Post Your Renders - #4: A New Hope
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Ah! More tweaks to make! It never ends! :) Labour of love, etc. Seriously though, those are good tips; I definitely want to play around with them.
The ocean shader deserves a tip of the hat to PhilW and his Realistic Seas (specifically Atlantic Swell). Brilliant idea really...use the terrain primitive. Scaled down for height, "mountains" actually make wonderful ocean swells and the terrain shader easily adds whitecaps to the tips of the waves. I never would have thought of that on my own! :zip:
I've learned a lot with this scene and will certainly reuse some of that knowledge in the near future.
@Dart: I'll have to seek out those Medusa poses...I am a bit annoyed that she is a ghost ship at the moment. :)
You can also use the snow function on the ocean primitive and set it for altitude. I haven't tried it myself yet, but I've seen animations using the method. It's pretty cool.
Dart's suggestions about using a lens flare to help sell the brightness of the lantern is a good one that I've used quite a bit myself in conjunction with the light sphere. One big advantage to using the light sphere is that it actually scales it's size on it's own. The further away the light gets from the camera, the smaller it gets. The closer to the camera, the larger. The problem with the lens flare is that it doesn't scale according to distance. You can keyframe it, so that's good, but if you have a lot of lights you need to do it to, it can be a PITA.
Here's an animation I did as a test which illustrates what I'm babbling about. I used light spheres and lens flares. I didn't keyframe the lens flares.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN6E8ji3oHA&feature=share&list=UU6wB1FKPN4DWpuoVsQY2o8Q
Just a quick throwaway render I did today while testing some ideas.
It was intended to be another YetAnotherStarWarsScene (TM) but I got sidetracked and then got a bit playful in post.
Spitfire by Anders Lejczak
Nice! I've played around trying a dogfight animation. So far nothing post-worthy.
Hi :)
I've been quite busy lately but I finally got around to rendering again; so here's another A3 render as usual.
I did tons of postwork in Photoshop, I think this one used around 10 layers. ...and I still couldn't do anything about that pesky shadow on her right cheek :blank:
Ambient occlusion is tough to tame sometimes.
Oh, and I don't remember if I ever posted this one, but it's a Christmas avatar that I used on another site, it's a bit out of season now but I thought it was cute anyway, lol.
Another one...
http://www.muenster.de/~eikemann/Images/V5_002.jpg
You always bring such excellence to these pages.
I see it is not your intention to disappoint! Great renders!
This one isn't quite right.
It's an attempt at a cover for one of my work-in-progress books, Shadowhunter's Son.
This is much, much closer than anything I got in Daz but I'm going to let this one rest for awhile and think about the composition of the scene.
What effect are you going for? Is the issue the person in the background obscured by the bright light? I may (or somebody else), may be able to offer some suggestions. For instance, what is the source of the brightness and how did you achieve it?
I was playing around with my water shader. Fairly happy with the lighting except for the specular wet map. It doesn't show as well as I had hoped. Could be my light rig to fake GI, or my settings in the Highlight/Shininess shader channel needs to be adjusted.
now where's my towel :coolsmile:
Messing around, trying various ways to get my multi-figure, custom morphed and styled Angelina Hair, by Goldtassel and Swam to render even a teensy weensy bit faster. Anything would help. It's the alpha maps. If I remove alpha, zip... done. But with the three completely separate figures of hair, each with a lot of trans mapped in the alpha, for some reason it just slows rendering down immensely.
This is my main character and she's had this hair as long as I've had Carrara. The hair and the variant on Anna Benjamin's Kunoichi robe figure were my first projects in Carrara. Although they've seen many changes, they are really part of her now.
Well, I tried this and I've tried that. Many things that I've tried before - but they still don't work in making that hair any faster - even at low render settings.
However, I was able to make it take a little longer, while producing much better results. I still need to manipulate some more tweaks. For instance, the In-Scattering is turning up too orangy. I'd like it to be less saturated. The transparency needs to be slightly stronger in places - which I'll create a new map for. And let's not even talk about that robe looking like plastic. I'm working on some new looks, so all of the clothing shaders were a quick and temporary alteration - anyways....
I ended up using all sorts of Carrara shader functions and mixing, multiplying and masking looking at various results. I never really had decent highlighting from a backlight off the hair. I blamed many things. Yesterday, however, I just replaced the alpha channel with one helluva transparency channel, with absorption and scattering, a bit of translucency and reflection and completely reworked my highlight/shininess channels. I also used a slight object blur post-render filter in the effects tab, which I'd like to optimize a bit more - as with all of the shader channels - but I love the changes so far. Problem is even worse now, however. Takes forever to render, even at low render settings. The new enhancements, as I knew they would, really prolonged the process. So next time I get free time to play with this, I'll look towards fixing what I've started here, but also start fresh - and attempt anew at making a faster version.
This was done in beta 8.5 build 149 - the first time I tested it compared to the save issues I was having with 172. Hearing that folks are seeing build 132 in their downloads may get me to try one further regression - but I didn't have the saving issue with this build.
Koukotsu,
Christmas is never out of season on that character. What a doll!
What effect are you going for? Is the issue the person in the background obscured by the bright light? I may (or somebody else), may be able to offer some suggestions. For instance, what is the source of the brightness and how did you achieve it?
It's more an issue with how I composed the scene than the actual technique with the effects. I just didn't get it to look quite like it did in my head.
I think part of the problem is that the main character is too statically posed. Another part is that my camera angle doesn't bring enough excitement to the plate.
Like I said, I just need to fiddle around with the figures and the composition a bit.
Thanks for the offer, though.
heya there's some great stuff happening with this one/ The shader on the body is working really well - only falls down on the hand as far as I can see. The water looks great/ >maybe the white parts of the eyes could do with more sparkle and a little postwork where there forehead hair meets the skin? The hair itself looks very wet - great!
move over Bigh, who needs a towel ? :)
can't beleive you did that without post! you've achived that feeling of light falling through the window, dust etc. I guess you've tried turning off hair shadows to speed up the render time?
Not eliminating shadows altogether, but no Soft Shadows on the hair.
Yeah, I try really hard to keep from needing (or wanting) post work - since all I ever do is animation. I know you can post animations quite easily, but Carrara has all of these cool filters and effects! Dust was generated for free. It came with the light cones! ;)
I keep finding new fun effects to play with - just by studying parts of the panels in Carrara that I haven't fully explored yet. Amazing what they have in here!
heh yes my dust cost $3.95 - courtesy of some abr brushes !
dust is what a lot of renders lack I reckon - that and birds ;)
Here's the older shader. This is one OLD picture - and her hair hasn't changed much since.
I got Glynn Hair though... much better for me :)
You're absolutely right! Thanks to Emperor Ken, I can work towards correcting that mistake on my end! ;)
Thanks for pointing that out!
I do go through and add all sorts of subtle details and animations that are only there for completeness. Makes a big difference
Whoa, another cool old render I forgot about from when I first bought Carrara
Hey Dart, a couple thoughts on the hair, just from what you mentioned.
You mentioned in-scattering. Are you using transparency with the alpha? That may be redundant. Try just translucency and the alphas instead.
The other possibility that jumps out at me is the light cone. Do you have the Light Through Transparency option selected? If so, disable it. Rendering the light cone with shadows should look good without the huge hit in render times.
About Carrara's cool effects and filters, they are cool, but some of them are dog slow because they're not multi-threaded. Especially the post render filters. Sometimes it's faster, more reliable, and maybe better quality if you learn how to do them in post production- Especially if it's an animation. I think you've mentioned Sony Vegas, and I don't know what it can do, so maybe you're limited as to what you can do for post-work.
I love what you did for the eyes in your still shot and I think you did a really great job of getting the velvet look on the long gloves/sleeves. I gotta be honest though, the shape of the hair is nice, but the texture looks kind of clay-like. You may be over-thinking it trying to get it perfect.
Edited to add that post render effects aren't handled by render nodes either (at least in C7.2 Pro).
In addition to the lighting tweaks (that I am going to work on today), it was head wax's images that made me realize what the Medusa At Sea scene was really missing. I might try some really low-poly models of seagulls (since they will be silhouettes, there is no need for detail).
Finally getting around to making these tweaks to my scene (been playing a lot in LightWave lately). I'll report back on the results and upload a new picture if it turns out nicely enough -- I promised my friends I'd stop spamming them with this scene! ;)
This is finally it - I think I can finally stop working on this now - though I didn't get the low-poly bird sillohouetes (I always mispell this word).
At first, ep's light sphere suggestion didn't appear to work - didn't see anything. So I tried vario-cross and could see that effect but it just didn't look right. It didn't belong. I went back to the light sphere and really cranked up the size parameter...that did the trick.
This is now in first place for being my favourite render thus far.
That is awesome looking. great job.
In addition to the lighting tweaks (that I am going to work on today), it was head wax's images that made me realize what the Medusa At Sea scene was really missing. I might try some really low-poly models of seagulls (since they will be silhouettes, there is no need for detail).
seagulls?
well wow that looks not bad at all :) nothing like a few tweaks! The atmospeher really adds to the image - ocean shader looking good - good idea the terrain as ocean - works as animation as well - terrain shader I mean. I hav a few dots on my vdu - they actually lookd like small birds :) who needs seagulls wendy :) when you have a dirty comp screen.
great surf here today!