Post Your Renders - #4: A New Hope
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Thanks you guys.
I'm glad you like them. They're default render setting using the default camera for my new preset scenes.
Here's the new Mountain Top Fog. It may not look like it, but the central region there is flat. Again, for ease of use - adding stuff from your asset collection.
Thanks Dart! :red:
Your really getting good with you landscape stuff, your last render is fantastic. Looking forward to more.
They start from a base preset (the first file on the left) and more stuff gets added with many presets to choose from. This set is for Woodlands, and includes Woodlands Object presets too, that are already loaded with plants, trees and deadwood - as well as a good terrain base. Then you just put those where you want them in the scene. Rotating them turns them each into and entirely new formation with an entirely new, but matching plant scheme.
It's just about finished - and I just added a new group within each preset. Drag anything you add to the scene into this group and it automatically gets highlighted in the render - to help make it stand out. I kept it subtle, but the light rig within is easily edited, and it's really easy to see what I've done and the effect it makes. See below:
The left image is me, just loaded into a scene with a Realistic Sky. The illumination is very realistic for what's going on with the environment. We often want to enhance realism with our own version - so you drag me into the Focus Group within the preset scene, and you get the render on the right.
This demonstration was done in an empty Sunset base preset.
I haven't posted to it recently, but here is the WIP thread on the project. I'll be updating it really soon.
So Dart, the terrains that you've made, are they still editable in the terrain editor, or did you convert them to vertex models?
I left them editable.
The big thing with this kit in particular, is that I wanted to focus on the actual features of Carrara and introduce a good method towards their use.
So there's two main scene folders, one uses the Realistic Sky as the scene atmosphere, which use a Sun light for the main illumination. The other uses background images that were rendered from scenes using the kit to create 360 degree, panoramic surrounding detail. So you have two different basic ways to begin scene creation. Many presets provide scenes that have already been started for you, which could be used as they are (those are the scenes I've been showing renders of) or you may add to them, which I will be demonstrating later this week.
Terrains use the power of the terrain editor within Carrara. The base terrain used for the central region uses a height map and a filter to get the ground smooth enough for walk cycles, large flat buildings or other prop sets, etc., I like having a relatively flat 'Ground Zero' area as a base to design scenes around. The terrain comes with a default, procedural shader. Each preset contains two more optional mapped versions of the shader. They work together, if you want to mix and match. These three terrain shaders (I think) are a great way to demonstrate, to those who want to experiment more with it, how flexible and easy it can be within Carrara to work with these excellent features to get truly excellent results. And yet it provides a great set for those who just want a preset.
All of the plants are made using the Plant editor, even the deadwood and lifeless shrubs. Having leafless upright shrubs helps to complete the look of an environment, just as much as the fallen twigs, branches and trunks. Again, all of these items use the features of Carrara within their shaders, too. Once again, I'm looking to give good examples of using the power of Carrara's features to create your own, new assets. All of the shaders I've made for this use a less saturated approach, which gives a very natural feel. During further experimentation, I've found that many more plants and trees can be created, without even making new shaders - as there is a good variety here, and every shader in the kit is also available as a shader within the browser - so you can just drag and drop.
The lake and stream use the Ocean primitive and is set for animation. It also includes both a transparent, high quality water shader, as well as a faster, opaque, but reflective version for times when the water is not a focal point - or simply doesn't require transparency, refraction, etc.,
Ummm... carrying on so much...
Stop it Dartan...
:blank:
"I'm not bad, I'm just shaped that way!"
This one was just for fun, it definitely could have used more work. Hard to believe the movie came out 25 years ago.
If your interested you can see the full sized version in my gallery at rendo.
That secret decoder ring you lost when you were a kid. :)
Hey, that's mine! Where'd you find it?!!!! :ahhh:
Very hot!
Here's a re-work of the medieval village I've been working on in fits and starts. I've said to hell with generating a terrain and exporting the map as I don't have enough control of the generators, so I went into PS and painted one completely from scratch. I want a mill pond and three different "levels" for the town. The top level for a church and cemetery, the mid-level for the village proper and it's square, and the lower level for a festival grounds or agriculture space. This a very early stage right now, done to test how much room I've left myself for the village and to check it against the scale of the terrain.
For the main village, I want a mill pond and dam with a race for the mill water wheel. I haven't got that far yet. I've added a place holder dam to better visualize what I want to do with the race and water wheel.
For the main village, I want a mill pond and dam with a race for the mill water wheel. I haven't got that far yet. I've added a place holder dam to better visualize what I want to do with the race and water wheel.Very cool. Layers like that can certainly be a challenge. Terrain generators are one thing, and filters are another. One thing you may like to experiment with, to further your experiments, is to use the map you're using, and try a filter or two or three or more on it. I would add a slight terrace filter and play around between the sharpness, number of terracing, advanced features, etc., also (or even instead) using a touch of mountain, or zero edge, being careful with erosion as it can bring your computer to a halt with one wrong slide of a slider! But it adds some really great details.
Anyways, I've found that you can layer stuff like that and then export to height map again... and load that in as a single map again - or run the map back into Gimp or PS and edit now knowing what the filters have done to your original image. These comparisons are helpful for mapping in details - and those terrain shaders will take full advantage of those details as well.
Just food for thought... not advice on what your doing - as it looks to me you're on the right track. I added that stuff in response to your terrain editor frustration. ;-)
It's gonna be cool. Your scenes always are
Indeed. I can hardly wait to see the end result.
BLASPHEMY! :coolcheese:
This is a reference to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
OMG! Has it been? Yes it has been that long ago... I'm vastly overdue to see that masterpiece again! Ed Asner... where are you? I know I have... nope. My copy of that was on VHS, of which I have none left. I'll get it onto my Amazon Cloud though :)
OMG! Has it been? Yes it has been that long ago... I'm vastly overdue to see that masterpiece again! Ed Asner... where are you? I know I have... nope. My copy of that was on VHS, of which I have none left. I'll get it onto my Amazon Cloud though :)
You're thinking of Bob Hoskins! It has been a long time! To be fair, it's usually Jessica Rabbit that people think about! :lol:
Yeah... long time... yeah... long time.
I've been so damned busy at work for the past 3 months. Glad I was able to buy and learn Carrara on my vacation.
Here's some of the stuff I've been cranking out lately when I get a few moments...
OMG! Has it been? Yes it has been that long ago... I'm vastly overdue to see that masterpiece again! Ed Asner... where are you? I know I have... nope. My copy of that was on VHS, of which I have none left. I'll get it onto my Amazon Cloud though :)
You're thinking of Bob Hoskins! It has been a long time! To be fair, it's usually Jessica Rabbit that people think about! :lol:
Thanks for the comments! Guess I should have mentioned the reference to "Who Framed Rodger Rabbit" when I posted the image. The Dress and hair are Red Rabbit from Pretty 3D at rendo. Of course the character is based on G4. I always wanted to do a Jessica Rabbit with G4, but never had the time to make the dress, so when I saw Red Rabbit it was an instant "got ot get it". It did take a more than normal work on the mats/shaders to get it to work in Carrara (designed for Poser).
EP - Your scene is looking excellent!
They are all good, but I really like the second (middle) one.
I really like the middle one.
A different angle. I added some custom made Cattails to this one. The seed pods use hair to get a more velvety look. I need to make them a bit lighter I think. I also need to thin the grass stalks as well, though I don't mind them too much as they look a bit cartooney and it seems to match the 'tooney-ish style of Dryjacks's houses.
My to-do list is fairly long yet. I need to work in the plant editor to better customize the trees, flesh out the village a bit, make some more detailed "hero" trees for within the village, etc. The main thing is I need to add some life to the village without first making my set too resource heavy.
Very nice EP! That is coming along quite well indeed.
I need to read up on the 3D paint function... I've used successfully used it in the past, but it's been a couple years and I seem to have forgotten how to do it. I want to paint in some dirt roadways/paths and some worn areas and I can't seem to figure it out. Time to RTFM! ;-) If I can't get it to work, I may convert it to a vertex object and create shading domains, but I'd rather not if I don't have to.
Part of a speed modeling competition, I decided to animate the fan blades.
Steam Punked Fan Watch Pendant Jewelry (the gals would love it) heh
note: needs further refinement
[youtube]ForVsA81wd4&feature=youtube_gdata[/youtube]
oops! That didn't work :(
Here's the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ForVsA81wd4&feature=youtube_gdata
I suspect that Dart is not the fuzzy type... Me...well those spinning blades would be a ***** on my chest... :-)
@DartanBeck
May I ask how you did the outcrops/stairs in the middle of your trees in your landscape ?
I am trying to work with multiple terrains or even props to get this done (like in Bryce), but you always can tell that the landscape was pieced together - even with using the same shader.
I also tried to use displacement/heightmaps I exported from Bryce, but that also doesn't turn out too well.
To begin, it might sound off track, but it will come full circle.
To help create woodland environments, I made three terrain pieces, Large, Medium and Small. Each of these I populated with plants, shrubs and trees, etc.,
I originally intended to replicate them with the surface replicator. So I made them much taller than they needed to be and sunk them into the ground. This way if they end up on the side of a hill, they should still be coming out from the ground. It still won't work if you have too steep of a grade. Anyways, the first image shows the smallest of these terrain blocks the way it loads in, and the second is what it looks like if you pull it out of the ground.
This is the piece I used for the actual terracing texture. The largest of the terrain blocks is what I used to simulate the side of a mountain - for the steep grade. I only wanted the terrain of the small block. So I dragged all of the plants out of the group and stuck them in amongst the rest of the trees and such, leaving just the terrain piece. I sunk it down until it nearly disappeared under the surface. Ctrl D = Duplicate. I duplicated it and moved it a little bit in two directions and gave it a bit of a rotation. If you duplicate and make a few movements and such and duplicate again without deselecting what you've just moved, the new duplicate will use the same translation and rotation data from 'this' position to the new one. Knowing that, I move my duplicated piece and rotate it just right so that I can jam down the Ctrl D a few times in a row afterwards to make a few of them. Then I correct anything that I don't like about the placement and/or rotation of my new duplicates before moving on and duplicating more. You can select and duplicate multiple pieces, too. So I do that, too, when I feel I can. I never want my duplicates getting ahead of me, or out of control, though. I always only go so far, fix what I may not like, and then continue. Once I had a whole field of these things, I went through them all lifting and sinking and rotating... take a few renders, etc., until I liked the look. Then I made my cloud visible ad moved it into position. :)
If it helps any, the third image shows it without the cloud.
So there you have than, and I really hope that it helps. Wait... it will help. You're gonna have a blast using this idea! ;-)
No, really. Whether you make it or buy it or whatever. In Carrara, always feel free to strip stuff down, tear it apart and use its bits. Stretch it squish it... lol
When I got to watch that Lynda.com Carrara 5 Essentials (training video collection), Jack Whitney, the instructor, said that this is the main reason that Carrara's native content comes with so much stuff. Some of it looks like toys compared to what we're used to seeing at Daz3d, so we never open any of them. Grab one and pull it apart. Learn what that artist did to assemble it, color it, model it...
Above all else, have fun doing it!
I was wondering how to tweak the subsurface scattering on my character, so I opened up the example that comes with Carrara. It's a candle. A very cool candle. But to illustrate SSS, they put a light bulb right by the candle to make the sss work. I tried it on my character. It worked. Why rely on realistic lighting in digital software? If you know you want an effect, make it so! "That sunlight should be making that dude's ear glow!" Answer: Okay, I'll put a bulb next to his freaking ear and make it glow! lol
Wow thank you DartanBeck :-)
So I haven't been too far away getting my own multi-level terrain.
Btw. I use plenty of the Carrara native content :D I love the frog, the slink and the butterflies and that nice candle, too.
Also I am playing with the basic clouds, seeing if I can use some of them as "fog". For now the small cotton cloud is my favorite.
I love using volumetric clouds for fogs and the like! They're great for changing the depth of a scene. TiP: Try changing the colors of the clouds to get cool effects!
I will try that for sure. What I also like about them is that they don't chase the render time upwards into the sky :)
If you can avoid intersecting volumetric clouds that also helps lower render times.