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GIGER
Comments: 1
philip

19.04.2024, 01:11

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Safe...at least for now!

Safe...at least for now!
Description:	A dog has chased a cat up into a tree. Can you find the cat? I wonder how long this little scenario will last? A study in secondary light sources INSTEAD of ambient channel expression. More volumetric cloud layering in addition to the sky lab for a more realistic and 3 dimensional sky. This is another scene featuring my GI workaround. Backlit scenes like this are not very realistic looking in bryce when ambient expression alone is relyed upon for shadow corrections. Ambient is a flat 2d appraoch to Global Illumination. Objects look different when light strikes them from when they radiate light. Secondary light sources pick up modeling shapes and contours and are superior to ambient expression for that very reason. Capitalizing on the foliage transparency phenomenon when viewed from below. Notice how the foliage responds to the light, instead of glowing of alien(arbitrary) light as the ambient channel creates. The leaves respond to light, making them more real. Hope you like it. PreProduction PSP7. Dog and Cat DazStudio. Rendered in Bryce 5.5. No post production.
Added by:	rashadcarter1
Keywords:	rashadcarter1, bryce5.5, psp7, DAZStudio, dog, cat, tree, sky, foliage, transparency, fleshy, refraction
Date:	11.01.2006 16:26
Hits:	4725
Downloads:	124
Rating:	4.67 (3 Vote(s))
File size:	584.2 KB

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jesuis
Member

Join Date: 10.01.2004
Comments: 163

PRIMA!

This ( smile ) looks so familiar. I love this. Perfect example of your secondary light. rather than ambience, works amazingly well with your foilage which I do believe you said was semi transparent. i would say I prefer this sky over most I have seen here on this sight with a few exceptions. Im a strong believer in volumetric clouds rather than SEEMINGLY volumtrics. it gives so much depth to an image and works well. I was wonderign and way meaning to ask you as to if you had attempted to use another color in your clouds rather than the blue, which by no means is faulty it is a MASTERFUL sky, but I was curious to see it in other works. I will be soon posting my landscape which I had used the sky that rash had provided. Its turnign out good, Rash has an excellent way of introducing secondary lighting RATHER than the ambience, both are very good way to improve ones images.

11.01.2006 18:48

Horo
Admin

Join Date: 05.26.2004
Comments: 4721

Excellent sky, cat and dog masterfully placed. Foreground grass also very good, particularly at the places, where it catches the light. The whole setup looks very plausible and real. Strange, though, the foliage looks somehow blurred to me. Great piece of work anyway.

11.01.2006 22:10

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

much thanks and cloud colors

Thanks for the review and the apprecitiation. It really means alot to me. I'm glad to hear you are having fun with the.br5 file I sent to you.

You are so right about the cloud colors. In the version of True Reality.br5 that I e-mailed to you, the volumetric clouds have a bit of pink diffusion and blue ambient, addind up to a slight purple. The color can be too much at times so I know you will need to remove it sometimes. I removed the saturation values in the volumetrics for this particular piece, but usually I keep them in as in Miami Vice (unfinished works). The saturation tuning is necessary when the sun is lowering as the sky lab gets color saturated at low angles and the volumetric clouds below need to match it.

Clouds in nature should usually have a little bit of bias toward some color often blue, as perfect grayscale doesn't usually happen in nature either. The color of clouds is affected by their chemical composition (which always varies) and by the nature of the light that strikes them, which usually has a tint of some kind either from the sun or from bouncing off of other surfaces. Technically, I usually add slight blue ambient to represent the effect of the atmospheric blueness in between the viewer and the cloud, as volumetics don't respond to the haze field so something needs to represent the effect of the air in between. The red or pink comes from a representation of atmospheric pollutants. The more color saturated the cloud, the more pollutants and chemical variation.

I was planning to send you some updated tweaks of the presets, so I will go ahead and do that. I will also say to you that the foliage transparency I sent to you (same as I used above) will need the volume color channel color lowered from white to dark grey almost black to work properly with the intense brightness of the sun used in True Reality. White is needed when light is low, or default sun. But for a homemade lighting set up like this, the leaves will seem too transparent if you don't add some weight to the volume color channel.

11.01.2006 22:23

tina gazcon
Member

Join Date: 08.07.2006
Comments: 254

Beautifuly done!

This is what I strive for in my work. Wow! I love your play of light, and the depth. It looks so real and life-like.

11.01.2006 23:50

richter
Member

Join Date: 04.15.2004
Comments: 1092

First of all - your sky is brilliant! I can feel the depth, I can feel the wind, the whole nature! The foliage and the grass everywhere in the scene looks real enough. What gives that this pic isn't a photo are some of the low-poly shapes of the stones and the nearest blades of grass on the left. These are minor qualms not worth even mentioning, though :) As for the cat & dog - it's almost a "Tom and Jerry" situation, funny and entertaining! Impressive lighting as usual! You've got a five from me, Rashad. I like this one a lot!

11.02.2006 15:03

LitoNico
Member

Join Date: 05.07.2004
Comments: 242

Very good clouds. I espeically like your volume clouds- I find those hard to get right. However, I think your secondary light looks very similar to ambient. On the dog it looks good and realistic, but on the trees it looks just like typical 2d ambient.
Leaves look great, your transluscene trick has worked well. The leaves on the tree on the far left are very realistic. However, you seem to have some white artifacts in there... don't know how would go about removing those.

11.03.2006 06:35

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

blurriness, artifacts

Thanks you all for the positive feedback. I think I know what Horo is talking about with blurriness. It comes from the hardness of the shadows. This scene was rendered with hard shadows, meaning that the shadows don't soften with distance as they should in real life. Shadows from the canopy make it all the way to the ground unaffected. Shadows are carried forever which is murder for a scene so heavily shaded as this one. The way the mat is set up, photos are used for the shadows. These shadows trace the veins of the leaves. Without soft shadows, it becomes difficult to discern how "old" or far away a shadow originates. I made sure that the shadows are dynamic and translate themselves onto the leaf beneath them, just like in nature. Couple this with the veins of the leaf below, and the problem with hard shadows becomes clear, as now the bottom leaf appears to have 2 distinct patterns on it, and they both appear at the same sharpness. The problem isn't the mat, the problem is that these shadows don't soften to give the sense of distance between the leaves, ultimately blurring the distinction between each leaf a bit when viewed from this angle. The answer is soft shadows. This image took only 2 hours to render with hard shadows even though there is a ton of transparent foliage, but with soft shadows, it would take about a week, as I would need to use the 72 light monster I used in Afternoon...

The artifacts LitoNico sees on the top left are not really artifacts but a white cloud hidden behind the tree, and of course leaf specularity. The photo used for those scenes is the same as the forefront flowers in Paradise Scene. It is a green leaf with random yellow spots. The shininess of these leaves only comes through on those few leaves that manage to somehow catch direct sunlight.

On the secondary source vs ambient expression thread, I will explain the subtle differnce I see that tells me the secondarys are working better than ambient, even on the tree trunks. The secondary light sources read model contours, but also bumpmapping. The dog looks great because it is a complex mesh with more opportunity for the secondary lights to hit surfaces at different angles. A tree trunk is basically a simple cylinder. It has very few contours for the secondary lights to pick up. But there's more. The difference between secondary lights and ambient is clear, in that the original bark photo has dark but yet quite visible green in between the bark bits. If this was ambient expression, you would see that very greeness in between the gray bits in the shadows, as ambient expression is 2d and flat. But since I used the photo for bumpmapping and used secondary lights sources, the green is depressed and renders black, as it is blocked by the "height" of the bark bits. There actually is a sense of height to the gray bark bits, something you only get when light strikes the object from outside. Ambient expression cannot give you that sense of depth. The secondary lights are what add alot of the depth and realism to the bark texture, as with ambient it would be much more flat and even looking.

11.03.2006 08:16

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

tree trunk madness

LitoNico you are right. I checked earlier versions of the scene and there was a difference in the early renders. The trunks used to have a visible gradient of light, there was a wrap around effect. The trunks used to be more 3d looking. When I was working on it at some point I had saved the scene and then it crashed, when I brought it back it was different. I remember needing to re-fit the leaf materials suddenly, and now I realize that something happened with the trunks rendr also. Trees from the tree lab have many issues due to their metaball structure. This anomalie is one of them, For some reason the only models in this scene above that don't respond to the light correctly are the tree trunks, which tells me it is not a problem with me so much as a tree lab issue. I had rendering problems with trees in Miami Vice also. Wierd, strange, unpredictable things happen with trees sometimes. The lighting is correct in the end, and if the tree lab would cooperate fully, I would have no problems with flatness. At least the bumpmaps are maintained.

11.04.2006 08:30

davidbrinnen
Admin

Join Date: 01.03.2004
Comments: 2224

There are great strenghts to this image and one or two weaknessess which let it down slightly. The light and the tranparency effect work together very well, mostly, where the sun shines through the leaves, the volumetric clouds and down to the rocks on the left, this is an excellet area. The right hand corner however, in comparison, looks less realistic and cardboard-cutoutish. The atomospheric haze is also an issue I believe in being a little too strong for this subject. I like the story element that's good too... that asside however, technically it is 4/5ths excellet. Just one or two quibbles which have been covered extensively in the comments above. If I were to change anything I'd try to make the leaves on the right less bold and perhaps more of an olive green.

11.04.2006 20:11

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