October 2015 New User Contest (WIP-THREAD)

13468917

Comments

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    icecrmn said:

    This layering technique sounds like it could work for lot's of stuff other than just fog.Maybe other stuff, like plants and trees to make a forest :) 

    It is very handy, i like to use it for magic effects and stuff like that (flames). If you look at some props they use planes for the plants (arranged in three directions) but its usually only usefull for background plants, as you can't get any details like tree bark in a good quality

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    Sonja11 said:

    Ooops wrong one. this is the right one with the bubbles done

    very nicely done, I like the light on the girl, that from the jellyfish and that from above. What I noticed is that the causic effect is present all though the water, or as I guess that is your background plane. If you look at underwater images the caustic effect is seen only on surfaces, not in the water itself (well ok the water surface looking up in the water is all caustic itself). So you need to move your background out of reach for the caustic light or you can alter the angle away from it. I hope you find a solution.

  • Kismet2012Kismet2012 Posts: 4,252
    isidorn said:

    For in-render fog I use http://www.daz3d.com/jepes-steamz. Doesn't always work the way I want in iray, but should work flawlessly in 3delight.

    I do not own Jepe's Stemz but a friend uses them very effectively to make fog in renders. 

  • IceCrMnIceCrMn Posts: 2,130
    Linwelly said:
    icecrmn said:

    ok,,my 3DL attempt is done.7 hours of rendering.

    it didn't come out as well as I had hoped.

    This one is going to take a bit of work to get sorted out. lol

    Icecrmn, I'm a bit confused about the light and the camera position  in you 3dlight version. There is a hole lot of light coming from the left hand side all of a sudden that never was there in the Iray version and you seem to have zoomed out by quiet a deal. The candle flame needs much more ambient (select the candle prop in the scene and go to surfaces, open the detailed list of materials and select the candle flame itself, there in the ambient dial up to 100. Maybe you have to dial up the opacity as well so that is seen better. From a distance like that flames are not soemthing to see through)

    what did you use to create the light through the window (where you want the atmospheric? You don't need to fill the whole room with ubervolume, you can use the ubervolume cone coming through the windows (see the first render attached, you can see the shadows though the ornaments of the window in the dust). I even parented it with a spotlight at some times like in the second render, there are three cones with three spots in there

    I left the scene pretty much the same.I parented volume cones to the spotlights that I had outside the windows.There weren't long enough to reach the windows so I had to scale them up.That lead to the camera being inside the volume cone , so i had to move it further back to get it our of the volume cone.The candle flame is actually using the uberlight base shader, so it's emissive.The entire hall is filled with the volume cones.They overlapped by the time I got them long enough to reach from spotlight to floor.

    My 3Delight skills need some work :) .

    I can move the spotlights closer to the windows and make the volume cones shorter, and use them more like props than lights to make the godray effects.

    Then try to get the camera setup a bit better.

    I have no idea where that bright light on the left side is coming from.There are 2 spotlights (with volume cones attached) outside the windows on the right, and the candle flame which is emissive.I assume that the volume effects aren't actually stopping at the walls and are passing thru them.The door at the back of the hall doesn't show up at all, and my big flower plant is glowing :) , the chairs are casting shadows the walls that they shouldn't be.I think this is coming from the emissive candle flame settings. I'm still not sure why the flame itself isn't glowing,,it should be if the whole room is filled with light from it *shrug*

    I've used 3delight before and gotten ok results, but I never really got good enough with it to do some of the more advanced things.I see you have gotten pretty good with it,, Well done :)

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    h_habash said:
    Sonja11 said:

    Ooops wrong one. this is the right one with the bubbles done

    You've done a wonderful work Sonja11, I'd like to suggest two thing for you if it doesn't bother you :

    1- Try to change the point light "if you're using one" to match the jellyfish color.

    2- If the bubble's meant to be coming out from the female creature mouth, I suggest to increase the hight of the lower bubble's abouve the head.

    It's only a suggestions from my point of view.

    Constructive criticism never bothers me!  I will go and look but I think I did match up the colors of the light to the jelly fish.  it was a fine line between being bright enough to cast a glow on her skin and being too dark (the darke purples) to light up the scene at all. I was trying to get the bubbles to kind of come from the jelly fish and float up around her.  Might have to go back in a reposition them so its a bit more clear.  And thank you!

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    I've been working on my entry today.  I adjusted my lighting and redid my latest render.  I think I got the lighting on the face better and managed to actually do that inside Daz instead of postworking it in Gimp.  I wasn't real happy with the color of his skin in the previous render.  Tell me if the fog looks better.  I actually had to use five layers and several different techniques to get it looking like this.  While I think it looks like fog, and I think I blended it in so that it merges with the background, I'm going crosseyed trying to get it just right.  I really need some constructive criticism.

    BTW, is there a size guideline for the entry? Some of the boards here seem to have a size guideline for posting and other seem to not have any guidelines.

    The fog on this one looks really good!

     

  • IceCrMnIceCrMn Posts: 2,130

    check this out :)

    last night I cleared my original scene and decided I would make a test render of just the environment to see how I was doing with just that part.

    When I switched the viewport over to  iray I got this image, so I saved it. It looks like a ghost is coming out of the back wall.

    also , here is what that tester looks like at 13% convergence and 9hrs rendering..No more ghost :(  but I think it's looking ok.

    once I can get a good environment going I'll get my people back in there and see about getting them sorted out :)

    odd artifacts.jpg
    1557 x 876 - 2M
    atmospheric env_only.jpg
    1920 x 1080 - 1M
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    icecrmn said:
    Linwelly said:
    icecrmn said:

    ok,,my 3DL attempt is done.7 hours of rendering.

    it didn't come out as well as I had hoped.

    This one is going to take a bit of work to get sorted out. lol

    Icecrmn, I'm a bit confused about the light and the camera position  in you 3dlight version. There is a hole lot of light coming from the left hand side all of a sudden that never was there in the Iray version and you seem to have zoomed out by quiet a deal. The candle flame needs much more ambient (select the candle prop in the scene and go to surfaces, open the detailed list of materials and select the candle flame itself, there in the ambient dial up to 100. Maybe you have to dial up the opacity as well so that is seen better. From a distance like that flames are not soemthing to see through)

    what did you use to create the light through the window (where you want the atmospheric? You don't need to fill the whole room with ubervolume, you can use the ubervolume cone coming through the windows (see the first render attached, you can see the shadows though the ornaments of the window in the dust). I even parented it with a spotlight at some times like in the second render, there are three cones with three spots in there

    I left the scene pretty much the same.I parented volume cones to the spotlights that I had outside the windows.There weren't long enough to reach the windows so I had to scale them up.That lead to the camera being inside the volume cone , so i had to move it further back to get it our of the volume cone.The candle flame is actually using the uberlight base shader, so it's emissive.The entire hall is filled with the volume cones.They overlapped by the time I got them long enough to reach from spotlight to floor.

    My 3Delight skills need some work :) .

    I can move the spotlights closer to the windows and make the volume cones shorter, and use them more like props than lights to make the godray effects.

    Then try to get the camera setup a bit better.

    I have no idea where that bright light on the left side is coming from.There are 2 spotlights (with volume cones attached) outside the windows on the right, and the candle flame which is emissive.I assume that the volume effects aren't actually stopping at the walls and are passing thru them.The door at the back of the hall doesn't show up at all, and my big flower plant is glowing :) , the chairs are casting shadows the walls that they shouldn't be.I think this is coming from the emissive candle flame settings. I'm still not sure why the flame itself isn't glowing,,it should be if the whole room is filled with light from it *shrug*

    I've used 3delight before and gotten ok results, but I never really got good enough with it to do some of the more advanced things.I see you have gotten pretty good with it,, Well done :)

    Ok I try to sort this out a bit. For one you can lengthen the volume cones without making them larger in skale using the y-scale component only, that should solve the problem of getting the cones so large that the camera ends up inside. And yes the cones themselves move on through the walls but when the shadow is on on the spotlights it shouldnt show up in the shadow (well only if its hit by another light).

    I never use the uberlight base shader, so no help there, all candle flames I do with the linear point light and the flame prepared as I discribed and the flame not showins is usually because the opacity is turned rather low on candle flames in general.

    From your render I'm really sure there must be another light source on the left.

    But then you got your Iray version onrather nice, so mayby you won't bother with 3dlight anymore.  But I really would llike to know what is hanging from the ceiling there?

    Well the reason I keep on with 3dlight is that my grafic card will not make me happy with Iray, so after the very first trials I stopped with that completely.

     

  • IceCrMnIceCrMn Posts: 2,130
    Linwelly said:
    icecrmn said:
    Linwelly said:
    icecrmn said:

    ok,,my 3DL attempt is done.7 hours of rendering.

    it didn't come out as well as I had hoped.

    This one is going to take a bit of work to get sorted out. lol

    Icecrmn, I'm a bit confused about the light and the camera position  in you 3dlight version. There is a hole lot of light coming from the left hand side all of a sudden that never was there in the Iray version and you seem to have zoomed out by quiet a deal. The candle flame needs much more ambient (select the candle prop in the scene and go to surfaces, open the detailed list of materials and select the candle flame itself, there in the ambient dial up to 100. Maybe you have to dial up the opacity as well so that is seen better. From a distance like that flames are not soemthing to see through)

    what did you use to create the light through the window (where you want the atmospheric? You don't need to fill the whole room with ubervolume, you can use the ubervolume cone coming through the windows (see the first render attached, you can see the shadows though the ornaments of the window in the dust). I even parented it with a spotlight at some times like in the second render, there are three cones with three spots in there

    I left the scene pretty much the same.I parented volume cones to the spotlights that I had outside the windows.There weren't long enough to reach the windows so I had to scale them up.That lead to the camera being inside the volume cone , so i had to move it further back to get it our of the volume cone.The candle flame is actually using the uberlight base shader, so it's emissive.The entire hall is filled with the volume cones.They overlapped by the time I got them long enough to reach from spotlight to floor.

    My 3Delight skills need some work :) .

    I can move the spotlights closer to the windows and make the volume cones shorter, and use them more like props than lights to make the godray effects.

    Then try to get the camera setup a bit better.

    I have no idea where that bright light on the left side is coming from.There are 2 spotlights (with volume cones attached) outside the windows on the right, and the candle flame which is emissive.I assume that the volume effects aren't actually stopping at the walls and are passing thru them.The door at the back of the hall doesn't show up at all, and my big flower plant is glowing :) , the chairs are casting shadows the walls that they shouldn't be.I think this is coming from the emissive candle flame settings. I'm still not sure why the flame itself isn't glowing,,it should be if the whole room is filled with light from it *shrug*

    I've used 3delight before and gotten ok results, but I never really got good enough with it to do some of the more advanced things.I see you have gotten pretty good with it,, Well done :)

    Ok I try to sort this out a bit. For one you can lengthen the volume cones without making them larger in skale using the y-scale component only, that should solve the problem of getting the cones so large that the camera ends up inside. And yes the cones themselves move on through the walls but when the shadow is on on the spotlights it shouldnt show up in the shadow (well only if its hit by another light).

    I never use the uberlight base shader, so no help there, all candle flames I do with the linear point light and the flame prepared as I discribed and the flame not showins is usually because the opacity is turned rather low on candle flames in general.

    From your render I'm really sure there must be another light source on the left.

    But then you got your Iray version onrather nice, so mayby you won't bother with 3dlight anymore.  But I really would llike to know what is hanging from the ceiling there?

    Well the reason I keep on with 3dlight is that my grafic card will not make me happy with Iray, so after the very first trials I stopped with that completely.

     

    I don't have an Nvidia graphics card either :)

    All my iray renders are done with just CPU.

  • daybirddaybird Posts: 655

    I'm so frustratet. angry

    After 8 hours of work at my scene, my wife has managed to produce a short circuit by letting fall the charger from her laptop beside her bed.

    All went black and now i have to start all the work again. *örgs*crying

  • isidornisidorn Posts: 1,601
    daybird said:

    I'm so frustratet. angry

    After 8 hours of work at my scene, my wife has managed to produce a short circuit by letting fall the charger from her laptop beside her bed.

    All went black and now i have to start all the work again. *örgs*crying

    I feel your pain. I had windows update reboot my computer making me lose a scene I was working on that I hadn't saved. I've learned so save more often now.

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    daybird said:

    I'm so frustratet. angry

    After 8 hours of work at my scene, my wife has managed to produce a short circuit by letting fall the charger from her laptop beside her bed.

    All went black and now i have to start all the work again. *örgs*crying

    Totally feel your pain!  I learned very very quickly to save, save and save again.

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    Linwelly said:
    Sonja11 said:

    Ooops wrong one. this is the right one with the bubbles done

    very nicely done, I like the light on the girl, that from the jellyfish and that from above. What I noticed is that the causic effect is present all though the water, or as I guess that is your background plane. If you look at underwater images the caustic effect is seen only on surfaces, not in the water itself (well ok the water surface looking up in the water is all caustic itself). So you need to move your background out of reach for the caustic light or you can alter the angle away from it. I hope you find a solution.

    Yes this have been a source of frustration for many hours now lol. These are actually gel lights and nothing I do seems to fix the issue.  The caustics just werent working at all no matter what I did.  And since this is only my 4th render or so I know absoloutely nothing about how most of this stuff works.  although I will say that doing this contest and reading as much as I can in thr forums has made a huge difference in what i now know.  So many thanks to everyone who has been so helpful!

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548
    icecrmn said:

    check this out :)

    last night I cleared my original scene and decided I would make a test render of just the environment to see how I was doing with just that part.

    When I switched the viewport over to  iray I got this image, so I saved it. It looks like a ghost is coming out of the back wall.

    also , here is what that tester looks like at 13% convergence and 9hrs rendering..No more ghost :(  but I think it's looking ok.

    once I can get a good environment going I'll get my people back in there and see about getting them sorted out :)

    Now this looks good!  I even kind of like the ghost in the first render lol.  But this is definitely working better with Iray

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    icecrmn said:
    Linwelly said:
    icecrmn said:
    Linwelly said:
    icecrmn said:

    ok,,my 3DL attempt is done.7 hours of rendering.

    it didn't come out as well as I had hoped.

    This one is going to take a bit of work to get sorted out. lol

    Icecrmn, I'm a bit confused about the light and the camera position  in you 3dlight version. There is a hole lot of light coming from the left hand side all of a sudden that never was there in the Iray version and you seem to have zoomed out by quiet a deal. The candle flame needs much more ambient (select the candle prop in the scene and go to surfaces, open the detailed list of materials and select the candle flame itself, there in the ambient dial up to 100. Maybe you have to dial up the opacity as well so that is seen better. From a distance like that flames are not soemthing to see through)

    what did you use to create the light through the window (where you want the atmospheric? You don't need to fill the whole room with ubervolume, you can use the ubervolume cone coming through the windows (see the first render attached, you can see the shadows though the ornaments of the window in the dust). I even parented it with a spotlight at some times like in the second render, there are three cones with three spots in there

    I left the scene pretty much the same.I parented volume cones to the spotlights that I had outside the windows.There weren't long enough to reach the windows so I had to scale them up.That lead to the camera being inside the volume cone , so i had to move it further back to get it our of the volume cone.The candle flame is actually using the uberlight base shader, so it's emissive.The entire hall is filled with the volume cones.They overlapped by the time I got them long enough to reach from spotlight to floor.

    My 3Delight skills need some work :) .

    I can move the spotlights closer to the windows and make the volume cones shorter, and use them more like props than lights to make the godray effects.

    Then try to get the camera setup a bit better.

    I have no idea where that bright light on the left side is coming from.There are 2 spotlights (with volume cones attached) outside the windows on the right, and the candle flame which is emissive.I assume that the volume effects aren't actually stopping at the walls and are passing thru them.The door at the back of the hall doesn't show up at all, and my big flower plant is glowing :) , the chairs are casting shadows the walls that they shouldn't be.I think this is coming from the emissive candle flame settings. I'm still not sure why the flame itself isn't glowing,,it should be if the whole room is filled with light from it *shrug*

    I've used 3delight before and gotten ok results, but I never really got good enough with it to do some of the more advanced things.I see you have gotten pretty good with it,, Well done :)

    Ok I try to sort this out a bit. For one you can lengthen the volume cones without making them larger in skale using the y-scale component only, that should solve the problem of getting the cones so large that the camera ends up inside. And yes the cones themselves move on through the walls but when the shadow is on on the spotlights it shouldnt show up in the shadow (well only if its hit by another light).

    I never use the uberlight base shader, so no help there, all candle flames I do with the linear point light and the flame prepared as I discribed and the flame not showins is usually because the opacity is turned rather low on candle flames in general.

    From your render I'm really sure there must be another light source on the left.

    But then you got your Iray version onrather nice, so mayby you won't bother with 3dlight anymore.  But I really would llike to know what is hanging from the ceiling there?

    Well the reason I keep on with 3dlight is that my grafic card will not make me happy with Iray, so after the very first trials I stopped with that completely.

     

    I don't have an Nvidia graphics card either :)

    All my iray renders are done with just CPU.

    then your patience must be miles longer than mine is, and I kind of envie you for that ;-)

  • CherubitCherubit Posts: 994
    edited October 2015

    Thanks to everyone who answered my question about render size and downscaling.  It was just one of those things I was curious about because of something I read.  I couldn't really see the benefit myself, but I thought I was missing something.  I figured with 3d art, if you render at the size it will be viewed, it should already be at the optimal quality for that size. 

    Anyway, I've been playing with fog brushes.  Let me know what you think.

    What an amazing work! Looking very beautiful! Kismet is right, the fog could be softer... What software do you use? Try to put the fog in a top layer and use either a blur filter in it.

    In fact, all entries are looking pretty great! I might start working on something soon...

    Post edited by Cherubit on
  • taemimun said:

    Thanks to everyone who answered my question about render size and downscaling.  It was just one of those things I was curious about because of something I read.  I couldn't really see the benefit myself, but I thought I was missing something.  I figured with 3d art, if you render at the size it will be viewed, it should already be at the optimal quality for that size. 

    Anyway, I've been playing with fog brushes.  Let me know what you think.

    What an amazing work! Looking very beautiful! Kismet is right, the fog could be softer... What software do you use? Try to put the fog in a top layer and use either a blur filter in it.

    In fact, all entries are looking pretty great! I might start working on something soon...

    I used Gimp for the fog.  I had several layers (which I just learned how to do) stacked on each other for the whole effect.  However, I sort of scrapped that way of doing the fog for the moment as I want to try and do all of the fog in Iray especially given the theme this month is atmosphere.  Since the fog is part of the atmosphere I'm creating, I would like to do all of it in Daz. 

    Thanks to Kismet's advice I'm trying to take my layers from Gimp and putting them on planes inside my renders.  Isidorn also suggested Jepe's Steam which I actually happen to have so I'm experimenting with that, too.  I should have some renders to post tomorrow.  So far, Jepe's Steam is turning out much better than my layered efforts and I'm learning tons just playing with them.  I finally figured out the trick of getting Jepe's Steam to render nicely in Iray.  Now, I just need to see if I can figure out how to do my efforts in Gimp onto planes so they look nice in Daz.

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012

    Okay, after rendering for 2days 23hrs and 18mins....

    !!!Imagination.jpg
    1440 x 1080 - 1M
  • isidornisidorn Posts: 1,601
    KA1 said:

    Okay, after rendering for 2days 23hrs and 18mins....

    Wow! Well worth the rendering time, if you ask me.yes

  • Linwelly said:
    icecrmn said:

     

    daybird said:

    I'm so frustratet. angry

    After 8 hours of work at my scene, my wife has managed to produce a short circuit by letting fall the charger from her laptop beside her bed.

    All went black and now i have to start all the work again. *örgs*crying

    I feel your pain :)

  • IceCrMnIceCrMn Posts: 2,130
    KA1 said:

    Okay, after rendering for 2days 23hrs and 18mins....

    Well done KA1!  Excellent job laugh

  • KA1 said:

    Okay, after rendering for 2days 23hrs and 18mins....

    Nice!  Awesome job.

  • KA1 said:

    Okay, after rendering for 2days 23hrs and 18mins....

    That is VERY nice.  I'd say the 2 days was worth it.

  • DollyGirlDollyGirl Posts: 2,656
    icecrmn said:
    Okay, after rendering for 2days 23hrs and 18mins....

    A very nice render KA1. Good composition, balance and focus, and you have definitatly established a mood.

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012
    edited October 2015

    Thanks folks, I almost gave it up to start again after a few 10hr test renders, I'm glad I didn't! (My partner was happy with the render time as well as it meant she got me to herself for the weekend rather than sharing me with Daz studio!! wink)

    Post edited by KA1 on
  • Kismet2012Kismet2012 Posts: 4,252
    KA1 said:

    Thanks folks, I almost gave it up to start again after a few 10hr test renders, I'm glad I didn't! (My partner was happy with the render time as well as it meant she got me to herself for the weekend rather than sharing me with Daz studio!! wink)

    It isn't always easy but sometimes having the patience to wait to the bitter end is worth the effort.

  • KA1 said:

    Thanks folks, I almost gave it up to start again after a few 10hr test renders, I'm glad I didn't! (My partner was happy with the render time as well as it meant she got me to herself for the weekend rather than sharing me with Daz studio!! wink)

    it is a real good render

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956
    Sonja11 said:
    Linwelly said:
    Sonja11 said:

    Ooops wrong one. this is the right one with the bubbles done

    very nicely done, I like the light on the girl, that from the jellyfish and that from above. What I noticed is that the causic effect is present all though the water, or as I guess that is your background plane. If you look at underwater images the caustic effect is seen only on surfaces, not in the water itself (well ok the water surface looking up in the water is all caustic itself). So you need to move your background out of reach for the caustic light or you can alter the angle away from it. I hope you find a solution.

    Yes this have been a source of frustration for many hours now lol. These are actually gel lights and nothing I do seems to fix the issue.  The caustics just werent working at all no matter what I did.  And since this is only my 4th render or so I know absoloutely nothing about how most of this stuff works.  although I will say that doing this contest and reading as much as I can in thr forums has made a huge difference in what i now know.  So many thanks to everyone who has been so helpful!

    I have been thinking about this for a little, well I don't own the gel lights and I made my water caustics myself but I guess your problem is with the distance of the  background panel ( I believe you are using one?). So if you can't move it any further away to avoid the effects from the gel lights, what you could try is to rotate it a little around the horizontal axis (could be x or z depending from where it startet out) so that the top part drops a little bit into the direction of your scene and hopefully shadows itself out from the gellight. Thats something you need to test (make a spot render on the backpanel to see if it had any effect, takes less time). I can't say that this will work but if it works you might then need to add another light (normal, from the side at a low intensity) so that your backpanel won't get too dark. I hope that gives you some ideas about what to to.

  • A little closer to the finish. Maybe reposition the lamp so that the leaves of the tree are better.

    I rescaled the image in The Gimp because it was to big + 2M

    So a smaller render for the finish would be better, so i can leave it unedited

     

     

    testrender.png
    1024 x 576 - 607K
  • KA1 said:

    Okay, after rendering for 2days 23hrs and 18mins....

    Wow.....

Sign In or Register to comment.