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Latest version with figure added.
The sudden thunderstorm clears. The fairy princess leaves her silver palace to frolic between the puddles in the harsh light of the full moon.
I'd welcome any suggestions for improvement. Thanks.
Thanks Scott, I have added a set and background, still working on the lighting(which is always the most challenging part for me). The positioning of parts of the scene I'm still not sure of.
It's looking good. I like the story it tells.
If this is supposed to be moonlight, I would mute the color palate a little. Using a slightly greyish white cast from the light sources would achieve this effect. I would also consider lowering the light intensity a couple notches as well. This may be tricky while trying to maintain the reflection though, so small adjustments would be good. Also consider implementing some backlighting on the actor to make her reflection pop out a little better.
If you want to try the next stage of tricky lighting, then putting some linear point light sources along with the candelabra on the table would be another tweak. Make sure to give those lights a warm yellow orange cast. Compositionally speaking this image is good for me. I would keep the camera angle and figure positions as they are.
Thank you zmortis for the comments and advice.
Graying the light source did the trick to make it look more like moonlight!
I had found that back lighting was needed to make the reflections appear in the window glass. I don't know if there is something else I could do with that.
Linear point lights on the candelabra add a subtle richness to the indoor scene.
Thanks again for the help.
The other thing which can be done with the reflections is to get into the surfaces tab of the window object, and alter the setting of the reflectivity and the opacity. Increasing opacity with increase the reflection at a cost of obscuring your interior scene. Increasing the amount of reflection will give the exterior objects more prominence as well, also at the cost of obscuring your interior portion of the scene. The trick is to find a pleasing balance. Right now I don't think the level of reflection/opacity is bad, so messing around with these parameters is an if you want to experiment kind of thing.
thanks Kelly,i'll keep working on that
The other thing which can be done with the reflections is to get into the surfaces tab of the window object, and alter the setting of the reflectivity and the opacity. Increasing opacity with increase the reflection at a cost of obscuring your interior scene. Increasing the amount of reflection will give the exterior objects more prominence as well, also at the cost of obscuring your interior portion of the scene. The trick is to find a pleasing balance. Right now I don't think the level of reflection/opacity is bad, so messing around with these parameters is an if you want to experiment kind of thing.
thanks Kelly,i'll keep working on that
Kismet2012: I like it with the fairy. I didn't mean to discourage you from using EmotiGuy, though...I just meant that it would have needed something more to make it work. It's a little hard to see what exactly the fairy is doing though...reaching out to catch something?
spmwc: This one is developing nicely. Biggest thing I see right now is, make sure your lights have shadows enabed. Personally I recommend using Raytraced shadows rather than Deep Shadow Maps (DSM). More realistic that way, but also takes longer to render. The DSMs unfortunately are known to cause some odd flaws in the final render.
wschwind: Looking good! If the moon is supposed to be the light source, make sure the moon itself is bright and appears to be glowing. If you're not sure how to achieve that, let us know what you're using for the moon (I'm guessing it's an image on a plane, or something like the Cyclorama).
No problem Scott. I really didn't intend to use the render with Emotiguy for the contest. The idea of him just tickled my fancy and I thought I would share.
The ball mirror has turned out to be a difficult option. It distorts the poses and makes it a challenge to place figure ideally but I will keep working on it.
I think that distortion is one of the neat aspects of the ball mirror, but it does take some trial and error to get a "nifty" reflection with it.
Adjusted slightly G2F's position and tweaked the pose of her right arm, the one reaching for the mirror ball.
Thanks for the comments Scott.
The moon is indeed meant to be the light source. The moon is an image on a plane which is reflected in the glass. My main spotlight is in front of the moon (it gives a slightly annoying reflection in the glass just at the base of the moon). I have another spotlight providing backlighting on the moon so that the reflection of the moon shows up in the glass.
Just an idea...maybe move the camera close to the character's face so that we're kind of getting a fairy's-eye-view?
Thanks for the comments Scott.
The moon is indeed meant to be the light source. The moon is an image on a plane which is reflected in the glass. My main spotlight is in front of the moon (it gives a slightly annoying reflection in the glass just at the base of the moon). I have another spotlight providing backlighting on the moon so that the reflection of the moon shows up in the glass.
It might help to use the Ambient setting (Surfaces pane) on the plane in order to give the moon more of a glowing appearance. You could use the diffuse texture in the Ambient channel and increase Ambient strength, or just increase Ambient strength with no image map...not sure which would look better in this instance.
Here is the result of increasing the ambient "strength" with no texture...actually the ambient strength was already 100% but I changed the color from black to light gray.
I does give a nice bright moon. Maybe too much for a reflection, but I'll play some more.
Thanks for the advice.
I've already used up both my entries, so this one's just for funsies.
I'm not sure what to do :(
It took somewhere between 18-20 hours for this render so when I added the smoke that I wanted to and re-setup the motion blur I knew the rendering would take longer so I lowered some of the rendering settings to try and compensate for this.
But now it's been 20 hours, 15 minutes and only at 61% done rendering and it appears the motion blur may not come out dark enough to see :(
I'm also thinking about scaling up the water so it's less choppy.
So I'm considering canceling the render and removing the motion blur but after 20 hours and to have to start all over this close to the end of the contest, I'm not so sure I should :(
Either your computer is drastically underpowered (possible, but not likely), or else you've got the inefficient advanced render settings/lighting/objects/effects for this render. I usualy chaff when a render takes more than 20 minutes (which some do). The usual suspects for long renders are the render settings (I can check back for my usual default settings when I get home), the light objects/sources used, and the amount of "nodes/angles" in the total object geometry. Certainly effects can look nicer with longer render times, but the price sometimes is nowhere worth the results if you are talking 20 hours on a 1920x1080 render in my book.
Of course another option if you have deeper pockets is to pay for a current generation high end Nvidia video card (say a 780gtx), and to get the Octane hardware render engine with Daz plug-in. That is roughly a $1000 USD combo option, but your render speeds should drastically improve. Personally I recommend the setting adjustments, and sacrificing a comparitively small amount of quality.
First thing I'd look at is the image size...until recently this contest had a limit of 800x800 pixels. While this has been relaxed, most people are still sticking at or near that size, so 1920x1080 might be bigger than you need, especially if speed is a concern. Aside from that, can you share your render settings?
Well, I do have 7 light sources in the image (1 distant light from behind the camera, 2 spot lights above the dragon, and each of the ivy plants with max ambient as well as converted to uber light source) then there's the semi transparent water with high reflectivity and the motion blur on the dragon.
I've also got to primitive cubes completely transparent with no shadows and the smoke shader applied.
As for my render settings (the ones I can see while it's rendering)
Bucket size: 16
Max ray depth: 1
Pixel x/y and shadow samples: 10
Gain: 0
Gamma: off
Gamma: .75
Shading rate: .05
Pixel filter: sync
Pixel filter x/y: 12
Motion blur: checked
Motion samples: 8
Motion amount: 600%
What I found with motion blur: I set my pose at the end result, then duplicate the figure. Hide everything on the 2nd figure except the part that's moving. Then I go back to the first character and set the animation (usually 5 or 6 frames). Then go to the first frame and render from the first frame. I set the motion blur to 100% for each frame (as this will render all frames in the animation and the 2nd character will produce a nice solid image of the final position for the motion) If I don't do 100% x number of frames, then the motion blur won't render all the frames.
I found that much easier than trying to figure out where in the animation the most motion takes place (as I've read in the tuts)
*edit*
I probably should take the size down, I've only just started attempting quality renders and since I'd also like to use it as my desktop wallpaper I've used my screen size for the image without thinking :O )
Ok, off the top of my head the following are different when I render:
Bucket size 8 = the number of pixels/points calculated in a single "square" as rendering (larger numbers means more memory use, if you overrun your physical memory, then you end up using your hard drive swap space, and drastic system slow down can happen).
Max ray trace depth 2-4 (this is the number of light bounces from each individual light source until the calculations end. If you want better/more accurate reflections then at least 2 is recommended, higher is a performance hit.)
Pixel samples x/y shadow samples x/y = 4 (higher numbers are a big calculation hit for larger sized renders. This means the number of calculation passes for each pixel's final color determination. Higher passes = greater per pixel color accuracy at a huge calculation cost per pass. This is where you can likely gain the most speed for the least reduction in overall quality as higher numbers of passes produce diminishing results with each pass.
The rest of the settings I'll likely have to double check when I get home. As far as I know the above settings are the "usual" render speed culprits. That and rendering the whole image 5-7 times for the blur effect with "stacked frames" is going to increase the total render time by literally the number of frames rendered (aka 5-7 times).
I am also going to highly recommend "Age of Armor" and their Advanced Spotlight, Advanced Ambient Light, and Advanced Distant Light. Each of these lighting products does a good job at lighting a scene without drastically impacting render speed in my experience. Compared to the "Uberlight" "Uber Environment lights" products I can reduce render times up to 40% (depending upon image size) at only a little cost of image quality. Of course this will vary with the individual parameter settings used, and number of light sources used in any case. However, I do at times blend the use of the two lighting products with good results as long as I'm prepared to take the time hit.
I'll try those 3 settings changes and see if that helps. (I had ray trace at 2 for the render used in the one I posted here, but knew that the extras I added for the final would increase render time and since that one took 18+ hours figured lowering it to 1 would help and not have much impact on looks)
I'll also use a smaller image size! LOL
Any ideas on how to get the "ghost" images from the motion blur to come out a little darker though? 1 of the spotlights was added specifically to try and highlight the arm so the blur would show up more, but that didn't seem to work.
Well, It's definitely much faster, in 2 hours and 15 min I'm at 57% completed. Unfortunately there is still a ton of noise in the pic and the last render by 63% was noise-free. I think going down to 4 on x/y and shadow samples was too low :(
That is probably true, but now you know what the tradeoff is for that parameter and can balance between noise and time.
Now that I'm at home the following settings are what I normally use (not trusting memory, hehe)
Bucket size = 8
Max Ray Trace Depth = 2
Pixel Samples x & Y = 6
Shadow Samples = 16
Gain = 1.0
Gamma Correction = off
Gamma = 1.0
Shading Rate = 1.0
Pixel Filter = Sinc
Pixel Filter x & y = 6.00
Motion blur = not selected
So upping the pixel samples a little bit and the shadow samples a fair amount should hopefully help moderate the noise levels without sacrificing a lot of speed.
I think I know where a lot of the speed was going so if my current settings aren't good enough I can bump it back up.
Basically I was only using 6 frames of animation, but (stupid me for not checking) from messing around with animation at an earlier point, the fps was set at 60.
This would probably explain the almost non-existent motion blur as well.
So I've set the fps to 6 and we'll see how everything comes out. When this one finishes, I'll post it up to see what you guys think and what suggestions you have that I might possibly be able to fix before the deadline.
Well here's a screenshot at 81% complete. I've reduced the render settings drastically to try to get this rendered in time for submission and I also had to remove the motion blur :( The dragon's arm was supposed to be swinging downwards but after over 24 hours and at only like 70-some % and it was still making the blur so light you couldn't really see it anyway. (I'll have to play with that on a test figure later)
Just a reminder
Only a few hours left to make sure that you add your images to the Entries only thread.
Contest Now CLOSED