Show Us Your Bryce Renders! Part 4
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Having had some fun drawing a terrain. The golden statue is from the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository and the clouds are from David's Cloudscapes 2.
Dave - If wishes were horses, this is a bathroom I would love to have, beautiful work.
David and Horo nice experiments with the dragons.
Horo I love the landscape,especially the clouds, awesome
It is a challenge yes. Do you have any links to the things you are talking about because this forums search engine is not very helpful?
So far as I know Renderman is a professional-grade plug in for Maya, not cheap, not for Daz Studio, and not a fair yardstick for measuring against Bryce at all. Daz has several "cartoon" or art style shaders in their store, in addition to the free carton renderer that comes with Studio, that make a fairer comparison. I've played with pwToon, Manga Style Shader and Visual Style Shader and think they are all quite good for what they do at a reasonable price. All of those products have accurate representative promo images in the DAZ store, easy to find.
I think your results are quite promising, David, and resemble what the Manga Style shader produces - see attached. Perhaps terrains in Bryce could be rendered in a cartoon style and composited in as backgrounds for character renders done elsewhere. If you could figure out how to make Bryce add in cartoon outlines around the edges of objects, that would be an nice feature, to eliminate the need to do that in postwork with edge detection. One effect I have admired and not seen achieved in Studio or Poser is the "stylize" effect that alien skin promotes at http://www.alienskin.com/snapart/examples-illustration.aspx for their photoshop plugin. The clouds in your render are not too far off. Solid color bands with outlines would be awesome, and of course many other effects are possible. This is the sort of thing you could make a product out of, if you are so inclined. I would buy it.
@jonathan - thank you for your example, which looks quite nice. We've created toon and CEL shaded renders in Bryce without any post work for some time. It's a bit tricky, therefore David and I would like to find easier ways to accomplish it.
Meet your Toon-Double was made 5 years ago in Bryce 6.1, Hatched Head 2 years ago in Bryce 7.1.
@ jonathan The 3delight renderer that is part of Daz Studio is a Renderman renderer. http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php perhaps I should have made it a little clearer. And since Daz Studio and Bryce are owned by Daz and the products for them are sold here, I feel that my comment was a very fair one.
Really nice!
Thank you! Without David's clouds, it would be rubbish.
@Horo: That is a nice image. And if without the clouds it'd be rubbish, I wouldn't mind producing that kind of rubbish. ;) (no smileys yet)
Thank you. I'm surprised it has some appeal.
I look forward to seeing the results of your collaboration! :) I found links to these impressive illustrations by RobertJ done on Bryce years ago, you might want to check them out if you haven't already.
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=694252
I stand corrected - I did not know 3delight and Renderman are related. :) Sorry if my comment seemed a little prickly -- I thought you were referring to the Maya plugin, which seems to be a top-grade professional tool, judging from the promotional materials. It looks like the Maya plugin may use something like shader bricks (judging by the promotional materials only), perhaps similarly to Studio and Poser? It's always interesting to see what can be coaxed out of the DTE with the right settings, in Bryce's brickless world.
Thank you! Without David's clouds, it would be rubbish.
Well, without the landscape the clouds would not be nearly as interesting! The setting provides a nice sense of scale and mood.
I couldn't resist sharing one last cell-shaded image from RobertJ, he is still producing them. Sorry if I am just rediscovering what the old hands already know:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2323702&user_id=123097&member;&np;
The whole composition, materials, lighting and mood of it is most excellent.
Wilmap, I forgot to mention if you decide you want to try to reduce the distortion on the building but don't want to use Edit Current Camera and change the camera's FOV (field of view) to a smaller value, another option would be to move the building farther from the camera and closer to the center of the scene. If it's perfectly centered the distortion will be greatly reduced at that point, but that might look odd, not sure.
Wilmap, I forgot to mention if you decide you want to try to reduce the distortion on the building but don't want to use Edit Current Camera and change the camera's FOV (field of view) to a smaller value, another option would be to move the building farther from the camera and closer to the center of the scene. If it's perfectly centered the distortion will be greatly reduced at that point, but that might look odd, not sure.
Or center the building and then use Horizontal Pan (Labelled as 'Pan H' in the 'Edit Current Camera' dialogue window) on the camera to move it back to the side. Then the composition will still be roughly the same but the building will not be distorted.
@jonathan - thank you for the link into the old forums. Strange, I haven't noticed that particular thread but have known some of the posters. I checked out the links into Radiosity, too.
Or center the building and then use Horizontal Pan (Labelled as 'Pan H' in the 'Edit Current Camera' dialogue window) on the camera to move it back to the side. Then the composition will still be roughly the same but the building will not be distorted.
It had taken me a very long time until I discovered Pan. This is a very helpful camera control, though Bryce can reset it when you come back from a lab. I don't remember which one but if the picture looks different, check Pan.
These links are to some impressive cell type images and are certainly convincing examples that deserves the "Pro" in Bryce Pro thanks for pointing us to them.
All this brilliant and valuable stuff buried in an old forum is becoming, to me, VERY annoying, what a shame!!
These links are to some impressive cell type images and are certainly convincing examples that deserves the "Pro" in Bryce Pro thanks for pointing us to them.
All this brilliant and valuable stuff buried in an old forum is becoming, to me, VERY annoying, what a shame!!
Thank you both for your input. And yes, it is very annoying, since I can't even open the link and just get a "server error". But anyway, as Jonathan, suggested the outline would be a nice feature so I've been working on that. This required the scene to be rendered twice over, the output of one scene being used in the next. But no postwork or other software, just Bryce. The process itself is not very time consuming, setting up the second scene to provide outlines took some pondering, but once this is done, it's not difficult - the most challenging is the issue of scale - hatching and outlines have to be appropriate for the final image size. But I guess that's true of any Cel shading.
Here's what I've got so far. Progress is slow, real world work - both a blessing and a curse. Provides money, eats time.
That looks very promising.
I think this process shows potential. It is not entirely as straight forwards as I would like, I don't know what is involved in terms of setup as far as other shaders are concerned, but this requires a bit of consideration before going ahead.
Here is another example, probably best viewed full size.
Here's something to keep you all amused. This is easy to do and renders very fast, so there's no reason (other than lack of interest) why you should not give this a try yourselfs.
Bryce Made Easy - Velvet bump recipe - by David Brinnen
The new one looks very good, CEL is prominent.
I haven't looked at your velvet video but I've been experimenting a lot. It appears that the effect also depends on the mesh. A sphere, for example, doesn't work. Here's another test that shows that the positioning of the object has quite an impact. The same object and a mirror at the back.
Good examples. I've mentioned in the video the importance of position. And yes this is quite a new thing. Indeed it may be quite entirely new. The mapping mode chosen was suited to mesh. If you want it to work on a sphere then a different mapping mode is required - but I didn't want to get too bogged down in the reasoning because while this effect is easy to setup, to understand how it works you really have to know how bump mapping works in Bryce and there's probably only a few of us that do and even then it's a pretty tough one this. So for now, easy to do, very hard to explain.
Yup, just watched the video.
David B.
Excellent surface you've produced with this bump trick. It doesn't surprise me that you would come up with such a cool technique. For my mind the effect looks more like satin than velvet. Perhaps for a more velvety look one would need some noise visible on the surface. Still, it is a fantastic effect. I wonder if this bump actually produces anisotropy but in an indirect way? Flipping the normals could in theory produce and effect similar to anisotropy. There is an artist name Simone who submits Bryce renders over in the Renderosity galleries and she produces velvety surfaces with Bryce 6 which I find very cool. I do not know what process she uses but it might not be so different than what you are looking into now.
The camera angle dependence of the effect is surprising to me. It limits to some degree the feasibility of the technique but I suspect there is a solution to this issue to be had. I have complete faith in you.
I agree, velvet is a bit fury, satin is not; though part of the effect is the same.
I suspect the camera looking angle has an impact because of the texture used. Here are 4 renders showing how the camera looks. Camera, dragon and sun were all rotated exactly 90° between the renders. Best effect is when camera looks from east to west (right to left), as David mentioned in the video.
Thanks Rashad,
To clarify, it is not camera angle dependence (which would be in line with what you would expect from an anisotropic effect) but geometry alignment. A change in mapping mode as well as the polarity of the bump effect itself, changes the situation radically, as well as modifying the procedural component. But in a desire to keep things brief and compact, I chose the simplest setup I know of so far.
It would be surprising to me if the artist you mentioned used this process, not because I don't believe it would be unreasonable for someone else to make the same discovery, but that having done so that they would restrict themselves to this one effect seems more than a little unlikely. As time permits, I will - hopefully - demonstrate other more exotic ways to use this function to create previously impossible effects in Bryce. For example, negative ambient light. Negative diffuse material response. Extreme metalicity effect - which is most odd. Or as Horo showed me earlier today, how about lighting up a material through extreme reflection? This too is possible. It's possible anyway, but not generally noticed because the reflection is more obvious. But when reflection is over mirror perfect then fringe effects grow vast and 100% reflection looks like 1000000% reflection. So you then notice the fringe effects moreso.
Edit. Horo, crossposter, good demonstration.
Well, it may well be that the mesh itself does also contribute. The renders with the colourful "Jameseses" above was made with the camera looking north as in the dragon example at top left, the second best position. Below, I redid the render putting the camera looking right to left and adjusting the sun and the chaps accordingly. In this case, this is not a the best camera looking angle.