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LitoNico

18.04.2024, 19:13

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Vacation Photo 23 IBL

Vacation Photo 23 IBL
Description:	An IBl version of the original. The original featured lighting provided by radials only for primary (sun) and secondary lights (sky influence). The original looked fine to me but I wanted to see what benefits might be gained from ibl. This ibl version took about three days to render, two of them on anti-aliasing alone. The hdri used is Blue sky with Sun 34 LOW SAT.hdri. The lighting angle is changed a bit from the original. The point for me is the benefit of an hdri sun in combination with the bryce default sun for soft shadows, and specualrity on the water, as radial lights don't produce soft shadows if the setting for fall-off is none, as it usually is when a radial is used a s the sun. Also ibl light alone does not stimulate specularity so water often looks odd in ibl renders. Foliage transparency is disabled for speed of render, That part really sucks for me. Some problems were not fixed, such as the odd positioning of Michael's foot, the lack of splash at Victoria's foot, and no footprints in the sand from them as they run toward the water. I could have added these things but the long render time just made me give up. I need a higher performace computer soon. Feedback welcome. Thanks for your time.
Added by:	rashadcarter1
Keywords:	rashadcarter1, psp7
Date:	09.05.2007 19:16
Hits:	6744
Downloads:	91
Rating:	0.00 (0 Vote(s))
File size:	466.6 KB

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gat
Member

Join Date: 12.21.2006
Comments: 667

I thought this was a carrara render because of the soft shadows. but then the water looked really good, so it looked like bryce, plus I thought I have seen this before. Nice render through! I think that the blue haze on the horizon makes it look like its inside a dome, but htats not a problem.
good job!

09.05.2007 21:26

spektyr
Member

Join Date: 07.02.2005
Comments: 1010

Really good scene. The only problem I see is that the sand is too flat. It needs an appropriate bump map and perhaps some footprints.

Giving the sun a yellowish color would give it a more realistic 'approaching sunset' feel.

09.05.2007 21:45

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

Thanks guys. Gat, indeed you have seen this before. The first version was posted in the characters folder about six to eight months ago. I was fairly happy with it aside from the issues mentioned. But I wanted to see how ibl would affect the scene. The original had hard shadows because I used a radial light for the sun, and when set to no fall-off, soft shadows don't work in bryce. In this case I used an hdri image with a bright spot drawn onto it in exactly the right place so that it could be positioned exactly as the bryce default sun. I used a quality 128 lights, and the default sun set to soft shadows... and here you have perfect soft shadows in bryce. It's nice to hear that you thought it might be a Carrara render because the particular hdri I used was created specifically to bring a Carrara style blue tinted Sky light into Bryce. I feel that adding a true sky dome to bryce would be a great benefit to future releases of Bryce.

In Carrara hdri is not usually necessary because the skylight does such a great job of providing multi-directional blue tinted light. The saturation level of that blueness can be a touch heavy in Carrara in my opinion, but I'm sure it can be controlled also, I just don't yet know how. Of course Bryce has a skydome effect also, but as I have mentioned many times it only offers light from directly above, it offers no light from the sides, a big problem for shapes other than terrains that gain at least some benefit from overhead light. Carrara has a fully 3d skylight that is exceptionally good. I love ibl, but I do not want to have to keep searching for the "correct" hdri for all different outdoor situations. In my heart I believe that just like the Carrara sky dome, there should be a "perfect" blue sky hdri that I could create for 90% of outdoor situations. I consider the sky light in Carrara nothing more than a blue gradient image turned hdri and called "skylight"

Spektyr, you are so right about giving the sun a tint of yellow. I had not realized just how low this sun really is, surely some yellow would be nice. The default sunlight itself is slightly yellow but against this blue background it looks pure white. Also, the only light stimulating the specularity on the water is that which comes from the bryce sun, so I did not want to dim the sun too much with color tints. Colored suns are more dim than a mostly white one. But a bit more yellow would have been great and would have set the mood alot more clearly.

09.06.2007 02:05

Horo
Admin

Join Date: 05.26.2004
Comments: 4721

Thanks Rashad for this example. Looking at both renders side-by-side is very instructive. The soft shadows are extraordinary because the look correct (perhaps a bit exagerated) just look at Michaels left and right leg (shadows). The pronounced hard/soft transition may be due to a rather large "sun" in the light probe you used. The leaves are a pity. Now there is a strange line near the horizon at left - we would expect the reflection of the sun continues up to the horizon. The dark part at right on the island looks good, like wet sand, but it seems to come from the same effect.

09.06.2007 07:12

davidbrinnen
Admin

Join Date: 01.03.2004
Comments: 2224

IBL gives a very good quality of light, even if in parts (like the issue with lack of leaf transparency) it is not compatable. The folaige looks good dispite, I understand how you feel, where IBL is used, transparency has to be used spareingly. The sea looks good, except where close to the camera. Known problems... well, you've 'fessed up to those, so I won't go on about them. The distant island looks great under IBL. The sky is maybe not "deep" enough somehow - the foreground rocks look fantastically realistic, but the material is perhaps a little too low frequency to be convincing at this scale - in isolation I'd have said the rocks were about fist sized. The figures and the folaige ect... give a different and to my eye conflicting sense of scale. Sea and waves/foam on the right, look very good. Overally the image looks to have high production values, just a few quibbles that could be corrected and of course the issue over render time that makes the whole process of revision rather painful for yourself. As far as I'm concerned, this is a definate improvement over the origional. I agree with Horo about the horizon, something strange happening there, like there is a ghost. As an asside, I believe there should be an option in Bryce to treat the "standard" sky as a generator of multiple light sources - of course the sun would need boosting a bit for this to work. But that needs doing anyway.

09.06.2007 07:47

FoxBoy
Member

Join Date: 04.08.2005
Comments: 197

Thats some good looking water! The beach sand detail is really cool with the darker water soaked sand fading into the lighter dry sand. Sky works well with the piece though it seems to lack something.

09.06.2007 07:59

richter
Member

Join Date: 04.15.2004
Comments: 1092

A lot has been said so I'm not to repeat anyone's comment. I'll just add that the reflection spread on the water surface is too much. In my opinion the sun-light should just barely touch the peaks of the waves and the reflection has to have more "specular meaning". The far island might look better if it was part of the near one's coastline. This way perhaps the scaling factor (and the plant issues) won't be that much of a noticable problem. I like the variety of trees on the far island, but there's something not quite right with that one's coastline. There's this thick dark line I cannot explain. A shadow problem.. who knows. As a whole, once you menage to break through all the challenges, this would worth more then a fiver, Rashad.

09.06.2007 08:33

caperh
Member

Join Date: 05.24.2004
Comments: 262

Well i think the first one have better light because is sun light, in this looks like light lamp, and i agree with spektyr the sand need more bump more footprints looks like desert island, but the waves are fantastic very calm beach, the plants and rocks are good and the far island maybe need a little haze.

09.06.2007 16:27

rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610

Time for more confessions. One of the big differences between the two versions is the haze...this version has almost none at all, and it is blue in tint to avoid the searing hot white one I had in the original. This combination of almost zero haze plus the ibl lighting soft shadows gives the impression of the objects being rather close and intimate, rather conflicting with the sense of openess this scene indicates.

The ghost along the horizon...I knew I would not get away with it for very long. As I consider my intentions honestly, I come to realize that this entire scene was probably contrived simply for the sake of playing around with using terrain meshes as turbulent water surfaces. There's nothing like a true mesh as opposed to a bumpmap that at this angle would look very flat. But as we know bryce worlds continue forever through the horizon, and it is impossible to create terrain water surfaces that extend to eternity. Even with tiling this would cause a ram memory nightmare. My solution was to use terrain tiles in the near ground and an infinite plane/slab in the background. Making the two approaches fit together was not easy, as one is a dynamic surface and the other is perfectly flat. In the original the water refraction setting was much higher than in this version. Here the refraction is lower so the foreground waves look better but the price paid is that now we can see below the water slab surface to the slab underside as it extends to eternity. Hence...the ghost!

This lower refraction also affected the water reflection drastically. I too felt it might have been alot, but it was automatic as transparent surfaces with refraction have automatic reflection in Bryce.

The dark line along the base of the far island is nothing more than the wet sand. It looks like a line because in general the water that wets it only rises to a certain level.

Thanks for the feedback.

09.06.2007 22:05

gat
Member

Join Date: 12.21.2006
Comments: 667

It does fill more intimate, thats why I said it looked as if it was inside a dome.

09.07.2007 00:54

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