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Comments: 5
Popgriffon

28.03.2024, 23:40








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Balloon disguise
Balloon disguise

            

Balloon disguise
Description: This image has been a long time in the making. Not because it is particularly complex, because it isn't - clearly. The components are as follows. A bryce sky, IBL lighting, a terrain, a fademirror box and a balloon model from DAZ. The balloon model, in case you were wondering about the title, is there to hide the point where the corner of the fademirror box lies - this often is an issue when useing mirrors, hiddeing the edges. The upper edge, as the name suggests fades off, this material is in the exchange if you wish to experiment. If you look closely you can see the joins in the terrain, and while I don't normally use lensflair, here it is used, like the balloon to distract the viewer from a point of obvious repitition. So much for the mechanics.

Now the reason it has taken so long. In a word... Green. OK, that's not too helpful, allow me to explain. The concept was a simple scene of moutain peaks viewed from a high vantage point. That is, mordor fractal with a bit of errosion. Then apply a high frequency material that is supposed to represent forests giving way to rocks and snow at altitude. So I put together what I thought was a suitable material only to discover it looked all wrong. So I took a look at some pictures, photo's of acutal mountains and found, somewhat to my suprise, trees are blue not green. Well, we know they are green close too, but at a distance they tend towards turquoise. Funny. So I made my trees blue and they still did not look right. So then I spent a long time faffing with the colours until I came up with the combination I settled on here... a high frequency mixture of dark purple and dark green with bits of blue mixed in. Instead of Haze, Fog was used to soften the horizon, the camera just placed below the upper level of the Fog with a density of 1. Fog had the added advantage of createing pools of cloud in the valleys. Needless to say I'm still not satisfied with this image, but it is asking a lot to get one material to do everything, but that was my aim.

Once again I've used the beach probe.hdr for this image, since that provides a good level of bluishness where the sun is not shineing.
Added by: davidbrinnen
Keywords: davidbrinnen, bryce6, IBL, beach, probe, moutains, balloon, DAZ, model
Date: 04.06.2007 19:29
Hits: 3849
Downloads: 120
Rating: 0.00 (0 Vote(s))
File size: 172.6 KB
Previous image: edinburgh-skyline
Next image: Carbon Cycle



Author: Comment:
davidbrinnen
Admin

Join Date: 01.03.2004
Comments: 2224
-

Oh... and I forgot to say (as if I had not already said enough). The image was rendered at 1600x1200, then bicubic sampled down to 800x600 and simultainiously sharpened.
04.06.2007 19:32 Offline davidbrinnen mail at davidbrinnen.co.uk http://www.davidbrinnen.com
gat
Member

Join Date: 12.21.2006
Comments: 667
.

If you were to cut the image in half I would give the left part a 5 and the right part a 3.
I really like the choice of terrain range and texture and the use of fog. Have you tried using volumetric fog? It will give a lot of depth.
To make a forest there is another thing you can do. Assign a texture to a terrain that you like and not going to change, and then in the terrain edditor paint noise and look at the preview to make sure you are painting on green, and anything that is ground make smooth. I will upload a pic right now of what I got.
04.06.2007 19:48 Offline gat brshkv at yahoo.com
jrdesigns
Member

Join Date: 02.02.2007
Comments: 6
-

Very nice. I like the wide angle view of the image but the distortion of the balloon is a little bothersome to me. You would expect to see some of this distortion with a circular object towards the perimeter of the field of view, not so much near the center.
Overall a very pleasing image.
04.06.2007 23:09 Offline jrdesigns jrdesigns at cox.net
rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610
harder than it looks

The fog field is very well utilized and from this high viewing angle looks alot like a haze field. The mirror seems to draw attention to itself but only to one who would suspect that a mirror would be placed in the scene. One would only notice it if they had an eye trained to look for such things. I think you did a good job of it. What gives away the mirror perhaps is what appears to be a change in lighting direction as the light strikes the mountains on the far right. The mirror may also be too tall. The lack of haze in the scene is made evident by the reflection of the opposite side of the world.

The overall impression of the image is very nice. Just as a movie director would think, our attention span is properly focused on the flair effect. It has a blinding effect that feels fairly realistic. It makes me want sunglasses for a moment.

The sky is fine, but still the feeling of flatness. The clouds suffer from this viewing perspective because we are looking "out" at the clouds instead of "up" at them. A couple of additional cloud planes of different dispersal regularities would give a more natural integration between the clouds with the atmosphere.
the clouds seem to have a hard egde on them.

I can see that you wanted to produce a material that would be an all in one, dirt, vegetation, snow, the works. It is very difficult to get all of these things from a single material, though you are extraordinarily good at it. If anyone can, you can, though I could not and would simply use layered terrains of blend transparency to add vegetation and snow layers on top of my earth and grass texture terrain. You make this look easy but I can see alot of technical consideration was put into the scene.
04.06.2007 23:34 Offline rashadcarter1 rashadcarter1 at aol.com
Horo
Admin

Join Date: 05.26.2004
Comments: 4721
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The sweep of the mountains is very nice, indeed. The usual Bryce problem with the sky, it looks flat. With all the labour that went into this work, I can't come to terms with the near terrain. You've mastered the use of open mirrors but - as gat pointed out - light and shadows get wrong. As long as this is not supposed to be real but fantastic, there's no problem. And yes, you did a good job in hiding that a mirror was used. I'm not surprised you're not yet satisfied with this one. The mid and far ground of this countryside is beautiful, I have to repeat. The use of fog is very convincing.
04.07.2007 08:22 Offline Horo h.-r.h.wernli at bluewin.ch https://www.horo.ch/
davidbrinnen
Admin

Join Date: 01.03.2004
Comments: 2224
-

Gat: Volumetric fog I did try, nothing wrong with it... except for the affect on the render time - which was quite punishing. That is not to say I would not try again another time, but it is something that is in the balance with respect to how much I think it adds to the finished image compaired with the overhead. I like the idea of painting noise in for trees, I look forwards to seeing an example of that technique in use.

Jrdesigns: Yeah the distortion on the balloon is excessive, my fault for using such an extreme FOV - it does not show as much on the terrain or the clouds because their shapes are not as clearly determined. If I placed it right in the centre the distortion would be reduced - but compositionally I didn't like that idea. I suppose one solution would be to render on it's own and mask it into place.

Rashadcarter: The advantage fog gave me over haze, in this image was that by just positioning the camera on the upper edge of the fog the sky colours and contrast were hardly altered by the fog and I could choose as high a sky as possible - even though it still looks flat because of the camera angle, I needed to lift up the sky otherwise with such a wide FOV it seemed like it was 3 inches above the camera. I did try cloud planes, but I was not happy with the results, I confess I'm not a big fan of cloud planes and often introduce them early in the development of an image only to remove them at a later point. Don't think though that this is reserved for cloud planes, most images go through a number of itterations of addition and subtraction before I go as far as producing test renders. For example, this image went through over 20 generations some slightly different, some radically different, one I even tried in panoramic projection. I find the thumbnails are one of the best aids to see which render is going in the right direction, I figure if it looks good on the thumbnail, then the overall balance of the image must be good and I'm not wholly reliant on the details to do all the work.

Horo: Yeah, you and me both over the near terrain, I just really like the idea of doing everything with one terrain and one material - it is just such a tempting puzzle. Or you could see it as my inherent attraction to lazyness. The clouds... they often look better on the thumbnails, they are certainly something I would like to see addressed by some technique - oh, yes, Rashad's were very good, but I fear the render time of volumetric cloud. Still, by working towards a specific objective, I find that is the best way to push myself into learning how to do something, otherwise, lazyness gets the better of me and the temptation is to do things that I know will work, look good and not be to difficult.
04.07.2007 14:49 Offline davidbrinnen mail at davidbrinnen.co.uk http://www.davidbrinnen.com


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