Post Your Renders - #4: A New Hope
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I confess, I had to go back and pay close attention. Bravo though!
Here's an updated picture of my village. This is supposed to be the tournament grounds, where Jousting would take place. I may also put in a May Pole with rigged ribbons/ropes. The fence, posts and polls are all spline based and procedurally shaded. No image maps.
Here's another angle of the scene I'm working on. My own "sky" as well.
cool idea the water fall and the foam is a nice touch. You did a grande job on the cat's tail rushes. !
Thank you! I'm intending on bundling everything together except the houses (which aren't mine) and making it available to whoever wants it. I'm currently testing it, but I think it's about ready. Most of my shaders are procedural, so the file size is pretty light.
pleasure :)
the procedurals work really well.
I admit to using textures combined with some kind of blender so procedurals are something I really should revisit.
Especially with terrains.!
cheers
WIP of my latest model the Hyperion battle Cruiser - still working on the shaders, windows and lights. Starfield made in Gimp.
C & c most welcome:)
I like the structural details towards the stern of the ship. That's an area that I tend to break down at doing well. You put the ship at a nice angle for the scene too.
What happened to my post? Did you guys see my post from early...early this morn, about how much I liked both EP and Roygee's renders?
I just checked my notifications and didn't see that you had made a post. Sounds like those mysterious and mischievous Web Faeries stole it and absconded with it to the ether! Curse them!
That or you were too busy playing with Rosie and forgot to hit submit! :red:
Does this iteration of the forum limit topics to 100 pages like the last one did?
No idea... but due to my question in my last post being serious, I no longer question what the wiki dude meant by this. lol
Where is my mind, and of what sort is it?
According to postings in the old forum, the limit in the old forum was an arbitrary one that was set by the moderators due to a perceived problem with the old forum software handling long topic threads. I haven't heard if the new forum software has the same problem.
It doesn't seem to me like it should matter how many pages a topic runs, since the server only displays fifteen posts at a time.
100 pages of posts should be insignificant.
I guess we'll find out soon.
hey roy, love the backend, lots of interesting things to grab our attention, beautiful light effects too.
Maybe the front end needs more interest (like stickers and dirt and greebley things) ?
Dirt is good. Unless it's under the fingernails :)
Thanks guys. Hey head wax - you and your dirt!
You are so right - still trying to figure out how to do this in Gimp - but more especially a silvery sheen with panels so it doesn't look like its cast out of one piece. Greebels - yes, lots to come!
Cheers
After struggling with my first scene ("Fractal Worlds"), which is still WIP due to some difficulties with G.I. (which I have solved, I just need time to tweak a few more things, but more on that later...), I thought I'd share a morsel of my second scene. This is a "working camera" angle, and does not show everything that will be in the final render.
Of course a month into the scene and it is still WIP. But this one has been a wonderful learning process. I designed all objects and shaders except for M4, and the skeletons which I got free off a 3D modeling website.
I still have to tackle a few more technical skills before it is finished, so it is still a good week away from sharing. I just hope my productivity level improves over time!
As always, feedback is always welcomed. Thanks for looking!
Looks like you're off to a good start Fractal!
Here's another shot of the Renaissance village I've been working on. Most everything seems to be scaling correctly except for the cattails. I see I need to work on the stalk and seed pod a little bit still. I also want to work on the dam some more.
Fractal, I really like what you've got going on it that scene. The glow on the magical electricity is beautiful. So, you made the scene, the snake, and all that? Very cool. And, yes... you get much quicker with everything you do in Carrara.
One big thing that "I", personally have picked up on fairly early on, due to the system I started with was much more meager than what I have now, is that reducing the number of lights can dramatically boost render speeds - so I take some days to just focus on lighting using minimalist techniques - which often requires that I defy all thought towards what makes sense, and just focus more on getting more stuff done with few lights. I also used to use "reflection" in shaders where, what I really wanted was a shine - accessed through a combination of settings between highlight and shininess - where it's easily mimicked by simply placing a reflection on it - but at the expense of a hard hit at render time. It all gets to be second nature, the more time you spend tweaking. This thread, right here, has taught me gobs of stuff, simply by talking to artists about great images that they've created.
EP, I love that Galadriel character, you've made. She fits in beautifully into that scene. I'm still fighting towards getting into that latest version. Time is being stubborn on me by flying past my face too quickly. Maybe tonight's the night?
I'm going to work on that dam today, the cattails and I'm playing with displacement on the terrain to sink the ruts into the earth a bit. I may package that as a supplemental shader if it causes a slowdown due to calculating the displacement.
Here is a short morph animation done in C8 pro. I wanted to see if I could get a good morph using Carraras tools and textures.
I used the magnet and displacement tools on the morph targets ( Head and neck only) and was very happy to figure out how to morph between textures in the shader room using the mixer operation in colour and bump. Carrara is good for basic sculpting and is more powerful than it is given credit for. I used a subdivision level of 1 for smoothing which helped. Did the rendering with sky lighting and ambient occlusion.
Youtube link :
http://youtu.be/-uOeVNh4CGg
Echo that! The water flow from the dam looks better at this angle/close-up too.
Thanks, DB, for the feedback.
BTW, for the electricity, I used an image of a lightning strike, alpha'ed all but the bolts on a flat surface, and made 3 copies of the image rotated 120 deg each to give it a 3D appearance.
The snake was done all in Carrara's vector editing tool. (At my experience level, I haven't bumped up against any limits to the tool, so I don't see a need yet to learn a new one like Hex.) I used bones on the body to simplify posing the snake in a coiled position, and created the head separately. The "skin" was generated using the fractal app "Apophysis 7x" with a snakeskin bump.
Much like my first image, there are a number of fractal images in this scene as well, though few appear in this POV. Personally, I think they add an organic feel to the scene. (After all, clouds, mountains, and trees are all fractals! :) ) The sword, the wall behind the Skull King, the ceiling, and the knight's armor all have fractal images in them.
You are right about the lighting. The first week I was working my first image, I struggled with slow renders until I finally fell upon a new strategy. Now, I either work on objects (editing, posing, etc.) or on lighting, but never on the two at the same time. All lights in the scene are grouped, so I can turn them off with a click; and I crank up the ambient when working objects. (There's a tutorial in there somewhere, I'm sure if someone felt motivated to make one! ;) )
Personally, something I have *NOT* picked up yet, is knowing how much detail to put into the objects. I enjoy creating the objects so much that I add 3x as much detail as will ever appear in the final render (short of making a 10K x 6K sized image!). This is killing my production time. But since I'm not on a clock (this is labor, not a job), I'll figure that out someday ... maybe. :) This is probably also why I like to crank up the AA/sharpness to the max - to eek out just a little more detail.
I agree, the forums are filled with nuggets. (I've said this elsewhere.) I wish I had more time to read more of what is posted.
Now, I left the most challenging work for last - the two main characters. As with all the other stuff, I am making all the cloths and armor from scratch. But I look forward to it.
I tend to overfill my scene sometimes as well. Mostly it's because I'm not entirely sure what angle I want, and what will be in the shot. Once I get a couple angles figured out, I either go through the scene and delete things that I know I don't need and hide things I'm not sure if I'll need. Checking the invisibility checkbox is a great way to speed up renders when something isn't in frame. Especially if you're using GI.
I love this scene because I started to build this elaborate set and I wanted some atmosphere. When I did, I found much of the background objects were hidden from view, so I started hiding and then deleting until only a cube primitive (floor/ledge) and a few pillars were left in the scene.
I am still stuck in the mindset that all of my scenes require 360 degree attention... so they do. As they are all film sets, I want to be able to shoot from any angle. That's where Carrara is truly helpful, as it can handle a lot without coughing up its innards, like some other apps out there.
Okay, in this scene I spent some more time on the already excellent terrain shader, provided by the scene's provider, EP. Before going after adding my shader textures, I spent a short time trying to get a better feel from the procedurals. The big thing is that these procedural terrain shaders look absolutely perfect for distant scapes. But having a character, or detailed model stand on them offers up their true source... a bunch of paint on a pallet. The first image is taken from my new default Camera 1, the second is Camera 2 and... you guessed it, the third image is camera 3.
For the cattails, I deepened the colors and reduced the color saturation. They still appeared to glow. That's when I remembered that I was experimenting with lessening the shadows cast from the ball of lights. EP always warned me about turning shadows below 100%. So I returned those lights to their original setting, aside from turning their brightness down to 6. I just remembered doing that. I bet these images would even look nicer if I put them all back to 10.
For the waterfalls through the dam, I added a glow to the shader and the foam got the same. I then duplicated the falls object, stretched it out and rotated it a bit, and planted them slightly below water level. The water included had a 100% transparency Intensity, so I used my water shader to help mask off the bubbles a bit. Now I'm thinking of taking the distribution map into dogwaffle and inverting it, and performing some further surgery to create a mass population distribution map and filling this place with meandering village folk. Maybe some militia members as well.
Nonetheless... I've spent less than an hour with this scene, and am already just loving it! The atmosphere is really good - so, naturally, I must dissect it and see how he made it!
That's one heck of a change in appearances you've pulled off here! Sweet!
FYI, if you go to the top level shader, you can use Advanced options to fade between one entire shader and another, the same way you did with just color and bump, using a single slider!
It's called "MultiChannel Mixer, in the Complex Shader options at the top level. Your current shader will then become "Source 1" and Source 2 is empty, so you can add your second, entire multi shader in there, and then use a slider or whatever to control the change/blend.
Here's the Video I made using this concept.
That looks really sweet. I need to really work on the shaders for the terrain. Yours looks much better than mine! A tip for the water rushes, I used translucency, so if you're getting too much of that, go ahead and dial down the intensity, or get rid of it if you wish! The water fall also looks super awesome!
Forgot to add that the main sunlight has a shadow buffer which will look like crap for anything but animations. I'll post a sample with a shadow buffer, with soft shadows, and with hard shadows.
Ahhh... another change! I made the sun raytrace a soft shadow from 5,000 feet! :)
Translucency is what that is! Ahhhh. Why I didn't notice that escapes me. At first I was getting the impression that they were incapable of accepting shadows... so the glow channel was my first stop. Nope. No glow. I am well aware of translucency and should have noticed that! Although I do like the way they look now, I might just make the translucency setting a little darker. Good call, btw... as those stalks do pass a lot of light through them. I built forts with them as a kid. I used to sit in my Dads swamp and gaze at these things. When they're green like that, the sunlight can really make them glow. Those forts were more like Teepees than forts, and using cattail stalks, we could layer them to a fairly water tight deal. Fond memories!
In some of my film sets, I will often delete off what won't be used for that particular save. Likewise, for forest shots, I'll often add stuff that won't be seen to get the image to turn out right. Sometimes you just need those shadows and light variations - even though I'm always cheating realism with my own light rigs anyways! lol