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Sniffing
Sniffing
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Horo

29.03.2024, 07:43








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Whispers in the Woods
Whispers in the Woods

            

Whispers in the Woods
Description: Another installment of technical testiing.

Renderman has been submitting Vue renders and the Vue renders have got me thinking. Vue has GI, and it has foliage transparency, two things that make outdoor Vue renders look highly realistic. These same effects are possible in Bryce via IBL and my foliage transparency technique, so I am exploring those technicals in this render.

All foliage except the grass and the dark pines are fit with the special leaf transparency. The effect of the transparency is integral, in that it alters the lighting solution for the scene greatly. It creates a feeling of softness to the leaves and of being alive. Each ray is allowed to penetrate 6 surfaces or leaves as ray depth is set to 6. Lighting is a single radial as hard shadow sunlight, and naturally my skylight.hdri for sky influence quality 64. One more square spotlight turned upside down to shine light up into the scene from below, this light is placed below the ground plane and does not cast shadows. In some places this light makes it look almost like there is ambient channel glow on some of the leaves, but there is not any just so you all know.

Even on my 8 core system and this low ibl quality with hard shadow sunlight, this scene took 1 day + 10 hours to render. Not too bad for the technical tricks at work, but long enough that an animation could never be generated at these settings and resolution. Much of the ground level vegetation is made from trees with trunks placed below the ground. Grass is terrain with noise 4096x4096. I feel good about this render as it feels about as realistic if not more than Summer Foliage. Always trying to top myself.

I purchased a product "Trees for the forest" from Daz and have used many of the trees in this scene. Little did I know that Trees from the forest is nothing but some trees made in Free Arbaro and sold at Daz. Arbaro is free and can be downloaded from Horo's website. It is a must have, and goes very well with Bryce trees. If you do not have Arbaro get it from Horo today, it will be essential to outdoors.

This scene holds many polygons due to the vegetation and is not saved in it's final form. I have previous saves that were not corrupted do all is not lost, only about 20% was added after I realized it would no longer let me save furhter changes. I swear any scene that is even a little bit complex turns into a saving nightmare and all is lost. They must make this program more stable. I could not edit this scene further even if I wanted to. Sad.

Feedback is very much appreciated. Thanks all for your time. Sorry for the long description notes.
Added by: rashadcarter1
Keywords: rashadcarter1, bryce6.1, arbaro, psp7
Date: 09.02.2008 18:09
Hits: 4278
Downloads: 89
Rating: 5.00 (3 Vote(s))
File size: 744.7 KB
Previous image: EVA Bryce



Author: Comment:
connorzelinsky
Member

Join Date: 03.30.2007
Comments: 394
-

So I first saw this picture at school in computer class but was too lazy to log in and leave a comment. I am happy I am first tho. :-) This is beautiful. The placement of you trees/ plants is amazing. Must have taken a long time to place everything. I really like the tall tree in the middle that goes off the top of the picture. The only thing I am going to complain about is that the mountains seem a little bit steep. Overall 5/5, more if I could. I've tried to make a scene like this and did not come close to this. I like it if you haven't figured it out by now.
09.03.2008 00:02 Offline connorzelinsky connorz16 at gmail.com
Render Man
Member

Join Date: 11.10.2007
Comments: 358
-

Very well done Rashad the plants are very real. This setup does not even look like Bryce. You have proved what can be done in this program. The 10 hour render really paid off. I am very impressed the trees and plants.

Is the vegetation disbursed throughout grass or some kind of plant?

How did you figure out that Trees in the Forest were made in Arbaro?

I like everything in this scene. It looks to me like you have a winning picture for the Bryce Gallery. Just don't buy any more trees with you voucher. Ha
09.03.2008 00:21 Offline Render Man alreich_4 at msn.com
archclan
Member

Join Date: 08.01.2008
Comments: 242
~

Wow so Pretty It looks so peacefull eh , SO the only thing i hate is Rendering So long haha so Vegetation really increases your render time , and thank you for the link i might try that arbaro sometime.. 5/5 :D
09.03.2008 01:12 Offline archclan arch_devol at yahoo.com http://www.archclan.deviantart.com
rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610
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Thanks very much gents. Positive feedback is always nice to hear. I did work hard on this one and it is nice that you can recognize that.

Connor,
You are absolutely right to observe the hills. They were the last detail I added. I played around with this scene for days adding elements up until I hit the memory wall. Once the wall is hit it is a crap shoot from then on as to how many more items it will allow me to add before refusing to update the screen and completely crashing the program. As I said the final save that was stable occured a full 25% ago and I did not wat to start over once again and redo that same 25% of work. So I say this to make the excuse that I agree that those hills need to be more specific and better modeled, and if I thought the computer memory was up to it I would have done it.

Renderman,
The render was a full day plus 10 hours, roughly 35 hours total. I did not use the radial group as soft shadow sun, had I done that the render would have jumped to at least 3 days. Hard shadows this time but the grass helps break up the shadows so the hardness is not obvious. This computer system I am running now is a full 10x faster than my single celeron processor was. This same scene would have taken the better part of a month on my single celeron. I realize that computing power is the only reason I can render these scenarios. I would not have the patience otherwise.

The Arbaro trees, it is obvious the moment you look at the trees offered in Trees for the Forest, and then you look at the istalled trees of Arbaro. They are exactly the same, I mean really exactly, as in fingerprint match kind of distinct sameness. It is cool. I have spent the day modeling variations of the trees included with Trees for the forest. From what I can tell the Daz package offers the trees already smoothed and in simplified grouping. The raw meshes directly from Arbaro require a good bit of tweaking in Bryce before they are ideal and able to match the readiness of the ones sold at DAZ.

Archclan,
Yes IBL and transparency are not a great combo. Inface tranaprency in most programs brings renders to a crawl when complex lighting is at work, so it does not surprise me thoug it makes me sad and terrified of repeating the process too often.
09.03.2008 03:21 Offline rashadcarter1 rashadcarter1 at aol.com
Horo
Admin

Join Date: 05.26.2004
Comments: 4721
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Typical Rashad plants: impeccable! Absolutely beautiful, rich. Soft shadows would not improve this much because the "worst" part of hard shadows is broken by the grass. Even though the mountains are a show stopper, I give you a 5/5. Nothing against the form of the hills, but they should not be green up to the top, they are too steep for that.

Correction: I do not host Arbaro on my website, only a short description and the link to the official site.
09.03.2008 15:23 Offline Horo h.-r.h.wernli at bluewin.ch https://www.horo.ch/
rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610
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Thanks Horo for the high marks!! Wow.

As yes, I oversimplified the Arbaro download, indeed you provide the link, not the program itself. Either way it is a must have for anyone who wants to spice up their vegetation libraries at a reasonable price with fairly good results.
09.03.2008 16:54 Offline rashadcarter1 rashadcarter1 at aol.com
richter
Member

Join Date: 04.15.2004
Comments: 1092
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I'll join the club and say that I've seen nothing better as a nature scenery in Bryce up-to-date as far as full pure 3D trees and plants are concerned. You've created an excellent image, Rashad. A harmony of green nuances. Your leaf transparency works very good, actually maybe too good on some places. What I mean is that he leaves at some places like the central white-trunk tree and the coniferous tree in foreground on the right look more like made of wax then a true plant surface. The transparency trick is leaning towards an overdid SSS work, perhaps I'm wrong, but that's what I think :)

On the compositional side, again, no qualms except that the impression of you trying to show most of the purchased trees in the "arsenal", which I'm not entirely sure if it's possible in reality, I mean so many tree/plant species gathered in one place. Maybe more uniform forest will appear more ideologically consistent. But nevermind that, I'm still impressed of the way this image looks. Well deserved 5/5, Rashad, you are raising the bar for the nature-base imagery here ;)
09.07.2008 15:59 Offline richter richter at cold-may.com
rashadcarter1
Admin

Join Date: 06.04.2006
Comments: 2610
-

Thank you Richter, very positive remarks for me, much appreciated!. And yes, I fully agree on the leaf trans SSS. I tested a couple of things here. The transparency "index" is set to make the leaves very transparent indeed, they probably would benefit from being a tab bit more solid and opaque. it would deepen shadows just a bit more adding more depth. The other issue is a special upside down spotlight beneath the ground plane casting light up into the scene but no shadows. This single light is large enough to cover the entire ground plane so all ltrees are receiving the same level of light intensity up from the ground. In some places this lack of shadows actually looks flattening like the ambient channel, something I want to avoid. So in the future when I do these types of scenes I need to remember that the transparency alone does a great job of faking GI, good enough that the "upward light" may be disgarded or at least much lower in intensity.
09.07.2008 20:03 Offline rashadcarter1 rashadcarter1 at aol.com


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