June 2019 - Daz 3D New User Challenge - Scenes and Landscapes

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  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604

    @ linwelly. no post work all done in daz Studio

    Daz is the name of the Compnay 

  • skinklizzardskinklizzard Posts: 218
    edited June 2019

    Bit of an update

    I used a gradient emmision to show that even the monolith is not completely immune to the heat of lava (thanks @ariochsnowpaw for the suggestion), it didn't come out quite as expected gradient needs some work and the UV of the monolith is super weird now after squishing it into something not a cube.

    wishlist for daz studio features: ability to tesselate and render polylines.

    in the mean time the cables are triangular tubes with a dforce modifier, anchored at the top and into some blocks along the shore.

    The blobs in the beam are spheres with dforce modifier and simulated with gravity at -0.5 but I think I might need to increase their density and set the gravity closer to zero, so that they look a little more 'pulled up' and less just floating in the beam.

    I'm thinking I'll try edit the displacement and texture on the monolith to add some inset arched window type things, with a slight crackled glass and lava coloured glow to break up the black and try add a bit more of an ominous feel to the monolith.

    also going to try wrangle some cylinders into pipes or tubes jutting from the bottom part into the lava.

    Lava_terrain_wip4.jpg
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    Post edited by skinklizzard on
  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956

    Bit of an update

    I used a gradient emmision to show that even the monolith is not completely immune to the heat of lava (thanks @ariochsnowpaw for the suggestion), it didn't come out quite as expected gradient needs some work and the UV of the monolith is super weird now after squishing it into something not a cube.

    wishlist for daz studio features: ability to tesselate and render polylines.

    in the mean time the cables are triangular tubes with a dforce modifier, anchored at the top and into some blocks along the shore.

    The blobs in the beam are spheres with dforce modifier and simulated with gravity at -0.5 but I think I might need to increase their density and set the gravity closer to zero, so that they look a little more 'pulled up' and less just floating in the beam.

    I'm thinking I'll try edit the displacement and texture on the monolith to add some inset arched window type things, with a slight crackled glass and lava coloured glow to break up the black and try add a bit more of an ominous feel to the monolith.

    also going to try wrangle some cylinders into pipes or tubes jutting from the bottom part into the lava.

    there are several shaders that will give you a grid line of your objects, I know it's not the same as having the havin the polylines but its a similar effect

  • Sisyphus1977Sisyphus1977 Posts: 306
    edited June 2019

    ariochsnowpaw, that scene is looking really good.  The additional elements of the birds and sailboat along with the tone mapping changes are great. 

    Here is my next go at the Moonlight Kiss scene.  I changed some of the tone mapping and environment settings (see attached details), added a bit of DOF (I don't want to lose the sharpness in the moon).  As Linwelly and Scott Livingston noted, I have used different terrains (mountains, hills, and water's edge) in a semi circle layout for the scene.  I was able to eliminate two of the hill terrain props by moving the big tree that is scene left a little more into the scene to block that area.  The dock is made of cylinders and cubes resized with a simple color texture map added to fake the wood look.  I did not add any normal map as the scene is dark enough that I think those details would be lost.  The light pole I created from cylinders and a cube as I did not have that prop and positioned a spot light for the accent light on the couple.  I used a cylinder to create the volumetric lighting effect.  I have attached some details regarding how I did that for those that are interested.  The moon sky is Orestes Iray HDRI Skydomes - Fantasy Moon, https://www.daz3d.com/orestes-iray-hdri-skydomes--fantasy-moon.

    I think I need to do some postwork where the water plane meets the shoreline by the dock to take off some of that hard edge.  I missed that on this go around as it is something I always need to look at where the planes intersect.

    Moonlight Kiss v2.jpg
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    Tone Mapping - Environment Settings.jpg
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    Volume Primative Setup.jpg
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    Volumetric Lighting Setup.jpg
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    Post edited by Sisyphus1977 on
  • @sisyphus1977 - first....AMAZING CONCEPT and render.

    but cuz I luvs ya....

    gonna really go for broke at every nit picky thing I could find....(BTW my wife is a reitired proffesional graphics artist and I asked for her help)

    The moon is a little bit assymmetric.  If you are using a finite dome maybe infinite would work better.

    To give the impression of distance the moon reflection needs to make a stronger triangular shape on the water to imply greater distance. Again if you are using a finite dome that can be fixed with an infinite dome or expanding your repeats on the waves layer.

    I suppose the lighting of the couple could give just a little more of thre rounding of the shoulders for a little more dimension,

    And thank you so much for sharing the settings....I will be stealing these from you in the future.

    All of this said...in the way of contructive (try to find some way to make awesome better) criticisms

    .....this is gonna be my new wallpaper for some time to come.

     

  • CoryllonCoryllon Posts: 284

    Ok, so I had some trouble with the program... still am. But I decided to have some fun with literal "Ghost Lighting" so this is outside a tomb :)

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  • Sisyphus1977Sisyphus1977 Posts: 306

    @ariochsnowpaw said:

    @sisyphus1977 - first....AMAZING CONCEPT and render.

    but cuz I luvs ya....

    gonna really go for broke at every nit picky thing I could find....(BTW my wife is a reitired proffesional graphics artist and I asked for her help)

    The moon is a little bit assymmetric.  If you are using a finite dome maybe infinite would work better.

    To give the impression of distance the moon reflection needs to make a stronger triangular shape on the water to imply greater distance. Again if you are using a finite dome that can be fixed with an infinite dome or expanding your repeats on the waves layer.

    I suppose the lighting of the couple could give just a little more of thre rounding of the shoulders for a little more dimension,

    And thank you so much for sharing the settings....I will be stealing these from you in the future.

    All of this said...in the way of contructive (try to find some way to make awesome better) criticisms

    .....this is gonna be my new wallpaper for some time to come.

    I welcome all comments regarding my efforts, as the learning from others and applying their wisdom evolves my abilities. So no offense to anyone who comments on my stuff, I welcome it.

    This may be a little long, but here goes.....

    Moon Asymmetry

    So I took another look at the moon and did a couple of tests to see what is going on (btw, my environment Dome Mode was set to infinite).

    I set up a new scene just with the moon environment and the water planes. To establish a baseline, I set the camera up to be facing the moon straight on (0 degree offset) with the default 65 mm camera focal length. I then rotated the dome by 20 degrees in either direction and changed the focal lengths to 45 mm and then 24 mm.

    As you can see from the attachment (“Squishy Moon”), as the dome is rotated the moon squishes and becomes more oblong. To take it to the extreme, I had a wide shot with 2.35:1 aspect ratio, 24 mm focal length and a 55 degree dome rotation, which really squished the moon.

    I had thought that this distortion was from the focal length with a wider lens and some fish eye effect happening, but that was not really the case.

    There may be a solution to this problem, but it may introduce other effects that have to be worked around. In the Parameters setting for the camera, go to the Lens dialog and you will see a setting for Lens Stereo Offset (mm).  So I set the dome rotation back to 0, and then worked the Lens Stereo Offset to see what would happen (attachment “Stereo Effect”). As you can see, by changing this parameter, the moon is rotated and does not get squished. But, as the focal length of the lens widens, some stretching in the foreground (almost like motion blur) occurs.

    I don't have a clue as to how this will affect a full scene and what changes would be needed at wide focal lengths (maybe hide it with DOF?). I will give it a try with my scene, starting first with changing the offset then if needed rotating the dome a small amount and adding a small offset. Or perhaps, just rework any wide shot parameters and scene blocking, so the offset effect has minimal impact on the moon.

    I wonder if this squishing happens in daylight HDRI scenes too where the sun is offset by the dome rotation in relation to the camera, or if it was something with this particular HDRI. It could be that with the brightness of the sun not having a sharp enough rim around it that any distortion is not seen. I just don't know, I have not looked that closely at the sun in scenes with the sun in the shot. 

    I played with the other settings under the lens parameters and could not get anything to work that might fix that moonlight reflection to make it more realistic with a triangular effect. Either I try to fix it in post, create a new geoshell (like I do when creating foam on waves), or just leave it be. I'll see what can be done and was hoping for a simple solution. If someone has one out there, let me know.

    I will sort out the couple a bit more and move them around to see how the lighting casts over them and the look. Probably just move them back a bit toward the RHIB.

     

    Squishy Moon.jpg
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    Stereo Effect.jpg
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  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479

    @sisyphus1977xx, I usually use a moon object with a moon-free hdri. I have an old product that works fairly well with the Iray Uber Base applied, DC: GlowMoon, and I also have TerraLUNA 3, which includes a moon object. (TerraLuna doesn't require TerraDome 3 to work, as it's essentially the moon props with utilities and the nighttime, hdri, skies.)

    Your image is coming along very nicely. I really like it.

    One possibility, instead of postworking the edge of the water, is to scatter some grass, weeds, etc. in a few strategic places to break up the line, with a few elsewhere on the ground so the others look natural. (You can use something like UltraScatter, but that might be overkill.)

     

  • I'm definitely gonna start looking more closely at my HDRI's in render to see if I find more examples of 'squishy moon'

    Your diligence is daunting @sisyphus

  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 2,001

    @TigerAnne The billboards aren't turned around backwards per chance are they?

    I think they were! Thanks for the tip. laugh

     

  • skinklizzardskinklizzard Posts: 218
    edited June 2019

    alright updated, fixed the lava tiling, and added some distance haze in addition to the dof

    I might change the 'windows' in the upper monolith into something like vents instead as I'm not particularly happy with them as they are.

    I also need to figure out a good way of making/adding flares where the dead trees touch the lava, and something to show scale so they look less like grass.

    (currently the flares there are and the pipe external heating effects are done in post, I want to try get them all into daz studio though)

    Edit: jpg seems to be degraded on attaching, trying a png instead

    Lava_monolith.png
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    Post edited by skinklizzard on
  • sueyasueya Posts: 832

    Here is the third version of my image. I have improved the pose of the rider and rotated the horse and rider as someone suggested.

  • ariochsnowpawariochsnowpaw Posts: 147
    edited June 2019

    @sueya - That is definitely a more relaxed look than before.  I like the rotation.  We get a much better look at her face and the way she seems to be looking affectionately at the mount.  It improves the emotional content.

    Post edited by ariochsnowpaw on
  • MoonCraft3DMoonCraft3D Posts: 379
    edited June 2019

    The lone merchant ship was peacefully sailing through the open waters navigating solely by the heavens as it sought to evade the perils of the open ocean. Foolishly they feared pirates most of all, overlooking the greater terrors that lie beneath. With all external lights extinguished the ship and her crew slipped along, ignorant of what stalked in their wake. All too soon their quiet night was disturbed by an unwelcome guest....
    (My submission - a kracken attack by night on the open ocean. I failed to make a LANDscape but had a blast creating an ocean setting.)

     

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/325001/3d-art-freebie-challenge-may-2019-winners-announced-spring-flowers-entries-thread-only#latest
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    Post edited by Chohole on
  • Sisyphus1977Sisyphus1977 Posts: 306

    Here are my latest updates.  I have version 3 of Moonlight Kiss.  I repositioned the moon and moved the couple so they are more under the light.  The moon still is not a complete sphere, but if I remember corrrectly, it is an oblate spheroid in reality, so it is not perfectly round and I will live with the current result for this challenge.  My attempts to use the Lens Stereo Offset or even the Lens X shift, turned out to be unsuccessful.  In my test, I should have added some primative shapes to the test scene and see what the result was.  Turns out that approach did not work well, so I abandoned it and just moved the moon closer to the camera centerline. 

    L'Adair , I have the TerraLUNA 3 environment and gave it a try, but elected to stay with the Orstes Moon as I like the sky horizon better along with the star field.  It too had the same problem with the moon shape as I moved it farther from the centerline with the camera.  I took your advice and added some additional plants at the waters edge to break up that sharp line (those are billboard planes that I created from images). 

    For the updates to the Surf's Up scene, I added a water plane in the horizon so you can tell that there is an ocean nearby, hence grabbing the surfboards.  I reworked the textures of the terrain some more and blended the edges in post where the rocks meet the soil.  The planet (downloaded Neptune image is attached) in the scene is a billboard (jpg image with black background in the Surfaces Base Color, Emission Color and Cutout Opacity) and adjusted the cutout opacity setting (0.5) to achieve the look, the moons are TerraLUNA 3.  I used Sun-Sky for the Environment in the Render settings and set the SS Haze to 3 for some atmospheric haze and SS Blue-Red Tint to 0.25 and SS Saturation to 1.2 to give it that reddish hue.

    Moonlight Kiss v3.jpg
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    Surf's Up v2.jpg
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    Neptune Full Image.jpg
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  • richardandtracyrichardandtracy Posts: 5,733

    Finally had time to do something with my entry.

    Finished the Height Map to OBJ program and got it working properly with a bit of smoothing as the original version was a bit blocky. Got a height map from around Chicken in Alaska, and created a terrain to go in the background. Will apply DOV opacity to the camera, 5% looks roughly right. Next thing is to create a cloud sheet to hide the bottoms of the valleys. The figure's pose is almost there. Finally will put in a sky on the dome.

    Regards,

    Richard

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  • a different kind of environment a complete redo of the gamesroom done on daz 4.10

    gamesroomenvironment1a.jpg
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  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 2,001

    Okay, what happened here? surprise How did I make the rest of the scene invisible? And how do I make it visible again? This is My Cold Place by Jefferson, and it's all one solid object, apparently. 

  • 1

    TigerAnne said:

    Okay, what happened here? surprise How did I make the rest of the scene invisible? And how do I make it visible again? This is My Cold Place by Jefferson, and it's all one solid object, apparently. 

    go to render settings and on the environment tab at the top select dome and scene

  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 2,001

     

    go to render settings and on the environment tab at the top select dome and scene

    It is set to Dome and Scene. Everything was fine in preview in the beginning. Then suddenly this.

    These are the settings, with a bit of the scene for unnecessary proof. Dunno, I like having evidence that I'm not talking bull.

     

  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479
    edited June 2019
    TigerAnne said:

    Okay, what happened here? surprise How did I make the rest of the scene invisible? And how do I make it visible again? This is My Cold Place by Jefferson, and it's all one solid object, apparently. 

    @TigerAnne, I don't have that set, so I can't test it specifically.

    First question, Is part of the set still invisible if you change the Draw Mode to Texture Shaded?

    Post edited by L'Adair on
  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 2,001
    edited June 2019
    L'Adair said:

    First question, Is part of the set still invisible if you change the Draw Mode to Texture Shaded?

    No, in texture shaded mode everything looks normal. I just included a little snip of the scene, but it's all there, looking solid. The part that's still visible in NVidia view looks no different texture shaded than the parts that go missing. As I mentioned, as far as I can tell, this set is counted as one large object. It's impossible to hide parts of it, or ungroup anything. You get all or nothing. 

    The textures are divided into several parts. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, though. The little strip of land that remains in simulated view contains textures from several of the sub categories. 

    Edit: The problem itself was solved by deleting and reloading My Cold Place, which in this case is fine, it's just one object. I'm still curious as to what causes this phenomenon, though. I've had it happen before.

    Post edited by WinterMoon on
  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479
    TigerAnne said:
    L'Adair said:

    First question, Is part of the set still invisible if you change the Draw Mode to Texture Shaded?

    No, in texture shaded mode everything looks normal. I just included a little snip of the scene, but it's all there, looking solid. The part that's still visible in NVidia view looks no different texture shaded than the parts that go missing. As I mentioned, as far as I can tell, this set is counted as one large object. It's impossible to hide parts of it, or ungroup anything. You get all or nothing. 

    The textures are divided into several parts. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, though. The little strip of land that remains in simulated view contains textures from several of the sub categories. 

    Edit: The problem itself was solved by deleting and reloading My Cold Place, which in this case is fine, it's just one object. I'm still curious as to what causes this phenomenon, though. I've had it happen before.

    Are you familiiar with Iray Section Node Planes? The image you shared with the original complaint looked like several of those had been strategically placed to hide sections of the scene. But they only hide things in Iray mode, so if the whole set showed in Texture Shaded, the next thing I was going to have you look for would be those nodes.

    The fact you solved the problem by deleting and then reloading the set would suggest it's some other issue.

    I'm just glad you got it fixed.
    smiley

  • 1

    TigerAnne said:
    L'Adair said:

    First question, Is part of the set still invisible if you change the Draw Mode to Texture Shaded?

    No, in texture shaded mode everything looks normal. I just included a little snip of the scene, but it's all there, looking solid. The part that's still visible in NVidia view looks no different texture shaded than the parts that go missing. As I mentioned, as far as I can tell, this set is counted as one large object. It's impossible to hide parts of it, or ungroup anything. You get all or nothing. 

    The textures are divided into several parts. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, though. The little strip of land that remains in simulated view contains textures from several of the sub categories. 

    Edit: The problem itself was solved by deleting and reloading My Cold Place, which in this case is fine, it's just one object. I'm still curious as to what causes this phenomenon, though. I've had it happen before.

    in the scene panel there are "EYES" if you click one that is open it closes and hides whatever it represented its a quick way to place stuff you want later and hide it until needed or the opposite.any chance you happened to click one by accident?

  • richardandtracyrichardandtracy Posts: 5,733

      Many complex programs get glitches and cross talk. On a daily basis at work I get SolidWorks doing stupid things. I take that as a signal to save, exit & re-start. Usually that clears things, if not, a restart of the computer is needed.

    Regards,

    Richard.

  • ariochsnowpawariochsnowpaw Posts: 147
    edited June 2019

    As we may recall from the lighting challenge I have lots of troubles with fog (processing with only 1 CPU core) but I wanted to play with that a little.

    I saved up to buy a new render beast but my truck decided that it would spend that on a new transmission so once more months away from my beast.

    I really wanted to play with color so I chose the exoplanet Kepler-452b

    Kepler-452b - Lonely Drone

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    Post edited by ariochsnowpaw on
  • dtrscbrutaldtrscbrutal Posts: 518

     This is version 2, not a lot of changes, mostly work on the water and adding some vehicle traffic, a few figures too. I also built up the skyline on screen right and did some alignment/adjustments to some props and fog planes. I flipped/mirrored a few of the window textures to reduce repetition as well.

     The real challenge with this image was the late spring storms knocking out the power, and all the blips and brown-outs during the repairs afterward. More bad weather is on the way so we will see how it goes tonight.

     

    image

     

    Sci Fi Cityscape V2.jpg
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  • dtrscbrutaldtrscbrutal Posts: 518

    @ariochsnowpaw Thank you for the input, I did read your post and have implemented your, and others suggestions. Every time I tried to reply I was knocked offline, so please forgive the belated reply. 
     Sunset Cove - Dawn Departure is great! Such beautiful colors and a wonderfully peaceful image. I could see playing around with adding more foliage but I have doubts it would improve the scene. You did a great job on that.
     On Kepler-452b - Lonely Drone I am having a little trouble understanding where the light is coming from. If the drone (great model by the way!) is the source I suggest you play that up more. The landscape looks very good in wide format. I see lots of potential for that scene.

    @skinklizzard You have done some very nice work! The only thing I can suggest would be to bring the light up a bit so it carries over the cables and monolith more. I look forward to your final version.

    @Coryllon I wonder if the POV is too zoomed out for this scene and it is losing too many details. It is not clear to me what is happening.
     Fire light can be tricky to work with, but it looks great on those columns. That is a real playground for torch light.

    @TigerAnne I had a similar issue once, happy to help!

    @sueya Looks like the riders feet are still out of the stirrups. You have made some very nice improvements!

    @Kimonolady Greatcoats, deadly maws, and tentacles, very lovecraftian!  My only suggestion would be to get the lantern light to carry more on your sea-beast, and/or perhaps a touch more light in the sky to silhouette it. Great horror scene!

     @sisyphus1977xx @richardandtracy_e725004c1a  @dragoneyes002 Very cool stuff, I will post some feedback when I get back online.

  • @dtrscbrutal - getting the light to hit the drone and give it some shine and detail unfortunately lit the fog below it.  I'm not really sure how to fix that so maybe will try rendering the drone on it's own and compositing.  I know there used to be a way to tell other objects not to receive light but haven't been able to figure that out.  I really like the imrpovement to your scene.  The slight motion blur to the incoming ship gives a really dynamic tone to the whole thing.  The changes, while subtle, definitely improve the overall image quite a bit.

    @TigerAnne - can't wait to see the whole scene now.  

    @Kimonolady - I was thinking about buying a boat the other day.  Not gonna happen now.  Who doesn't love tentacles and fangs unless they're the one about to be eaten

    @Dragoneyes002 - wow....just wow.  I love the attention to detail.  My machine could never render that scene....my mind could never put that together.  for some reason the jersey in the frame towards the back draws my eye and I suddenly realize I'm pretty deep into this image.  I have no recommendations to try to improve it cuz I'm just kinda like...wow...who thought of that.

  • CoryllonCoryllon Posts: 284
    Basically, I am trying to give the cavernous look to the scene, taking the focus off the people and putting on the vast expanse they are exploring. Not really sure how to do that.
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