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davidbrinnen

19.04.2024, 19:38

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MIAMI VICE

MIAMI VICE
Description:	pre-prod jasc psp7, rendered in bryce5.5. No post prod. This is a very preliminary first draft, so that's why some trees are still floating in the air. Going for realism in well lit scenes like this one is diffucult, so I would appreciate your input. Three technical experiments are underway in this image. First experiment, COMBINING the sky lab with volumetric clouds to get a more 3 dimensional sky. The sky lab all alone by itself creates nice looking, but notoriously flat clouds that give it away as Bryce no matter what I do. I believe the volume clouds correct this. Does the sky appear legitimately 3D to you all? Secondly, the Grass is a technique I've been working on to create acre upon acre of grass without placing tons of individual grass models. I think this grass technique would look nice in one of Alex Quinn's Zen Garden or Dome Scenes. Does this grass look like real (short length, recently cut) grass to you guys? Third experiment; again testing the realism gained by using my transparency "trick" in the foliage shadows instead of ambient expression or just nothing at all. You will recognize the flowers from 3dcafe.com. (Viper is a free model.) I have employed the "trick" again to allow the light to penetrate the flowers and their leaves more natually. I want the flowers NOT to look cartoonish as ambient creates and much more like film quality as I believe this "trick" has no match in providing. Notice the flowers do not look like glass or crystal. I wish davidbrinnen would use this technique in Multi-channel brige render to solve the shadows others had commented on, as I agree whole heartedly with his choice not to use ambient on the undersides of the ferns. Until now ambient was the only option available for leaf shadow corrections. I am proposing a better option than ambient, of clevery assgned transparency. Nights4r, what do you think of the petals of the Clematis flowers, as you have rendered them in the past yourself without ambient or transparency? Do the petals in this image appear fleshy and life like to you?This "trick" has alot to do with the gamma of the textures, as it lights the plants almost from within. The haze is another little experiment, as I'm trying not to overdo the haze effect. Lastly, the image needs an artistic focus as all images should tell a story. LitoNico is already in my mind! Is this a park, a school yard, or what? The scene can still turn into anything. I need something to fill in that horizon. It's named miami vice for the palms and the fancy car, but I don't mind changing it's name.
Added by:	rashadcarter1
Keywords:	rashadcarter1, bryce5.5, psp7, noambient, fleshy, transparency, sky, grass, flowers
Date:	06.26.2006 05:13
Hits:	5134
Downloads:	144
Rating:	5.00 (1 Vote(s))
File size:	567.0 KB

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Nightst4r
Admin

Join Date: 12.11.2003
Comments: 451

Wow

The clouds are awesome yes they do look 3d. The grass is outstanding, it does look real as well. The flowers look great, aside from the fact that some are floating. I do like the petals. I never rendered Clematis flowers before, probably confusing me with someone else :) I think the haze is a bit high because its causing the left side there to become a bit too odd colored compared to the rest. The flowers in the left-distance look a little bit too big.

In my opinion I'm not sure why those particular sets of flowers would have bunched up in that exact location and no where else. I mean thats a lot of different kinds of flowers to bunch up in a single spot. I'd feel like a pond would give a good reason for the bunching. But not sure if its a good place to stick a pond.

Thats my 6 cents :)

Great work, just plant them trees and flowers back intot he ground and i'd be happy.

06.26.2006 05:23

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

oops, sorry Nightst4r.....

I somehow got Nightst4r and richter confused. Richter rendered purple serenity to which I was referring. sorry.
Also, I seem to have some sort of rendering problem in the upper right area of the image around the palm trees. I will sort it out before I submit the final version.

06.26.2006 06:19

Horo
Admin

Join Date: 05.26.2004
Comments: 4721

A photograoh on a 2D face was what I thought when I saw the sky but you say it's pure Bryce, so you've got it! The grass is very good. For a low cut lawn a bit course, put it passes nicely for a low cut meadow. Perhaps a bit less green and a triffle more yellow. Vegetation green is very difficult to get right. The flowers do not fit on this grass, but are by themselfs beatutiful. Why not put them into a garden bed with chisle or stone walkways around them? That could perhaps go for a focus.

06.27.2006 13:06

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

I like what you're saying Horo

Aha! That's where Horo's expertise makes itself apparent. A garden bed with a stone walkway sounds amazing!!! I'm good with the technical stuff, but envisioning the artistic elements of the scene is not always my forte. I feel the need for some sort of architechture in this image, but I still don't know what kind. Please keep the ideas coming. At some point Horo you and I need to talk so that I can make the leaf transparency trick into a tutorial so that others can get their hands on it. It's simple to do but it will take a lifetime before anyone else discovers how to do it on their own. It's much more clever than it seems. I can also share the secrets of the sky and grass so that everyone can utilize them. Maybe david could also help me develop the tutorials. Grass for all!!!!!!

06.28.2006 05:18

richter
Member

Join Date: 04.15.2004
Comments: 1092

Now, one-by-one. Your sky is one of the most successfull I've seen to be rendered in Bryce. My minor suggestion about it will be changing the slightly rose nuance of the 3D clouds to a bit more near grayish, like the clouds from the sky lab. The blue sky color is natural enough to me.
I'll be very happy to know what kind of tech did u used for the grass creation. There's so much of it! Did you add transparency to it too? If so, I believe the too-green gamma prob could be solved with lowering the transp.
Now the flowers are a hit. The texture maps they're coming with from 3dcafe are most convincing. This combined with your technique of amb.& transp. makes them simply perfect. Clematis' petals included - too far from my eye to say fleshy, but close enough to say "full house vitality". I'm lookin forward for new entries!

06.28.2006 21:50

davidbrinnen
Admin

Join Date: 01.03.2004
Comments: 2224

All the components in themselves are looking very good. The sky is particularly striking, athough I'd be tempted to render this on it's own at a high resolution and reintroduce this to the scene as a backdrop in order to cut down on the continual penalty of rendering volumentric clouds. It would also then offer more control over the lighting, because sometimes what looks good for the clounds my not be quite what you need on the ground. The grass is very appealing, but a little too green for my tastes. On the whole I'd say the colours were a little too strong if the aim is realism. If you take a photo and pick out the colours in a pain package you will find that many of the colours are not quite what you might think they are. Skies here in the UK are predominently grey. I know that in the US they have some really blue skies... but not so here, and that in turn has an effect on the response of all the colours. What this image really needs to pull it together is something by way of a composition, not an easy subject to discuss at the best of times, I would suggest a trawl of google images and landscape artists and find something that suits your subject and is to your likeing compositionally. Looking good though, and it is pleasing to see some serious consideration going into the technical aspects of bryce.

07.02.2006 16:14

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

creating a sense of real sunlight.....

The gamma or "energy" of real sunlight is difficult to create in bryce. Few artists attempt these head on lighting scenes like this. The lighting was my single biggest challenge. A mock sun is used as the default sun is too low energy to provide the gamma needed to create realism. The grass looks normal to me, as it is meant to look healthy with no dryness. I was thinking of a Tennesee Blue Grass. There are also about 3 different colored blades. The rose nuance of the clouds is derived from observations of nature. I have noticed that clouds and horizons are very often slightly pink-ish. I believe it is atmospheric distorion from pollutants. The clouds render pretty quickly actually for volumetric clouds. I probably worked a month to find a cloud texture I could render at 60% quality that would look good enough to "pass". Most artists need to correct their images in a 2d app before publishing. Gamma corrections, saturation and contrast enhancements, sharpness, all of that in order to tease out that sense of detail and "energy." I am trying to get as much gamma, saturation, contrast, and sharpness as possible into the original Bryce render so that no post-prod is necessary, as I am always thinking about the possibilty of animation. Extensive post work makes me nervous, as I trust the raytracer in the renderer more than my own artistic eye in a 2d app post production session. Thanks you all, and I soon will submit more images for contemplation.

07.02.2006 18:55

LitoNico
Member

Join Date: 05.07.2004
Comments: 242

You've done it with the sky. Grass is okay, in Miami it'd probably be a lot browner, even on something like a golf course. The trees are a disappointment, but Bryce trees are by definition unsatisfactory. Though I hate to say it, In your place I'd go into Vue, It seems more a pro's tool, while Bryce is an artists tool.

07.03.2006 14:28

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

tree lab issues in my "Vue"

You are so right LitoNico. But I feel Bryce plants could be fixed easily.The makers of Bryce were brave to implement a tree lab. It has it's problems, but to me it's not all that bad. If I were working for Daz3D, I would make 3 changes to the tree lab that would bring these trees up to industry leading standards. First, I would make it so that the trees had alot more individual leaves per plant. Real adult trees can have many thousands of leaves on them. Bryce cannot as of yet produce that amount of individual leaves. If you set a small leaf size like 4, the tree looks barren even with a regualrity count of 20 because Bryce won't implement ENOUGH of those small leaves per segment to fill in the tree. You would need to set it to regularity 60 or 80 per segemnt to mimic reality at a small leaf size setting, but we all know the highest setting allowed is 20. Too many segments looks weird for it's own reasons, so increasing the segment count doesn't help any at all. Second, all of the leaves are expressed at the exact same size on any given tree. The leaves should vary a little bit in size from leaf to leaf on any given plant because leaf ages and growing stresses are not all the same. If you set the leaf size to 4, every leaf on the tree is size 4, which is RIDICULOUS. The leaf sizes should be controlled over a range, like the segment controller and other controllers within the tree lab allow for randomness and variation over a range of values. Third, foliage transparency maps! As mentioned by LitoNico, Vue is known to be more professional, partly because of things like foliage transparency maps. But Bryce can also do this. Its just that no bryce users had figured out that leaf transparency was NECESSARY FOR REALISM, so no one ever tried to solve the issue until me. People just used OPAQUE leaves with ambient expression because it was easy and seemed fine since there was no other option. When David or Horo helps me, I will provide you all with the tool for transparent foliage and all will see how much more realistic vegation looks when you don't take the easy way out by employing a cheesy flat ambient. I have made no mention YET of my transparency discovery to Daz, but since they compete with Vue, they definetly need to implement this trick as a selling point for realistic foliage worthy of competing with Vue. Lastly, Bryce needs to completely open itself up. There should be ALOT more trees and plants possible to make. I should be able to control the leaf shape and curvature alot more. The resolution of the leaf shapes in the presets is too low. Upon closer view, the leaves all look like strange cut-outs when they should have smooth edges. I should be able to make ruffled edged leaves and other shapes without having to resort to the user leaf and photos. The user leaf has a very flat curvature and it is based upon a small leaf image. It's very difficult to "fit" your pictures to the leaf shape presets provided. The default leaf has the best curvature map of any preset leaf shape FYI. The secret program used for the presets shapes should be integrated directly into the tree lab itself so that I can assign any picture shape I want without having to "fit" anything to a preset, assign leaf curvature settings, and leaf size range values. Now we're talking complexity and naturalness. The palm tree leaves in this scene are transparent and glow as they should of penetrating sunlight from above, but they are too shiny as I overdid the specularity and they look very plastic. But the transparency itself is there as evidenced by the undersides of the upper arching leaves, and that transparency brings us MUCH CLOSER TO THE CAPACITIES OF VUE. When Byrce6 is released, I hope there are 2 versions. One modest, and one "pro" version. Bryce6 needs to come out as a pro tool, otherwise it wil lose many of it's fans. The render engine in Bryce is AMAZING and UNSURPASSED even by MAYA Unlimited. Exactly why the makers of Bryce gave this "artists app" such a "pro renderer" is beyond me. Other renderers are faster perhaps, but pixel for pixel, none is of a better quality. And that is the selling point of Bryce. That is what keeps people coming back to this program. The Bryce renderer is capable of ANYTHING. Bryce can at times be a pro tool. This website boasts terrific examples of how clever users break the mold on what Bryce's "limitations" are. If we can solve just a few more general problems, Bryce can remain an industry leader for it's price range. But yes, Vue was designed differently, so there are certain things it does naturally that Bryce does not do so naturally. But Bryce can do it EVENTUALLY. In the end, I am certain that Bryce can do ANYTHING Vue can do. Personally, I'm hoping for a BrycePro version to be released someday. Something that can communicate with Maya and 3Ds Max the way Vue Pro can. This will gain Bryce more respect in the industry.

07.04.2006 17:52

richter
Member

Join Date: 04.15.2004
Comments: 1092

ok...

You did your study with the leaves - I give you that. Also your idea was one of the most inovative things I've heard and "seen" to be made on Bryce "territory". Still, I'm not sure what I'm really supposed to see. What I'm sayin -- "steal" my attention, grab it by showing me and the others here an example of two equal leaf-like plant/flower renders, one next to the other, with the transparency tech added to one of them. Simple or complex rend - choice is all yours.

The first time I saw the Bryce Tree lab I was deeply amazed. The next few months of work although gave me the impression that something is amiss. Agreeing to what you've said about the branches and segments I can also add that if you want to render even a small portion of a "forest" using 20+ trees, the render time breaks any hope of the img being rendered in our lifetime. Notice that I'm not talkin about the RAM used. Currently my is 2GB and even now it's hard for me to handle a realistic vegetation. HERE speaks Vue. From what I've heard, and seen, Vue specializes in rendering large masses of trees and plants optimizing them in the Ram memory and not slowing unnecessary the rend time. But I don't own Vue. I own Maya 7 Unlimited. Perhaps this is not the right place for me to talk about it, but since you put it that way... Bryce has a few render options to tweak which if you understand and combine with the proper lighting and texturing can make of your work a real contestant and later gain the software used "more respect in the industry", because it is the people like you, us, the entire community here or wherever that Create. Software only helps for the realisation, BUT a realisation that we need to complete our most daring projects. Ever heard of mental Ray or V-ray, are you familiar with the toon shading and hypershading Maya provides, even motion blurring (that Vue has too)? I'm truly a Brycer inside my heart but I can't deny the obvious. You CANNOT possibly compair two so different render engines. Not without knowing/comprehending both in deep. Don't get me wrong, I mean no insulting or offending any brycer here. Just thought I owe you an opinion.

07.04.2006 21:39

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

different programs, different purposes.

I'm in no way insulted. We agree completely. Maya 7 Unlimited is a 4D program in my view. Everything about it wants to be set in time and animated. I own Maya 6 Unlimited, and it is truly unlimited. All those secret menus and it's adaptive programmablity is extraordinary. Maya 7 Unlimited runs around $3000.00 for first time buyers. The price is justfied for a movie studio, but for the average person? Toon shading, mental-ray, v ray, all make the job alot easier. But the job was NOT IMPOSSIBLE before these advents. Tools require the right hands before they can do anything. Maya was used in X-men when Mystiq morphs into different people. To do things like that, you need Maya for sure as it is an animator. But a still frame shouldn't require that much power. Does Joe Schmo living in the middle of no where deserve a realistic render any less than some wealthy person or studio? Digital artist are MAGICIANS as much as anything. The magic is in how cleverly they use the resources of the chosen program, and how closely they observe and mimic effects of nature in their works. Remember when David rendered those teddy-bears to test volumetric mats as furs? He scratched the surface of something that others may someday exploit. Fur in Bryce, unheard of!! David showed that limited furry-like mats are possible at least in theory in Bryce, even without toon shading, hypershading, or particle systems. MAGIC is the key concept. The renderer is capable if only we can trick it into doing what we want. The sky in this very scene would not have happened if I had not been a Maya user. I losely applied a Maya tutorial on atmospherics to Bryce, and it worked somewhat. Maya creates Volume clouds just like little old Bryce5.5. Go figure. No doubt, Maya has many more tools. Wouldn't it be nice if Maya and Bryce could communicate? If imports and exports were supported? Do people really build every plant and every tree from scratch in Maya? There's no tree lab or sky lab as such, so things are done from scratch. There is a Vue package that boasts compatibility with May and 3ds max. You can import these Vue landscapes directly into Maya and 3ds max and back again. If only my Bryce mats and models could be applied to a PROFESSIONAL app. like Maya. Years of work in Bryce, will go to waste if Bryce doesn't start going into new territory. Why do so many Maya users still use Bryce at times? In every review I've ever read about Bryce, it's renderer is praised for it's price range.

07.04.2006 22:51

Nightst4r
Admin

Join Date: 12.11.2003
Comments: 451

Collada

When Daz begins to support importing, as well as exporting. You will be able to get ColladaMaya for maya and then the two programs will be able to communicate nicely.. as well as a few hundred other applications. I read that daz had collada export support, but it was buggy. Hopefully they will fix that up, and get an import and then add it to bryce.

10.11.2006 13:56

tina gazcon
Member

Join Date: 08.07.2006
Comments: 254

Unfinished?

This is really nice! How or where do you get such real graphics from. I'm stuck still on basics. I want to create with the big-boys! I just dont know how to use all of the tools in this program. Do I need alot of different programs? I know my work could be much better if I knew what I were doing. Any tip or tricks would be helpful. Thanks again for your comments on my work.

11.04.2006 15:33

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