Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 2
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Yeah, much more natural with shine! Thought I wonder if it fits the toned blue environment...
Now time to test with different light scheme if it does behave well under different light (maybe boat scene again or some very contrasty non tonemapped hdr?). How well does the skin respond to purely diffuse lighting (flat white environment) and very strong single light without fills.
I'm wondering mostly about the IOR if it will be the correct one that I won't let too much of light through the character. I took liberty to draw on your render to mark some areas. I really like the look of the ears. I think it's the correct behaviour to get reddish when the light shines through. Also the area marked in violet looks translucent, but I'm wondering if it's caused by the correct light. I'd turn off key light for a small test to try if that area is caused by the rim light or it's the effect of leaking light through the neck. If it was gone then I think that for such closeup Vicki would need some skeleton made from reflective sphere and cylinder placed inside the mesh (that will make the light return to the upper layer of the skin). The other solution might be playing with the IOR to change the direction of the rays. As for the nose and lips - I think that lips look enough reddish but it's not caused by light going through but rather reflection, but for the (inside of the) nose I think the effect is very subtle. I'd make Vicki even more transparent or add some skeleton so that light will return to the surface and light the thinner parts like lips, ears and nostrils.
Getting around to catching up with 'Obscure Lighting' tutorials.
Have very quickly put it to some use here... will carry on exploring.
"Where Cyborgs Rule: Barker"
I bought the Cyborg model as soon as I saw it pop up in the store and after doing some posing of it I decided this guy was a rather evil barker and reminded me of someone from a graphic novel, which led to the concept of this image.
For the youngsters out there, A barker is someone who stands outside an entertainment establishment extolling people to enter.
The building and ATM were modeled in Modo. Textured with Bryce procedurals and images created in Photoshop.
The Cyborg was completely retextured with Bryce procedurals and posed in D|S 4.5.
Staged in Bryce 7.1, illuminated by the Bryce sun, 6 spots, 2 radials, Use Sky IBL and True Ambiance. About 6 hours to render at 64RPP.
Credits:
Cyborg - DZFire
Genesis female - DAZ3D
Swimwear 2 - Mindvision G.D.S.
Sandy Hair - Goldtassel
Grunge texture (wall) - CG Garage.
Any comments are appreciated and thanks for looking!
But be aware, neither the quality setting of the HDRI or the RPP will have any impact on the resolution of the HDRI.
Quality determines the number of simulated light sources generated by the HDRI and is used to overcome shadow banding issues. I recommend quality 16 for a starting point. Then increase incrementally.
Using RPP of 256 is only really required for TA rendering or in extreme cases where blurred reflection and blurred transmission effects are joined with high luminance value for Specular Halo (this value being responsible for the level of blurring). Lots of blur lots of noise. TA = lots of noise.
If TA rendering is used, HDRI quality should be set to 16. TA combined with HDRI direct light (as opposed to TA optimised light) = massive render times.
Well to be honest I didn't know about the quality settings using TA with HDRI since that's what this render was. I did it as a premium render with TA and soft shadows enabled. I set the rpp all the way up to 256 because I recalled from some of the tutorials I've seen you saying that you should have it as high as possible for the final render. I didn't use any other light aside from the sun and the Turkey is a pretty old and fairly lo rez object so I figured render times wouldn't be too punishing, which they weren't the scene only took 49 minutes. Maybe given all that there was to it, 49 minutes is alot but I don't consider render times to be excessive until they get above 12 hours or so and even then I might not consider it excessive if it's a scene I'm very pleased with and want to look it's best. The quality setting of 256 was there mainly because that appears to be the default. I do recall from one of Horo's tutorials him saying something to the effect of 256 isn't really much different in appearence then 16 and therefore there is no real need to run it that high but I already had tested it to see what the render time would be and since it wasn't too bad I figure it didn't really matter if I left it there or not. I remember also it being said somewhere that each quality point represents a sampling of the scene so I was just using the rational of the more samples the better. Below are screen shots of the relevent settings used.
Looks good to me except for that blue patch on her neck highlighting the mesh resolution issues. :)
Looks good the only change I might make is to have the barker actually barking by opening his mouth a bit if there is a morph setting for that?
ok redid the lastest sunset scene in different colors and a tad darker, then I went and used it as a background in poser.
I like how the terrain I used as water came out, I need to remember to save it as an object.
Wow very nice,
The problem I am having, beside the most obvious, is that I don't have a good "absorber" to put inside the model. Ideally I would like a volumetric cloud that followed the geometry of the model and soaked up the rays that got diffused into the core. Instead I've used a shrunken version of her own head. But due to the geometry of the model, it is difficult to get the absorber close enough to the skin while at the same time not intersecting the mesh and becoming visible. I tried using Wings3D to produce a "shrunken" version of herself, but the mesh was unmanageable with my limited skills at Wings.
The IOR is a bit of a problem because only at refraction 0 is it possible to avoid showing the "seams" up in the mesh model. There is also a conflict between the specular halo setting I want to drive the specular effect and the setting needed for blurring transmissions and reflections. Three different controls would help at this point since the changes needed, while subtle, seem to have a significant impact on the plausibility of the skin.
Here I've tried to apply the skin for the whole body, setting back a duplicate model away from the camera to act as an absorber and prevent rays travelling right through the figure. The problem being, because the duplicate model is not smaller but just further away, the depth of skin that can be entered by the rays varies and this creates lines where the absorber gets close to the surface. Like in the inside of the arm where a hard shadow has occurred.
A skeleton is a good idea, but I think it would let too much light through the model. What's needed I reckon is a "fat" skeleton.
Dan, lighting looks good, but the render time does not surprise me. You can create TA light sources which behave like spot lights, this in some ways will save time, but the smaller you make them the greater source of noise they become and increasing the RPP seems to be the only way to overcome that issue.
Mark, if you are using TA optimisation in the IBL (which I suspect you are), then one thing to try, just out of interest, is disable the Bryce sun, set the RPP of your render down to 4 and see just how much light (and what "kind "of light) is being contributed by your HDRI settings alone. Then switch the backdrop off and with a fully black sky and HDRI effect set to zero. Turn the sun back on. And render with 4 RPP again to see what the sun is providing. I often make this kind of check to see if my light sources are plausible.
Rareth, interesting render. I'm not really aware of the capabilities of Poser so it is difficult to comment.
As a bit of light relief from battling with skin settings...
Exploring further with David's 'Obscure Lighting' technique and I've immediately hit a problem.
This was rendered at 256RPP and still the amount of noise would errrr.... make your ears bleed if it was audio noise and not visual noise (hopefully seeing the pic wont make anyone's eyes bleed) :-)
This is basically the same scene as the one above with just the two light sabres... only in this one, I added the V4 model and two extra lights to light her (the glow from the light sabres not being enough on it's own.
So question for David: Did I miss a video telling me how to get rid of noise in this situation or is there anything I can do about it?
Titled: Definitely Not Darth
The problem I am having, beside the most obvious, is that I don't have a good "absorber" to put inside the model. Ideally I would like a volumetric cloud that followed the geometry of the model and soaked up the rays that got diffused into the core. Instead I've used a shrunken version of her own head. But due to the geometry of the model, it is difficult to get the absorber close enough to the skin while at the same time not intersecting the mesh and becoming visible. I tried using Wings3D to produce a "shrunken" version of herself, but the mesh was unmanageable with my limited skills at Wings.
The IOR is a bit of a problem because only at refraction 0 is it possible to avoid showing the "seams" up in the mesh model. There is also a conflict between the specular halo setting I want to drive the specular effect and the setting needed for blurring transmissions and reflections. Three different controls would help at this point since the changes needed, while subtle, seem to have a significant impact on the plausibility of the skin.
Here I've tried to apply the skin for the whole body, setting back a duplicate model away from the camera to act as an absorber and prevent rays travelling right through the figure. The problem being, because the duplicate model is not smaller but just further away, the depth of skin that can be entered by the rays varies and this creates lines where the absorber gets close to the surface. Like in the inside of the arm where a hard shadow has occurred.
A skeleton is a good idea, but I think it would let too much light through the model. What's needed I reckon is a "fat" skeleton.
say what - run that by me again
say what - run that by me again
When (if) I get to the point of understanding this fully myself, I will make video's to explain the process. Sorry if it doesn't make a lot of sense, trying to get skin to look like skin has turned out to be a bit tricky.
Yes and no. Yes you can do something about it. No you may not like the answer. The smaller the light sources get, the more chance they will generate noise because the possibility of them getting sampled for light shrinks so correspondingly you increase the power of them as light sources. And fireflies result.
Solutions,
Wrap your glowing sabres in larger invisible gel lights to increase the area of light producing surface - this means you can reduce the power and take the "heat" out of your fireflies.
Add normal direct radial lights along the length of the sabres to compliment your TA lighting - if the render time gets too large, split your render in two. Make a standard lighting render and a TA render, process the TA render to mitigate the noise and combine the two to add the glow effect back into your scene.
Strip your scene back to a glowing stick and your basic set up and let me ponder a solution?
OK thanks, some stuff to look into today.
I've already tried some of the things I thought would help, none of those things are things that you suggest (which makes me wonder if I'm not completely wrong about how this works). Re-enabling the sun and making the sky white (which in theory should provide more light surfaces for rays to sample?) had no effect.
I don't really want to go down the route of adding other lights to the light sabres because that negates the need for the obscure lighting, and these renders are supposed to be exploring the possibilities of using this quick and easy glow effect... that at the moment for me isn't being so quick... or easy. :-)
Though the one with just the light sabres was really quick and really easy (and not noisy at all).
But really, the most puzzling part for me is that even at 256RPP, this scene renders in less than an hour which is remarkably quick for a scene with TA, a high poly model with high res textures, bump maps etc fill lights and soft shadows.
I'm going to go back to the first 30 minute video and see if 'how it works' gives me any more ideas (I did watch it but at that point most of it was beyond me, having got to grips with it a bit, It may now make more sense)... Maybe I can approach setting up the scene differently and still getting the balance of light and glow effect another way... But yes if all else fails, I can take Vicky off and send the file to you... Ahhh don't you just love the internet... :cheese:
OK thanks, some stuff to look into today.
I've already tried some of the things I thought would help, none of those things are things that you suggest (which makes me wonder if I'm not completely wrong about how this works). Re-enabling the sun and making the sky white (which in theory should provide more light surfaces for rays to sample?) had no effect.
I don't really want to go down the route of adding other lights to the light sabres because that negates the need for the obscure lighting, and these renders are supposed to be exploring the possibilities of using this quick and easy glow effect... that at the moment for me isn't being so quick... or easy. :-)
Though the one with just the light sabres was really quick and really easy (and not noisy at all).
But really, the most puzzling part for me is that even at 256RPP, this scene renders in less than an hour which is remarkably quick for a scene with TA, a high poly model with high res textures, bump maps etc fill lights and soft shadows.
I'm going to go back to the first 30 minute video and see if 'how it works' gives me any more ideas (I did watch it but at that point most of it was beyond me, having got to grips with it a bit, It may now make more sense)... Maybe I can approach setting up the scene differently and still getting the balance of light and glow effect another way... But yes if all else fails, I can take Vicky off and send the file to you... Ahhh don't you just love the internet... :cheese:
The speed is the blessing of doing away with a whole raft of additional calculations - TA rendering does not need to do any shadow calculation at all because it deals with the passage of rays crudely as photons so the shadows "emerge" from the method. So if an answer can be found without direct lighting, it is - as you have noted - pleasingly swift.
Noodling around with obscure lighting.
The ManifoldLab Plugin for Wings has some pretty fancy shape extruders.
I abused yet again Horos Lake.hdri with soft shadows My longest render time ever, 12 minutes.
David you're doing a great job as always, sub surface scattering is hard to pull off and your renders are looking good.
Like you I have been trying to get Human figures to render properly in Bryce, but was having much less success. so I went the other route to try and get Bryce into Poser (I prefer it over DAZ Studio).
Looks good although I liked the colors of the first one you did too, this one is a bit too orangy for my tastes but hey, my tastes aren't the standard now are they? :)
I don't know, looks like Darth Vixen to me. :)
I wasn't using it intentionally but yes TA optimization is checked in the IBL section of the skylab settings. I'm not sure what these images tell me, other then the HDRI doesn't seem to be adding much light (although intensity is fairly low at just 20) but I followed your suggestion and did the renders below using the settings you specified. The first is with the sun disabled and RPP at 4. The second is with the sun on, HDRI background off, HDRI effect set to zero and the sky fully black rendered at 4 RPP. The third is the scene done as it was originally. I thru that one in because I didn't save the original scene and I wanted you to be able to compare the two renders you reccommended to the same scene in a final draft version with all the settings as they were and RPP at 256.
I wasn't using it intentionally but yes TA optimization is checked in the IBL section of the skylab settings. I'm not sure what these images tell me, other then the HDRI doesn't seem to be adding much light (although intensity is fairly low at just 20) but I followed your suggestion and did the renders below using the settings you specified. The first is with the sun disabled and RPP at 4. The second is with the sun on, HDRI background off, HDRI effect set to zero and the sky fully black rendered at 4 RPP. The third is the scene done as it was originally. I thru that one in because I didn't save the original scene and I wanted you to be able to compare the two renders you reccommended to the same scene in a final draft version with all the settings as they were and RPP at 256.
What is says is that you could potentially rebalance your light to enhance the lighting effect and produce a more photo-realistic final render.
Here is what you could do if you wanted to experiment.
With the sun turned off, increase the HDRI effect value until the chicken is lit at about the same level as default grey. To achieve this put a fully white sphere in your scene and tweak up the effect until it measures the same as default grey 126,126,126 rgb.
Then turn off the HDRI as before and set the sun on so that on the bright side of the sphere is about default grey.
Then turn back on your HDRI lighting and you should have about normal light but you should see that you now have some light in what was before very dark shadow regions.
In theory... that's the theory. Only, if you want to experiment. Don't feel like I am nagging you are anything. ;)
Eireann, looks good! Even there is some optical illusion since the backgound seems bent when looking at the model and straightens out when looking at the background - or I need new glasses?
Plodding on with the SSS experiments. Patched in the hair again to save render time.
@TheSavage64 - I like your laser swords. Look really good.
@dan - that's a great render. I particularly like the JukeBox at right.
@Rareth - your sunset scene improves. Where's the light comming from at the lady? It looks like a studio shot from a photographer.
@David - the one on p43 looks good as far as specularity is concerned. The previous one (p 42) made me think of translucency. Is there a way? Rashad once elaborated on the ears and nostrils that there should be some translucency if the light shines through.
And the landscape is great.
The face on this page looks a bit pale.
@eireann.sg - I like the snake-like render.
@LordHardDriven - I think something is wrong with the HDRI used. Are you sure it generates more than ambient light? The backdrop looks distored as well.
Horo the lighting is coming from an IBL light I generated from Bryce to produce the indirect lighting I have a distance light in the scene providing the sunlight, and I have a bluewhite fill light acting as a camera flash,
I just wanted to congratulate Dan on yet another fine Peasant Girl render.
Nice one, Dan, cool font as well!
Eireann, looks good! Even there is some optical illusion since the backgound seems bent when looking at the model and straightens out when looking at the background - or I need new glasses?
Want me to make an educated guess ? LMAO :)
I have used deformed glass spheres before which I put around the camera to get distorted images, but here I left that out.
Well the HDRI is from a product called Small Place HDRI (http://www.daz3d.com/shop/small-place-hdri) which was sold as primarily a Carrara prooduct but also included were HDRI files for both DS and Bryce. Now the default position for the HDRI didn't have a good surface area showing in the foreground to place the turkey on so it looked like it was sitting there. So I turned it around until I found the toaster oven with some space in front of it. This seemed like the only really good spot in the scene for placing the turkey but it also appears to be where the image wraps around to meet itself and as you noticed the tile doesn't line up quite right. I'm not sure if that is considered sloppy work on the vendors part or this is normal when going to the opposite side from which the HDRI was meant to be viewed? I didn't really care that much because the image I made from it was more or less just playing around.
As far as what it generates I'm really not sure of anything as I'm still struggling to get a handle on all this lighting stuff, mainly because I haven't had much time to really delve into any tutorials or the mentoring DVD since my wife broke her leg and I've had to take over her responsibilities as well as continue with my own and be her caregiver. All I know was I wanted to make a quick scene with an appropriate setting for the turkey. I knew using an HDRI backdrop would be the quickest way to achieve that result rather the say importing in the kitchen or dinning room scene of the Dream Home by Jack Tomlin/Redhouse Designs. I had hope to use that HDRI I've seen David used called Kitchen Table but apparently I don't have the product where the backdrop quality version of that file can be found. There are some blurry lo rez versions of that particular HDRI that came with the Tileable High Resolution Terrains and Matched Materials product but they're too blurry to use as a backdrop. Fortunately the Small Place HDRI product had an appropriate HDRI to use as a backdrop but that was the only other HDRI I own that might have worked and so I couldn't be too picky about it.
Well the HDRI is from a product called Small Place HDRI (http://www.daz3d.com/shop/small-place-hdri) which was sold as primarily a Carrara prooduct but also included were HDRI files for both DS and Bryce. Now the default position for the HDRI didn't have a good surface area showing in the foreground to place the turkey on so it looked like it was sitting there. So I turned it around until I found the toaster oven with some space in front of it. This seemed like the only really good spot in the scene for placing the turkey but it also appears to be where the image wraps around to meet itself and as you noticed the tile doesn't line up quite right. I'm not sure if that is considered sloppy work on the vendors part or this is normal when going to the opposite side from which the HDRI was meant to be viewed? I didn't really care that much because the image I made from it was more or less just playing around..
HDRI itself isnt difficult to do.
Whats tricky though is to make enough HDRI images and stitch them so together so that you end up with a 360 degree view.