Post Your Renders - Happy New Year yall
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Just a WIP - feedback would be appreciated!
Some random thoughts
1. The mountains just have one of the preset textures, I want to adjust them so a little more rock is showing.
2. I'm not happy with the water - I think the wave pattern is too busy and it needs to be a bit clearer.
3. I need to move some hotpoints - some of my replicated grass is flying above the ground.
4. The shoreline is a little too regular and some of the plants there look weird.
Also - I rendered this with the Skylight, and now I see why people use light domes instead. Took a little over an hour at this resolution. :(
Thanks,
Mark
That's nice...but I think you're missing an opportunity to have some gorgeous sunlight streaming thru the leaves in the trees, some of the leaves glowing, and shafts of light hitting the ground, and all the gorgeous colors you see in a sunlit forest.
As it is, the trees seem fairly dark and flat, with not much interest, IMO. While it might be somewhat "realistic" in that you can find photos of trees that look like that, I think artistically, and for greater impact, you might want to give the foreground some more color and interest.
Just a thought.
EDIT: Here's a photo I found that illustrates my point. I'm not saying this is good, or what you need to do, just that it's something to think about.
It's a very good thought - I'm not quite sure how to accomplish it though. :) Maybe if I space the trees out a bit more - or I guess I could just fake it with some extra lighting. I'l play around and see what works.
Thanks Joe.
It's a very good thought - I'm not quite sure how to accomplish it though. :) Maybe if I space the trees out a bit more - or I guess I could just fake it with some extra lighting. I'l play around and see what works.
Thanks Joe.
If it was me, I'd go outside and look at leaves on the trees. And figure out what it is about leaves that makes them glow, or have bright colors, or allow light to pass thru in beams to the ground. There's translucency, and SSS, and reflection....I'd try to change the shaders on my trees and leaves to give you the effects you want.
EDIT: BTW, I think in the foto I posted, the bright colored leaves are Aspen trees, amidst the pines. I'm no tree expert, but you might want to think about what effect you might want, and search around for fotos and see what you want to emulate.
I actually did exactly that - I am working off some image I found on a Google image search - I don't have a lot of pine trees in my area. Or mountains. :)
I am adding a second, very weak light source on just the ground below the trees and a tiny amount of translucency to the trees themselves but I think that for this image lightening up the forest too much would not be very real (for certain values of "real"), From what I've seen pine trees don't really glow much; even in the image you posted, you can see the sharp contrast on the pine trees compared to the general glow of the other trees. Now whether or not my all-pine forest is real is a whole `nother issue that I may need to think about. ;)
I moved the sun around some to increase the contrast on the mountains and that is adding some interesting backlight that seems to be helping the effect in the test render I have going right now.
Thanks again for the input - I appreciate it.
EDIT: Finished my test - see attached image. Slight improvement I think. I'll keep playing with it and see where it leads.
One other thing you might consider, and I see it a lot in posts of renders here...
If you take your image into Photoshop and look at the brightness levels, here's what you see. Basically much of the pixels are bunched up in the dark end (left side of the graph). Much of the image is dark, at one end of the scale, and the rest of the image is near the other end.
Usually, though certainly not always, people (artists, photographers, etc.) tend to want their images with a more balanced brightness range. Brightness that is fairly evenly, or more balanced. More of a bell shaped curve centered in the middle.
Brightness generally defines interest. If an image is totally dark or totally bright, it generally doesn't have much detail or interest. On the other hand, if it's more balanced, like the image I posted, people generally find it more interesting. Again, not always, but it's a good thing to consider and start with.
And here's the levels of the image I posted. More balanced, hence more interest. Note it's more of a bell shaped curve in the middle.
Also, it's clear that the image has more color, which implies more interest.
Again, neither is right or wrong or the correct way to go. It all depends on your goal. Just something to consider
Adding translucency to the leaves definitely gives them some glow, and adds more light under the canopy. But I've still got massive blocks of bland and uninteresting greeny saminess - I think that's borne out by the levels plot (almost any movement of the sliders makes it a more interesting image!)
I'd love any tips for getting a better spread of levels. And also for the sun rays through the leaves -- that sounds really cool.
BTW translucency adds considerably to the render time -- that was about a 2 1/4 hour render!
Be careful though...I didn't mean to imply that there is a good or bad levels curve, or there's a cookbook recipe for making good images...cuz there isn't. Just like there isn't a cookbook recipe for, say, gamma correction settings... :) :) :)
But I think what your levels curve is saying is that there is too much ambient light, which makes everything at about the same brightness. I would suggest killing the ambient (personally I do that in every scene). It was designed for a time long ago when processors were too slow to calculate decent global illumination, and it was a cheap and nasty workaround. And IMO it looks horrendous. :) :) :)
What you might want is a bit more contrast. More dark shadows, and more bright highlights. Maybe only a little, because as anyone who has walked thru a gorgeous forest with lots of tree canopy, it is gorgeous with that fairly even light, accented by bright shafts of sunlight and a glow of almost luminescent glowing leaves.
There's no ambient, but I do have fake GI - around 30 spots at 7% on a dome about a mile in diameter, as well as the sun light.
yeah, IMO you really don't need all that ambient...well, fake GI or whatever.
I think one problem is the sky, visible behind the tower, looks fairly dark and the high levels of ambient in the forest doesn't seem to match. And what color is the ambient? Since most of the ambient light in a forest like that comes from light thru the trees, it should be greenish.
Personally, I'd kill the fake GI and start from scratch. Start with ONE sunlight and work from there. The more lights in a scene, the more difficult to figure out what's going on...
Sounds like an idea. I'll run some small scale renders over lunch and see what comes out...
One thing you might also want to do is look at each area of the image separately, and see if it looks okay. Sometimes that's a good way to figure out what could use some work and what is okay.
IMO, the foreground, lower third of the image is very nice. Sunlight dappling the fence and the ground. Maybe a tiny bit more contrast.
But the areas I highlighted seem overly flat and uniform and, well, blah... :) :) not much color, uniform lighting, and not much detail or interest.
Spring time - I wish
Squeaked the sun around to light this side of the tower. The first 2 are sunlight only at 200%. I realised I had gamma set to 1.8 (this is a Mac) and changed it in the 2nd pic to 2.2. The blacks are deeper in the first, slightly muddy in the 2nd. I never quite know which is the "correct" setting to use -- 2.2.doesn't always look better!
The 3rd pic has "Skylight" GI enabled, which brings back details in the shadows, but it's starting to go meh under the trees. We've still got the big hump on the curve. It's shifted right slightly, that's about it.
Edit: Just realised I've got some atmospheric mist in the scene - that ain't gonna help! I'll try another render tonight with it turned off.
This is improving. Joe's advice is certainly getting you going down a better road.
My own feedback is that you will need to be certain of exactly what time of day you hope to portray. How high up is the sun?
Generally I find it best to start with a very good and powerful sunlight. Right now I suspect that the translucency isn't nearly as pronounced in the final render as it could be because there is not enough translucency enabled in the material or the key light source itself isn't as powerful as it could be.
The indirect lighting is always the hard part, and it seems to me there is no fast rendering yet plausible looking solution that works every time. Getting light to rain down from the sky as skylight will help, but the ground level light bounces will be missing so the undersides of objects as well as the flanks will be dimmer than they should be. The only solution I can think of is a light dome beneath the ground that sends light upward as needed. Clearly these lights must exclude the ground plane from their influence, allowing their light and shadows to affect the rest of the scene. It is for this reason that I personally use two domes, one for skylight and another for ground level lighting. I call it EGDLS (EarthGlow Dome Light Strategy) in Bryce, but it works just as well in Carrara. Treat the ground level lighting as a separate problem instead of trying to solve it along with the sunlight and skylight in one fell swoop.
I say this to suggest you might get more accomplished by starting first with the indirect lighting, adding in the sun last to provide the highlights.
Same scene, different sun angle, real GI (and a 4 hour 50 render time!), slightly different framing. You can see a real difference in things like the puddles, which were almost invisible before. Only thing, cos the sun is low down in the sky, I wanted to get a more golden quality to the light, but there doesn't seem to be a way to change the colour of sunlight? (there's a colour box for the sun in the realistic sky panel, but changes don't stick)
IMHO thats the best way to set the sun color is by that method - in the realistic sky editor, click on the color box for the sunlight, and choose a deeper yellow or more orange ... Hit OK to close the realistic sky editor (RSE) and it'll stick.
Generally, when Im using IBL - (my own rendered 8000x4000 sky image from a spherical camera) , I set the Scene Ambience to 20% Sky , and set the sun color in the RSE to a very light and pale yellow. The Sky Ambience by default is a blueish tinge (which gives you the blueish in your ground shadows, say on a cement type surface), and setting the sunlight the slight pale yellow counters the Sky's Ambience. This combined with using the Sky background IBL image which also contributes to the scene lighting...
Now, all 3 have the same settings in common, the way I had used the Ambience Sky, Background (Sky IBL 8000x4000), RSE Sunlight + sunlight color, and full GI ...
Tesla Iron Knight and Soldiers of Fortune both are mid / broad daylight renders. Both have a slightly different and random sunlight HSL colorwheel color. I always pick a random spot, rather than technically specify an HSL color (default color wheel mode in carrara's color selector) . Tesla has a much warmer look and feel, while Soldiers has a much cooler / colder feel. Bear in mind, the ground textures play a role in this too, the Tesla Iron Knight my intention was a Tatooine type location hence the ground light bouncing upwards is much warmer too... Soldiers of Fortune, set somewheres else entirely, has its own merits in how (at least to me) the buildings seem to look very realistic just due to the way the ambeint lighting works in this scene.
Mandalorian Sunset on the otherhand, has the sun alot lower and a deeper darker yellow sunlight color chosen. The othe difference is that I used a space nebular type image (had to be tiled H & V quite a bit) , which gives the sky a very other-worldly appearance that hey, this ain't earth, but some sci-fi martian sky!
Links to my Deviant pages for said images.
Soldiers of Fortune
Tesla, Iron Knight
Mandalorian Sunset
Come to think of it, here's another Evening Sunset render, portriat duo Nikita and SB-20 "Zombie" ...
Same technique, same 8000x4000 self spherical sky IBL render, Ralistic Sun, Realistic Sky editor + sunlight color (other than default white), Scene Ambience: Sky 20%, full Global Illumination Skylight and Indirect Lighting ...
The evening setting sun type scenes I've always enjoyed, due to the more "vivid" colors produced. Even in non-renders, its great to be outdoors when the sun sometimes makes everything outside that "hyper-sureal" effect with the deep golden light filtering through the sky onto every building... And I'm not talking about the everyday normal typical evening either... Its those really once in a while occasions when the conditions are "just right" ...
Some people doctored their HDRI photos snapped with a camera to showcase and enhance thise effect...
;)
Ok, here's a good example, the exact settings I used infact for Mandalorian Sunset -
Mandalorian Sunset - Gentleman Vigilante
Sunlight rotation angle btw - X -73.47 , Y 0.00, Z 37.67 incase you're wondering for the exact angle... ;)
Also yeah, theres some SSS in the vines, leaves, and flower petals.
The lanterns in the Tangien Courtyard set are using the lanterns transparency in the Alpha channel... The floor I set to about 13% bump amplitude and gave it a 17% reflection value ...
The Mando's outfit- is a mix of different sets, and I unified them all together with my own complex procedural shader I had made... :) (The shader on the Astromech in Nikita and Zombie i had also made)
MDO2010,
Very cool scene! I love all of the extra detail you're putting into the ground, banks and such... Bravo!
Tim_A,
Ouch! Very nice render, man! Great job on the grass and ground details... I love that tower!
Mohandai,
Killer! Great set of images! Love it!
a pink R2!! :)
trying out some hi render settings. do i have to do something to enable caustics or is it automatic?
these are hi settings, right? :)
over 10,mill rays launched so far :lol:
over 30 million
will this render finish>
over 40 million rays. needs some exciting music. got Iron Maiden Phantom of the Opera live after death playing.
You do need to enable caustics. It is below all the GI settings in the render room.
Mohandai, great renders!
Misty, caustics is it's own little Global illumination renderer, to enable it you need to go a little more than halfway down the page on the rendering tab and check the 'caustics' checkbox. You can then increase the intensity of the lighting effect, the number of rays launched, etc.
I found because I use refraction in my corneas that when I'm doing a closeup render of a human figure, I have to leave caustics unchecked or else it turns my character's eyes into gemstones (and they can even produce lighting effects). Very cool if that's what you're after but not what I was looking for when doing realistic human rendering :)
Also a little farther down, actually nearly the very bottom of the rendering tab, is 'bucket size'. Might want to turn that down a bit, I notice you have at least 4 cores rendering. Makes for smaller render squares and may make for more efficient rendering too.
Thanks Johnstark! :)
as for caustic, I generally leave it disabled unless I have a specific need for it. Enabling caustics also add to the render time as every material surface that has some level of transparency / translucency will be calculated. Given the surface area also counts.
And yeah on occasion it'll cause more unwanted side effects than expected.
Playing around with reflections and the shader for my light fitting...
Instead of using blurry reflections or adding noise, I used the "Fibres" generator in photoshop, and plugged that into both the bump and diffuse channels. Gives an interesting effect I think.
For object accuracy and shadow accuracy, small numbers are "better". I'm about 20% through on my current render, with over 324 million rays launched so far, and a bit over an hour to go... ;) This is on settings I'd describe as "medium high" - basically a notch down on everything.
(the "time remaining" is misleading, since the bottom half of the scene renders much faster than the top half)
rubs eyes looking for buckets. i only have dual core. 8-/
You must have hyperthreading then Misty, cause you've got 4 buckets going there (the different colored rendering blocks number 1 through 4). Carrara treats that like 4 cores for rendering purposes.
I haven't had a chance to really respond to this, what with my play being this past weekend, but I have been following your posts.
When you use the sunlight in your scene, the lower the angle of the sun, the more orange it gets. You could change the sunlight to a distance light and then you would have more control over the color by being able to set it.
The Haze settings in the RSE will also have an effect on the sky color.
My guess about the fake GI is that you may have had the shadows on the replicated light to low. Also, lighting cheats like that, don't work as well when you use the Gamma 2.2 setting. If you do want to try the Gamma 2.2 setting, try setting the shadows on the replicated light back to 100%.
If it is still to dark under the trees, then as an experiment in trying to simulate reflected light from the ground, try adding a low intensity (10-20%), greenish distant light, aimed straight up and set to ignore the terrain. If you are using a realistic sky, make sure the, Enable Ground, checkbox is disabled or the RSE "ground" might block the light.
This image uses a dome with replicated distance lights to simulate GI. I also use a greenish, low intensity, distant light, pointing straight up and set to ignore the terrain (and since I used clouds in the sky, it ignores them as well) for reflected ground light.
As a point of fact (divorced from pride), ;-P I didn't use postwork for levels adjustments, but I did paint out some collision artifacts on the Knight in silver.
Edited to add that I did not use gamma correction.