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Comments: 2
t_bahles

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Summer Foliage
Summer Foliage

            

Summer Foliage
Description: A test of sorts. This scene took 2 days 5 hours to render on this new machine, it would have taken over 3 weeks on my single celeron processor system. I shutter to think on it. Anyhow the terrain is set with David's material. The foreground green plants are the leaf template 2 from the xchange. I have been very careful with color saturations so as not to cartoon the scene with too much color. That washed out feeling or sunfaded look of real life is what I am after in this render.

Light is IBL quality 64 for skylight and a light dome of 80 point lights grouped and placed very far away as sunlight for soft shadows. Ideally, the lighting is the last thing you would notice about the scene. The light should feel very natural and plausible. The foliage transparency is working it's magic spreading the light and allowing that signature SSS glow on the undersides of the leaves, it has no rival in making vegetation appear realistic. All of the plants have this transparency/SSS trick going on except for the pines. I figued I would cheat on them since their shape makes the SSS/ transparency hard to appreciate anyhow. Render Man you were wondering how transparency would function compared to the ambient channel. Hopefully this scene is an example of the benfits of transparency over ambient glow.

There are a few errors in the scene that I for now find charming, like the obvious procedural texture on the exposed bark of the foreground pine tree. Also there are places where leaf or petal meshes overlap. A few of the background trees have leaves that have a high specular shine, I should have disabled the specularity on such low resolution leaf meshes.

There is not a strong focus for the scene other than the landscape itself.

Feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks all for your time
Added by: rashadcarter1
Keywords: Rashadcarter1, bryce6.1, psp7
Date: 04.26.2008 04:11
Hits: 5048
Downloads: 123
Rating: 5.00 (3 Vote(s))
File size: 691.0 KB
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Next image: Cockscomb Ridge



Author: Comment:
Horo
Admin

Join Date: 05.26.2004
Comments: 4721
-

Absolutely beautiful and worth a fiver, no way. That leaf transparency of yours is working a treat. Good choice of yours omitting this on the pine needles, because they are too thick to show any transparency, as far as I remember. Pity Bryce has no collision detection but in fact, if there is any - as you say - it is hardly noticeable. Using a light dome for creating a large sun to cast soft shadows is a good idea. Does it render faster than engaging soft shadows? Now since you are using an HDRI to light the scene as well, why don't you create a light probe with a large sun in the first place? I haven't tried it yet, but I think that might make using additional lights obsolete. The weakest thing is the sky. Although beautiful and absolutely natural looking, it is a bit "boring" because those nice clouds of yours are missing. It is not too bad, though, because the sky doesn't use up much of the "real estate" of the picture. The ground you've used does excellently fit. To me, this looks very natural.
04.26.2008 17:51 Offline Horo h.-r.h.wernli at bluewin.ch https://www.horo.ch/
connorzelinsky
Member

Join Date: 03.30.2007
Comments: 394
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Wow, very well done. I tried to do a picture like that once but tress and leaves are very hard. very well done. 5/5 from me.
04.26.2008 17:59 Offline connorzelinsky connorz16 at gmail.com
krickerd
Member

Join Date: 09.07.2007
Comments: 46
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Fairly close to real life. If you rendered it DOF (I'm not going to suggest it as it would take weeks probably) it would look a bit more realistic. If you set all the radial lights to No Falloff, lowered their intensity to 1, changed their color to a pleasant shade of gray, that might speed things up.

The grass looks pretty decent. The plants are imports I assume.

If IBL is used, what image did you use?
04.26.2008 19:10 Offline krickerd krickerd at comcast.net http://www.infiniteimages.org
Horo
Admin

Join Date: 05.26.2004
Comments: 4721
HDRI with larger sun

I did some experiments. Large sun HDRI with Quality = 4096 (i.e. 4096 lights) render time = 100%. Half light dome with 140 lights as sun, render time = 400%. Sun only, soft shadows, 64 rays/pix render time = 500%.

If you start with an equirectangular BMP, make sun in zenith 1/10 the vertical size. Use FakeHDRI in HDRShop to boost sun (experiment what's best for you, depends on amount of ambient required), then apply Gaussian blur with 20% of the size of the sun, convert to an angular map and there you are There is banding on smooth surfaces with the dome and the HDRI, noise with soft shadows.
04.26.2008 20:03 Offline Horo h.-r.h.wernli at bluewin.ch https://www.horo.ch/
rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610
Thanks

Thanks to each of you for your positive feedback. It really means alot to me.

Krickerd, the image was rendered IBl. If you would like I could send it to you via e-mail, I am curious what you would think of it. My purpose with this hdri is to mimic very simply the behavior of light in the sky on a clear day. The search for the "perfect" hdri led me to build my own as I do not like playing hit or miss with light. The skylight plays out very differently during different times of the day. Time of day is not always the first consideration when setting up lights but it should be because all of the light effects are controlled by this issue of how high up the sun is in the sky at a given moment. The image I used has been "drawn" so that it has a fade to black feature near the bottom 3rd of the image so that when set to a low angle the skylight/IBL will get dimmer just as in nature, a sort of fall-off based on hdri position. The image also features a greyscale upper 3rd with a blue tinted bottom third that intensifies toward the darkness at the bottom so that the blue tint shows up more at low angles (early morning or evening) than at high angles as above. The sunlight is made exactly as you proposed, 80 radials set to strength 1 with a grey color and no fall-off. I have 2 versions of the sun. One is a single radial strength 80, and the other is a light dome made of 80 lights strength 1. In the end both "sunlights" are the exact same intensity so I can use the hard shadow single radial while constructing the scene until I am ready for the final render at which point I insert my 80 light monster for soft shadows. I could probably rig a DOF by layering different blurred versions of the scene behind the crisp one in the foreground. It is a crude shortcut but would probably work.

Horo you are right in that I could have done all of this with an HDRi fit with a bright spot. This is essentially the same hdri I used for the Perfectville scenarios but with the bright spot removed. I agree that IBl lights render much faster than radials. Based on the numbers above I could have finished the scene in 1/4 the time, a big difference. I have found as we have discussed before certain issues with IBL sunlights. A bright spot that is too wide will give shadows that are too soft. To create a bright spot that is small enough to represent the distance of the sun while bright enough to light the scene is tricky indeed. I have been playing around with that but I must go further. Thanks for the detailed directions as I think I can see a way to do what you have proposed. As you know I love the bright spot idea and am likely to return to it.

The sky...Sometimes I can be such a control freak about every detail, then other times I can be so very lazy. The plain sky was most likely laziness. The exact blueness of the sky is plausible so I just went with it. The sky was begging me to do something with it but I figured I would not use all of my tricks at once. I have a few scenarios in the works that are volumetric to a great deal.

Again thanks to you all for your continued feedback. I feel I am improving based on your feedback and suggestions. Please keep them coming.
04.26.2008 21:15 Offline rashadcarter1 rashadcarter1 at aol.com
rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610
4096

Oh boy Horo. As I feared the IBL and SSS/transparency do not interact well. For some reason it seems that radials handle transparency better than IBL light samples. Perhaps you can test this aspect of the two lighting options in relation to transparency. I remember finding transparency and ibl very tedious at any setting above 64. A single transparency plant is one thing but when they are stacked many deep as above the combined transparencies really get crazy. It is for this reason that I needed to modify the sunlight. At 64 lights the sunlight from an hdri bright spot would not be soft yet, and if so rather banded. At 128 they begin to soften but the render time is already beginning to skyrocket. The smaller the sunspot the higher the IBl quality needs to be for the samples that become sunlight to align properly. This is why an hdri with a bright spot when set to quality 16 does not look nearly as it should, shadows fall slightly off center, all of that. At around 64 lights it all comes together and it improves greatly from then on in sunlight and shadow accuracy.

Curious about whether anyone likely Horo knows the benefits and drawbacks of the optimization options and how they affect render time?

By rigging the radial dome sunlight I have guaranteed that no less than 80 lights comprise my soft shadow sun. Also by lowering the IBL quality to 64 I get just enough accuracy from the hdri to make it worthwhile.

I am curious what you would think of this scene if rendered at minimums, in IBL quality and a single radial for sunlight. I think the 17 light version will be interesting to compare. It should render in a few minutes..
04.26.2008 23:02 Offline rashadcarter1 rashadcarter1 at aol.com
Render Man
Member

Join Date: 11.10.2007
Comments: 358
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Great work Rashad I just love this arrangement and yes I do see what you mean about the transparency. When I first saw the thumbnail picture I thought it looked great and then when I looked at the full view it was breathtaking. This is about a near to real as it gets unless one of you comes up with something else.
04.27.2008 02:29 Offline Render Man alreich_4 at msn.com
FoxBoy
Member

Join Date: 04.08.2005
Comments: 197
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Being really bad with trees and such. I' blown away on how well this looks. 2 days sadly seems right for something like this...
04.27.2008 04:53 Offline FoxBoy Schlechter_Fuchs at yahoo.com
davidbrinnen
Admin

Join Date: 01.03.2004
Comments: 2224
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For a test of sorts, it's an impressive one! Anyhow, 5/5 no doubt. But to be critical. Well, strengths and weaknessess, in a critical sense. The background area is excellent, hard to find any faults there, I was immediately pleased with the colour of the grass (but when I read your description, I recognised why that should be the case) - it could be just me and our generally mangy weather in the UK but green green grass never really looks realy real to me. The trees in the background are quite "green" but believeably so given the lighting. Shadow regions over the ground look very plausable. The foreground, while good, is far less satisfactory in terms of realism. I would not employ DOF as you suggested blurring the background, that would be a shame, and since a large number of light sources and transparency effects are in play, I would avoid Bryce DOF altogether. My suggestion would be to render a distance map and use filtering to place the forground objects out of focus. Explain this by introducing a focus for the image, a statue - sun dial - something of that ilk in the mid ground. Due to the focusing nature of the human eye, the foreground objects (blurred) should have to be quite close to the viewer and then mostly all mid and distance can be all in sharp focus. I will not criticise the blue sky, the colour is good and as we know, unless handled very carefully, bryce skies tend to be a bit predicatble.
04.27.2008 10:54 Offline davidbrinnen mail at davidbrinnen.co.uk http://www.davidbrinnen.com


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