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Next version wil probably get the near green water. Green will be a nice contrast to the reddish stone.
And you made the float trip- that's something I dream of!
This is a lovely render, lyam04. Lighting is interesting, camera angle adds another dimension and composition is good. However, I think that what we want to see is more "landscape". A panoramic point of view with environmental interfacing. I think that the focus of this picture is on the girl and not on the landscape which is really good but not quite what we were looking for. Maybe if you could make the image more panoramic to give the skyline more importance and the girl less.
So we have a couple of you that are just using DAZ Studio as your renderer. So I thought I would see what I could come up with to help. I took a scene that I used a couple of years ago cause it has free and paid terrains and it was my attempt to create a "landscape". So I am going to post things that I have learned, through this thread and my research. You all are most welcome to chime in and make comments. As an added bonus I will then make changes from your recommendations and we can discuss the success or failure of said change. You can also take my learnings and apply them to your scene and we can see how they changed your image.
So on to the first learnings:
You want to make the scene big. In the image below you can see the skydome and terrains I used. If you are working big then I suggest that you put the Scene Navigator tools some where so that you can zoom around the area. You will find them under the Window ->Panes(Tab)->Tool Settings. Once you have that tab then where it says Active Tool: select Scene Navigator. You can adjust how much you bump the Perspective View with each click by increasing or decreasing the value in the Move Controls. Another trick is to use the frame button, it has four corners with a plus in the box. I used it for the below image by selecting the skydome and clicking on that button.
Now for the scene. I am using a skydome from glaseye. But UberEnvironment2 comes with a skydome as well so there are many options. I like glaseye because he has also created matching UE2 presets for his dome and they are located in his gallery on Sharecg as well. So then I added three terrains. The big one is a freebie called Morphing Ground[/ur] by Porsimo. The two close up rocks are Jack Tomalin's Cliffhanger and Castillo del Diablo. I picked these two because the textures are high quality and do well when rendered close up. I also bumped up the scale on the Morphing terrain to 164%. Making it bigger has its problems but dof and haze do not make the textures so critical. I did however bumped up the bump values to 200% and increased the min and max to -.22 and .22 respectively on all of the textures. I got more interesting results from these settings. It would seem that when creating these panoramic views that you need to push some of the parameters to get visible results.
Green River
I got Bryce 7, what seems to be a long time ago. I found it too difficult, but I thought I would give it a try.
This is a lovely render, lyam04. Lighting is interesting, camera angle adds another dimension and composition is good. However, I think that what we want to see is more "landscape". A panoramic point of view with environmental interfacing. I think that the focus of this picture is on the girl and not on the landscape which is really good but not quite what we were looking for. Maybe if you could make the image more panoramic to give the skyline more importance and the girl less.
OK, thanks. I'll try again.
For those using Bryce 7.1 Pro for the first time, don't use Displacement or Bryce will crash. A couple of caveats on that.
A) It can be used if kept below 1 but will slow Bryce to a crawl or make it nearly unusable. Bryce will apear to have crashed, it hasn't, but Labs will take a while to open and close.
B) Before trying it SAVE YOUR IMAGE ☺
Okay now that I have a sky and big terrain, let's look at what the scene will look like. Attached is the scene image with no DOF applied. As you can see everything is in focus and there is no really good sense of things being big. Perspective is on with camera so that all of my terrain is in the image. I need to get that out of focus look you see when you are looking out at a distant vista. DAZ Studio controls focus through the camera controls. I found these three articles to be most helpful in understanding how to use the controls to get the results I am looking for.
Camera lens terms and theory
Camera Focal Length
Camera Depth of Focus
The second image shows you what I have chosen as my camera's parameters. I have a long focal length of 178mm, so that I get my mountains, sky and rings into the picture. The edges of the black square tell me that. I have a fairly narrow area that is in focus. My F/Stop is 45. Only the first ring will be in focus and the girl and the mountains will be out of focus. I am getting there but just not quite right yet. What could I do to improve on this image?
So is there something else you would like to do with this image?
Do please remember that this contest can be done in any program, we are not insisting on the use of Bryce.
I am always happy to help anyone when they do use Bryce, but landscapes can be done in DS and Carrara as well. (or even Poser)
Yes what Cho said. That is why I am going through a step by step on DAZ Studio. Just to show you that it can be done. It just takes different tools. Hopefully there are some learnings. I know just doing the exercise has shown me things and solidified techniques for me.
Thanks for the suggestions Dollygirl and cherponbeck. I put more light on both figures but wanted to leave the indian a little more darkened since he is under a tree. I added a ton more trees changed a few things and textures and added some things. Here is the newest render. I am also beginning to work on a second idea and should have it up soon.
I noticed everyone is also posting stage screen shoots. Here are the screens of this file for perspective camera, top down and right of the stage for this image.
So Xangth, I think that you could work on some bump and displacement on your foreground. The use of these two parameters can make things a little more interesting. I would see if there is a bump file for the grass on the right to break up the leaves and create a variegated effect by the light. I would also consider adding some displacement on the wolf. You want him to be more velvety. I love your water. I also like the small touches of the flowers and bugs. Makes you want to stay and see everything in the image.
Okay let's see what it looks like now. Below is the scene rendered in the settings from my last post. It is okay but I just don't feel that the fuzziness of the distant mountain is sufficient. So let's play with F/Stop and see what we can do. So I ran several renders with F/Stops starting from 1 and going up to 30. I thought the F/Stop of 30 gave the right touch of blurriness and did not mess up the sky to much but added that touch of depth. Do you think it is an improvement?
Ghost Town
Daz 4.8/iray
I've still got a lot of things to fix in this image. The trees need to be tweaked so they don't look like copies of each other, I need to break up the foreground more, and I haven't begun to mess with the camera. Thanks Dollygirl for the camera links - I'm definitely going to need them.
Best Regards,
Eric
A nice start ewcarman. lots of tricks to make the eye travel through the image. Yes I agree with what you think is needed. I would also maybe do something behind the town. Kind of break up the horizon in that area just a bit more. I had an image with the same kind of "lost" horizon and the comment to me was it just needs a mountain or another set of greenery. You don't want it too dark then you can't see the town. Maybe a telegraph pole would work.
Your welcome on the cameras.
Yes I agree with cherpenbeck. If you look at landscape paintings the human and animal subjects take a back seat to the terrain. If you want your open spot to stay open then add low bushes or grass to the area. The blurriness of the foreground is dominating the scene and making it look unnatural.
I have gone back and worked diligently to alter the focal point in this image, but have had no success. I think the issue happens because the texture is being stretched because it is the bottom of the "dome". So - I have finally given up on trying to use the dome for this image.
I did take notice of several suggestions to incorporate in my newest attempt to create an image for this challenge. I am using only Daz Studio and no postwork. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I have gone back and worked diligently to alter the focal point in this image, but have had no success. I think the issue happens because the texture is being stretched because it is the bottom of the "dome". So - I have finally given up on trying to use the dome for this image.
I did take notice of several suggestions to incorporate in my newest attempt to create an image for this challenge. I am using only Daz Studio and no postwork. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
So, aside from the atmosphere and other tricks that are used to suggest a large scale scene, the other is camera angles. It is natural to want to get everything you've worked hard on into the frame, but sometimes that can defeat the purpose.
So, for your scene, your camera is above and looking down, which defeats the scale as it looks as if you are viewing a model or diorama. Try a lower angle and decide what the focus is going to be. The boat could be a good, intimate focal point with the city skyline rising above, maybe slightly blurred with depth of field and atmospheric haze to suggest distance.
You can do an aerial shot with the landscape below, and not have it look like a model, but that would require a much grander scaled terrain, atmosphere, and/or clouds. It also helps if the focus in an aerial shot is in the air, such as aircraft, bird, whatever.
This is an early aerial shot from me, when I just got Carrara 7 Pro and was playing around with scene scale, atmospheres and terrains. I hadn't bothered with replicating trees or anything at this point, but the principle is there.
Back to camera angles. You don't need an overly dramatic angle to sell the scale, although depending on what you're trying to achieve, it can help.
These images use lower angles to sell the scale of the scene. I also used other tricks, such as atmosphere, lighting, clouds, and lines diminishing towards the horizon (forget the technical term). The diminishing lines one is particularly evident in the highway image and somewhat less obvious in the War of the Worlds image. The low camera angle is also very useful in the knight/dragon image and the War of the Worlds image, as well as the highway image, although to a little lesser extent.
thank you evilproducer for the tips on camera positions. Very insightful stuff. I like your idea for wohaver as well. Although I do so love what wohaver has done with that water, beautiful.
From the information in the links given in the first post of this thread. We were advised that not only do we need things to go blurry but that there is the presence of haze when looking far away. I know of two ways to introduce the effect of the haze at render time. The first is to use a Fog Camera such as Age of Armour has in his product Atmospheric Effects Cameras for DAZ Studio and the second is to use a prop such as FX Daz Studio by JeffersonAF.
In the first image, I have used the Fog camera. I set the visibility to 3000 meters. This parameter has a limit of 100 so you have to go into the parameter and uncheck use limits. Using the Fog camera results in the haze being applied across the whole image. Because of that I had to go back in and set the Specularity of the skydome to 100%. I set the spec color to 10 16 101, a dark blue.
In the second image I have used the haze prop. I set the diffuse color to 105 105 105 as well as using the image provided by JeffersonAF. Opacity was set to 60%. Using the prop allowed me to control just where the haze would be located. Out here in the desert we have lots of days with haze, caused by pollution and dust. So for me looking in the distance I can see the layer of the atmosphere that contains these particles. So using the haze prop makes sense if I want to represent a dry arid landscape. In the Cascades where I grew up I would want the fog camera for the haze because there is was moisture I was seeing not dust particles. So you just need to account for the type of terrain and what vegetation is on it when figuring out what type of haze you are going to use. Which do you think is more realistic and did adding the haze add or detract from the image?
So here's my second attempt. I did try to do a normal landscape, but my renders came out so bland and uninteresting with the stuff I have. So here something a little strange - Bridge way to Weird. Suggestions?
After venturing into Bryce back in February I had a great time learning some neat tricks from the likes of David Brinnen and Horo via their tutorials. It's worth the effort to watch some of their excellent videos on landscaping for beginners which is basically where I place myself. More time spent clicking on different buttons to see what happens then having intuitive knowledge to get exactly what I want the first time trying. But that's the fun of Bryce. And Daz for that matter is exploring and experimentation. One thing Ive learned, which was already mentioned earlier in this thread, is to save your work alot for many reasons including the inevitable crashes lol.
So I went with the standard canyon scene with the mountains coming out not to bad. Haze and fog both set about medium and a combination of hdri and sunlight to get the lighting affect. My biggest hold up in getting the render this far was trying to get cast shadows projecting off of the mountains. Any other object placed in the scene will cast a shadow so I'm not sure what is going wrong with the mountains as the perimeters all seem correct.
As I've mentioned, most of what I did was through experimenting, but I'd be glad to tell anyone interested what I did to get a certain affect, providing I can remember lol
One last thing is that I've reread the contest rules and the 800 pixel restriction is no longer included. My render is about 1200 x 400 which works great for landscapes but can be changed to fit the rules if needed.
WOW!! I got some really great feedback from both evilproducer and Dollygirl, as well as graphic examples and links. I have made some adjustments to my camera settings (angle, DoF, and Fstop). I am so pleased with how this image is developing... so I can't wait to see where we go from here.
Thank you bot very much!!
I'm not at my computer so could you post a screenshot of the sky lab showing the settings for your HDRI and I may be able to suggest some chages if I can.
I had an absolutely awful weekend. I think Murphy and his law are camped on my doorstep again. I hope it gets better because if it gets any worse something is going to break around here - probably me. lol!
But it's really cool coming in and seeing all these great works! Wow there's some really cool landscapes. And Cherp - your canyon is really coming along nicely!
I can't leave well enough alone. I had to do some tweaking to mine. So I boosted some light and color cause I thought it was too dark. So here we go.
I like your scape lyam04. I think I would tone down the light on the bridge just a bit to get some detail back. The way it is now pulls the eye away from the mountains and all that is seen is this huge white area.
Very nice canyon scene, robborfla1. Thank you for your insights and learnings of Bryce. And your image is acceptable.
WOW!! I got some really great feedback from both evilproducer and Dollygirl, as well as graphic examples and links. I have made some adjustments to my camera settings (angle, DoF, and Fstop). I am so pleased with how this image is developing... so I can't wait to see where we go from here.
Thank you bot very much!!
Your welcome wohaver. I am glad that the little tuts have been of help. Yes I see improvement too. I think the next thing to think about is how to break up the shore a bit. The line between water and the shore line is very straight and produces a sense of harshness to the image. I would go and see if I had anything that could be used as a beach and if I had nothing then I would opt to put some tropical plants, such as palm trees, or lush bushes. I would add them in clumps and maybe just three clumps at that. I would also try using rocks to break up the line. Always remember odd numbers, like using 3 clumps, or 5 clumps, are better and more harmonious then using even numbers.
I like what you have done with the castle lights and the play of light on the water. I agree with you this picture is better and you can see more of the details because of it. If you can and want to I would maybe add more of the tree to the lower left corner below the rocks of the picture. I think that would balance out the foreground and act as a frame for the castle.
Did I add the effects of distance, check, by adding in DOF. Did I add the effects of haze, check, by incorporating the haze prop. So what else can I do? Well I really haven't talked about the lighting configuration I am using. Up to now I have a UberEnvironment2 light with a Studio default distant light. As I mentioned in the first post of this series I am using glaseye's skydome. So I chose to use his light rig that he designed for the particular skydome I am using. For all of the previous renders the UE was set to 50% intensity and the distant light was at 40%. I think the images were nice but they are a little bland and there is a lack of depth because of the lack of color and shadows. So I could probably play around with these lights to get a better result but instead I explored what is called Linear Workflow. It is a scientific model that describes how we humans see our world. In this industry they call it Gamma Correction. Many of the renderers default to this technique. 3Delight is not one of them. That is a good thing because I like to have options and rendering realistic all of time is okay but I like to see something that can never happen in the real world sometimes. But this time I do want some realism, so I played around with GC to see what that would do. To make GC work in 3Delight you have to do two things. The first is to turn on the GC option in the Render tab and set the correction to 2.2. The second thing is a bit tedious. For all of the surfaces you want GC to work correctly on you have to tell Studio what gamma value you want if there is an image involved. So in my example I chose to set the gamma on the terrain textures and on the skydome. I left the Rings, Victoria and her garb alone because let's face it nobody is going to believe a girl walking barefoot through some rings floating in the air is real. I found that I had to up the intensity of both lights to get an image that represented a sunny day. For UE I set the Intensity to 200%. For the distant light I set it to 135%. I also had to tone down the terrain texture files by throwing in a light grey in the diffuse channel. That is it folks. My final image is below. So which one do you like and why?