Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 2

David Brinnen

pumeco said:

@Rareth
I never said renders look more real than photographs.

@Dave
Well, full points for doing it and for the modelling, but you're really crap at blood ;-)

@David
Ah, now that makes a lot of sense (and in more ways than one). I wondered why, on the committee, no one seemed enthusiastic for something as cool as a Post-Processing Lab when I brought it up. For such a tinker-orientated bunch it just didn't make sense. The problem with your upcoming product is that we're never going to see a proper implementation in the program because of it. DAZ are never going to implement something if something can already be faked within the program, and at the same time, make them money in selling it. It's just like we're never going to see proper adjustable rounding ability for edges of primitives because the easy, less versatile route has already been taken to supply ready-rounded shapes in the content library.

I wish you lot would use that noodle sometimes.

Cross posting again, Len. Well, the issue is more that we were snowed under with fundamental problems, at least in my case, a lot of time was absorbed trying to work out what was wrong with bump mapping/mapping modes. That took up the bulk of the development cycle for me since it seemed the number of people that were both interested in testing it and also capable of understanding the difference between approximate and simulated behaviour was limited. My view is very much that the focus should be on getting the basic building blocks in place before adding more interfaces and labs.

pumeco

Same here, but unfortunately we all know they don't work like that.

As with all your products I wish you both success with it when it arrives, but only because I can appreciate the work that must have gone into it, and the fact that you two do a heck of a lot for the community.

Dave Savage

pumeco said:

@Dave
Well, full points for doing it and for the modelling, but you're really crap at blood ;-)

Well no I'm actually an expert at doing blood (see the pictures below taken at some of my gigs)... just not in Bryce and I wasn't going to spend a lot of time on a throwaway piece of work that I only did as a last minute idea just for laughs. :lol:

pumeco

You're a make-up artist?

pumeco

Rashad Carter said:

I think the effects Len applied look great. Glad to hear PJF is teamed up with Horo and David that should yield useful fruits.

Cheers Rashad, and I have to admit that line got me as well at first glance!

David Brinnen

pumeco said:

Rashad Carter said:

I think the effects Len applied look great. Glad to hear PJF is teamed up with Horo and David that should yield useful fruits.

Cheers Rashad, and I have to admit that line got me as well at first glance!

You would think with English being my first and only language I'd be better at it? Oh I suppose I do know a few programming languages if those count...

Dave Savage

pumeco said:

You're a make-up artist?

No, just a gorehound.
Most of the blood comes from a trick I do where I swallow a sword and then when I pull it back out, my mouth is full of blood.
Another good one I used to do regularly was to have someone come on stage halfway through a song with a gun and shoot me in my chest, resulting in an explosive splat of blood from my chest (and another ruined shirt).

pumeco

@David
To be honest, reading a programming language is probably easier to read than a lot of the stuff I see posted on the internet lately. I'm constantly baffled by the amount of people who post and have never even heard of periods and commas etc (it's just one massive sentence). I'm lucky, I have a PJF spelling and grammar assistant to drop witty remarks - and I learn from it. Question is, who the hell is teaching those others?

@Dave
Wow, that sounds like a great job that does :-)

Yup, gorehound here too - although I try not to talk about it in case it scares my Peasant Girls off.

Just don't get in my way, Savage, that's all. I carry the infamous Bloodhound tattoo on my right arm, and being a gorehound yourself, I trust you know what that means if you piss me off (unless of course you have one too), in which case I'll let you off.

Chohole

Still playing with trees, pulled the leaves off and trying to make it look wintery, snow touched, etc.

Have tried 2 different ways now. which is best ?

David of course will come along and show me how to do it with just one material, instead of duplicating the tree mesh as I have done with theses 2.

dwsel

Continuing experiments with lenses. Previous scene with different sky seen through two plano-convex lenses (sphere-cube) with IOR of 1.6. Depth of field recommended, long rendering times expected, higher than default ray depth needed. Single lens element is already visible and when you direct the camera towards light source it gets amplified by the lens system so that the whole image is getting brighter (which should be compensated if the effect is desired).

Rareth said:

the chain is actually a frame from a phyics test avi I did in Cararra, 6 seconds of the ball swinging on the end of that chain

this jewelry design stuff is getting interesting, I need to see where I can go with it.
I really like this one, it's clean design, nicely lit. I prefer it over the other recent ones from you because of the proportions and studio lighting is nice as well. I think that the best studio for the jewellery is the one where the objects have several things behind the camera to be reflected, or something like environment map (IBL).

pumeco said:

Hope David doesn't mind me cannibalising his render, but I just wanted to show what I meant about making an image look analogue, and in my opinion, improving the realism through naturalisation if that makes any sense.

One way to help make things look analogue is to soften it, but softening can have benefits both ways. I could have taken David's knives and softened it at the size he rendered it, but here, the softness (or at least some of it) is due to the fact that I've double the size of his render without pixelation and without any special resizing plugins. It's now 1700 pixels wide even though he only had to render half of that. The rest of the effects is just down to personal technique (plugins and manual work), but I can recommend practicing these skills to anyone who want their renders to look more photographic. Remember, when we see a photo, it has always taken on the properties of the lens, the film (or sensor), and chemicals (or codec). If you miss that out of your render, you miss that added element of realism.

Post-work such as this means your render is still Bryce. David's knives are no less Bryce-Rendered Knives than they were before I laid my filthy hands on them.

That's very nice colour grading + texture. I really like the result - it's like a vintage photo now.

pumeco said:

Another reason I wanted to show this is because it's a demonstration of something I wanted to see built-in to Bryce. I wanted a "Development Lab", sort of like a digital darkroom where effects such as this can be controlled with numerous parameters as you view a preview of the render. The Development Lab would effectively be the last point in the workflow (if you wanted to use it), where every 'image-based' parameter is set up, and where you control resolution, AA, Colour Correction, and whatever else would fall under image control.:

I might have some opinions about this idea, but I don't think that thread about 'showing Bryce renders' is appropriate for that. I'd happily discuss about it in 'postprocessing Bryce renders' thread.

It doesn't help that every time I think I've got to the root of how TA works... I unearth another curious thing. The next video I intend to make will show how TA light can be significantly "amplified" by using a bumpy mirror - which if that sounds pretty crackers, wait till you see it in action. Since it seems to work in a way that breaks all the rules of how surfaces respond to light in Bryce.

Dwsel, more interesting experiments from you. Here's some more of that rainbow material (close as Horo observed to the oil spill), in another simple render.

And some more of the knives with less exotic materials applied.

Interesting... Looking forward to see another tutorial/walkthrough from you.

The knives rendering look now more like an advertisement piece. Classing light, realistic materials (just like you'd expect the knives too look when you unpacked the box right after buying them in a market). About the dragon material - currently the mapping of the material or a noise type shows up too strong imho. You can clearly see the gradients which is not that good compared to the previous render of 'knives in oil'.

another render of that diamond ring

Could be worth exploring a spectral light Dome like the one I used here in Bryce 6 and beta 7

Diamond Heist
http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=4053&mode=search

Chimera
http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=4213&mode=search

Nice results, but I prefer the other way of doing dispersion: http://www.mentis.ca/design/graphics/dispersion/ that can be extended for more smoothness to more spectral bands. It works with any scene, with any light - just these parts with refractive objects have to be rerendered.

@TheSavage64:
These are another great examples of CSG. Pity that the only way to move them to CAD is to convert them to mesh before export.

These stage performances look very nice (if 'nice' is a good word to call that kind of shows ;) )

Oh... and I totally love advertisement renders of various container designs that you make.

David Brinnen

chohole said:

Still playing with trees, pulled the leaves off and trying to make it look wintery, snow touched, etc.

Have tried 2 different ways now. which is best ?

David of course will come along and show me how to do it with just one material, instead of duplicating the tree mesh as I have done with theses 2.

Well you could do it with one material maybe... That largely depends on how complex your bark material is and if there is room in the material lab for more channels.

I like the look of the one on the left.

Nice renders, Pammish.

Rareth

ok new diamond render..

David Brinnen

Strange... Bryce 20 minute lighting project - another obscure lighting experiment - a video by David Brinnen

Rareth

David Brinnen said:

Strange... Bryce 20 minute lighting project - another obscure lighting experiment - a video by David Brinnen

Oooo Pretty..

Chohole

David this is how the snow is set up on the left hand one, THe Actual bark is just the 2nd texture, which is a jpg tex that came with the original tree.

David Brinnen

chohole said:

David this is how the snow is set up on the left hand one, THe Actual bark is just the 2nd texture, which is a jpg tex that came with the original tree.

Looks good. However... be careful using ambient in your renders instead of embracing more holistic lighting solutions.

Rareth

ok modified the lighting for the ring (again)...

Chohole

THat looks really good now

Rareth

chohole said:

THat looks really good now

thank you I tweaked the diamond mat for just a smidge of diffusion, and reflection,

there is a spot light behind and to the right of the camera with soft edges

and three radial lights above the ring (one red, one blue and one green) off set on the x and z axis from 0 by half a bryce unit

GussNemo

@Dave: Thanks. I took another look and now understand what they're doing.

@Rareth: Those are nice looking diamonds. And the last image of the diamond looks great.

@chohole: I think both of those trees look good. The ground lighting on the left image is lighter, more snow is on that tree, it's framed differently, but I like it. And the right tree, less snow, darker ground lighting, framed different, again. Still looks nice to me.

Roland4

The dead tree

pumeco

@dwsel_
Nice organic-looking renders yet again, and thanks for the suggestion, but I'll give the new thread a miss.

A few years back I decided to write a book on this stuff, and today, I decided I'm still going to go ahead and do that. It's something I genuinely love doing so I think it'll make a good first book project for me at some point.

Still, that's for another time, my main priority right now is to get out of England, permanently.

Dave Savage

pumeco said:

Still, that's for another time, my main priority right now is to get out of England, permanently.

Yes, gone are the days when you could just steal your neighbour's goose and get a free ticket to Australia.

pumeco

:lol:

GeroblueJim

Nothing spectacular, I was mainly seeing what I could remember without reading anything or watching any tutorials. I ofund the tutorials on youtube. I'll look at them when I get the chance. I got the sky in and some terrain. But couldn'ty remember how to get texture onto the cube, although I brought the various terrains up.

Dave Savage

This one kind of looks like a cover for a murder mystery novel.

It started off as an exercise in making a convincing wet patio material (for the Geo-Fix product posted on the previous page).
If I can get it to look realistic enough, it's another Bryce render that will end up in a trade press advert.
I think it's starting to look good now, but the cement between the flags needs some work yet.

Then I just added some of my recently made models (and the Bryce bullet, which I didn't make), rendered and saved as .hdr.

Rareth

TheSavage64 said:

This one kind of looks like a cover for a murder mystery novel.

It started off as an exercise in making a convincing wet patio material (for the Geo-Fix product posted on the previous page).
If I can get it to look realistic enough, it's another Bryce render that will end up in a trade press advert.
I think it's starting to look good now, but the cement between the flags needs some work yet.

Then I just added some of my recently made models (and the Bryce bullet, which I didn't make), rendered and saved as .hdr.

Looks great from here

Peter Fulford

David Brinnen said:

Rashad Carter said:

snip... Glad to hear PJF is teamed up with Horo and David that should yield useful fruits.
...

I was answering to PJF, not suggesting we had formed a triumvirate.

...

Heh. Nobody remembers Lepidus.

It doesn’t help that every time I think I’ve got to the root of how TA works… I unearth another curious thing. The next video I intend to make will show how TA light can be significantly “amplified” by using a bumpy mirror - which if that sounds pretty crackers, wait till you see it in action.

Fascinating stuff. I wonder if the bump map is effectively increasing the surface area of the TA light, and maybe even "virtually" projecting the surface into the scene (in that strange way that bump does and doesn't raise a surface).

I miss the mad fiddling. It doesn't help that every time I think I've got a little time for Brycing, there's yet another Brinnen video to watch and absorb.
;-)

pumeco

I've missed endless Brinnen videos but I too intend to watch that one.

Peter, that time when you commented on those Halobird cube and room tests about it suddenly taking on a very flat, dull surface finish - that was done with microbump. Buggered if I know what Brinnen is up to although I suspect you're right in the increased amount of area having something to do with it.

If he's doing with light what was being done with reflection, I'm guessing you'll not only get more light, but better light.

Rareth

ah ha! avatar update successful.