complicated than it need. But... here goes... the sky started out as the "gas clouds" material that was rendered in Bryce using Horo's and mines spherical mapper, I then took it over to Octane and further processed it with Octanes procedural materials which took it up from LDRI to HDRI(ish) and into that mix was added the Octane sun, then this file was rendered as a spherical projection and sent over to Horo for mending. In the mean time, I modeled this guard tower in Modo, mapped it's bits in UV layout, rebuilt it in Modo and exported it as an obj and then used Jack Tomalin's Prepper to create a Cr2 file for that obj, which I then text edited to give me the number of joints I wanted, used Poser 10 to rig it and sent that lot off to Forbidden Whispers for texturing and conversion to DS. Then from DS bridged the model back over to Bryce and incorporating it with the HDRI Horo had prepared set up this render. The time I spent on this was around a fortnight, I don't know how long the contributions from Horo and Forbidden Whispers took. But in the light of the time spent building this, whatever time it took to render this scene, I forget now exactly, three quarters of an hour or something like that, is negligible.

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  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,119
    edited December 1969

    mermaid010

    Nice render. Did you have Cast Shadows turned on for the IBL in the second render? That can cause it to take a while. I also set Falloff to Linear and use Radius to set the amount of light that reaches the front of the image. I also play around with the HDRI Effect lowering or raising it to adjust the amount of effect it has, I do this with the sun disabled and the enable the sun to see if it looks right. If it looks too bright I will reduce the Sun Intensity; make it Visible or not; change the Ambient colour etc. Some things decrease render time others can add to it but it is all trial and error :-)

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

    Thanks Dave, all your renders are so inspiring. :-)

    Thanks Mermaid and a good effort.

    Some tips that you may find helpful:
    When using Grass in the instancing lab, I always use the larger clumps because they are a lot more random. This helps because the IL is broken and the "Rotate" feature is unreliable ie: It doesn't rotate Bryce grass or trees.

    When you make an HDRI for IBL from the Bryce sky, mostly you are just trying to get some natural looking ambient light in your scene so you can set the quality to it's minimum and turn Cast Shadows off in the IBL tab. The Shadow in the scene will come from the Bryce sun as long as you switch it back on again (when you activate the IBL, it automatically switches the Sun off). You will find that this combination reduces your render time by vast amounts.

    Also: Even if you're not using the Premium options in Render Settings (Soft Shadows, TA, Blurred Reflections etc.), The Premium render engine is the better one to use in my opinion. As there is no need for an Anti aliasing pass using Premium and as long as you're not using TA, the higher RPP settings are not needed and again your render times will be reduced.

    :)

    Meanwhile: Just after Christmas, I bought myself a real Chrysler PT Cruiser in the real world... Though mine's black with blacked out windows in the back.
    But this model is a nice one to work with. This rendered at this size in a little less than 3 hours.

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  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    edited December 1969

    Thanks Dave, all your renders are so inspiring. :-)

    Thanks Mermaid and a good effort.

    Some tips that you may find helpful:
    When using Grass in the instancing lab, I always use the larger clumps because they are a lot more random. This helps because the IL is broken and the "Rotate" feature is unreliable ie: It doesn't rotate Bryce grass or trees.

    When you make an HDRI for IBL from the Bryce sky, mostly you are just trying to get some natural looking ambient light in your scene so you can set the quality to it's minimum and turn Cast Shadows off in the IBL tab. The Shadow in the scene will come from the Bryce sun as long as you switch it back on again (when you activate the IBL, it automatically switches the Sun off). You will find that this combination reduces your render time by vast amounts.

    Also: Even if you're not using the Premium options in Render Settings (Soft Shadows, TA, Blurred Reflections etc.), The Premium render engine is the better one to use in my opinion. As there is no need for an Anti aliasing pass using Premium and as long as you're not using TA, the higher RPP settings are not needed and again your render times will be reduced.

    :)

    Meanwhile: Just after Christmas, I bought myself a real Chrysler PT Cruiser in the real world... Though mine's black with blacked out windows in the back.
    But this model is a nice one to work with. This rendered at this size in a little less than 3 hours.

    Does your real world one have the Steering wheel on the correct side?

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

    Indeed it does. :-)

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  • HoroHoro Posts: 10,632
    edited December 1969

    @Sandy - volumetric clouds look good.

    @Art - eagle looks nice in front of this background.

    @vivien1 - very nice courtyard. The shadows glow, looks as if you used ambiance.

    @Dave - nice beach huts, looks a bit like a fence. Nice car and nicely presented. So the steering wheel is on the right side, which is the wrong side, at least off the British isles.

    @Tim - nice abstract, looks a bit like a dragon skeleton.

    @mermaid010 - great vegetation. I agree, the second render is not 86 times better as the render time would suggest. When creating an HDRI from the Bryce sky, switch off Sun/Moon Visible, then switch it on again. Shadow rays usually take more time to render than light. The HDRI for ambient light can often work nicely without IBL shadows - though bump in the shadowy parts gets lost, but this is of no concern in your render. Do not use such an HDRI as backdrop because you would make it small, 600 px. Set the ambient light with HDRI Effect, if you need to go towards 1, use the attenuator Falloff and play with Radius and HDRI Effect to get it right. IBL Falloff is not the same as for the other light sources. Like Intensity Apply to Light Source is a HDRI Effect booster if you haven't got enough HDRI Effect (i.e. light) and specularity.

    @David - prison tower looks great. Oh creating the final HDRI for Bryce was peanuts, around 6 hours.

  • Tim82Tim82 Posts: 859
    edited December 1969

    well i had some fun rendering this today :)

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  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,119
    edited December 1969

    I don't know what this started off as but this is how it ended up :-)

    Another volume sphere cloud for the fog.

    Death in the Mist

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  • mermaid010mermaid010 Posts: 5,483
    edited December 1969

    Thanks Sandy, Dave and Horo for your comments and helpful tips. Although I revisit David’s and Horo’s videos on Ibl and TA rendering from time to time, at the end of the day it comes down to practice and trial and error. I will re-render this scene using the info given, and I have another scene that can go with good lighting, maybe I can use some of the info on that scene too. I've been working on it for almost a month now. :roll:

    David- the tower render looks great

    Dave – the car render is nice, the real one is awesome.

    Tim – another really cool render

    Sandy – the foggy, misty scene is nicely done

  • Electro-ElvisElectro-Elvis Posts: 883
    edited March 2015

    This sounds perhaps more complicated than it need. But... here goes... the sky started out as the "gas clouds" material that was rendered in Bryce using Horo's and mines spherical mapper, I then took it over to Octane and further processed it with Octanes procedural materials which took it up from LDRI to HDRI(ish) and into that mix was added the Octane sun, then this file was rendered as a spherical projection and sent over to Horo for mending. In the mean time, I modeled this guard tower in Modo, mapped it's bits in UV layout, rebuilt it in Modo and exported it as an obj and then used Jack Tomalin's Prepper to create a Cr2 file for that obj, which I then text edited to give me the number of joints I wanted, used Poser 10 to rig it and sent that lot off to Forbidden Whispers for texturing and conversion to DS. Then from DS bridged the model back over to Bryce and incorporating it with the HDRI Horo had prepared set up this render. The time I spent on this was around a fortnight, I don't know how long the contributions from Horo and Forbidden Whispers took. But in the light of the time spent building this, whatever time it took to render this scene, I forget now exactly, three quarters of an hour or something like that, is negligible.

    David. Interesting approch and well-made modell. I have to confess, I could not follow your explanations entirely. Why have you made a Cr2 file? And why have you used Poser to rig it. (I feel a bit embarrassed, but I also have to confess, I do not know exactly, what rigging in this context means) However nice result.

    Another question: Have you made the piano modell by yourself? Lately I tried to make one with Bryce. But is still WIP.

    Post edited by Electro-Elvis on
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