Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Welcome to the thread! I am very happy you are joining the fun :). You have very nice rim light on the mountains and Evil has got some great tips about the lighting with screen grabs, too.
About Ambient Light. The consensus is that as a rule, you should turn it off or down. But I find that, as with all rules, there are some exceptions. For example, with the outdoor scene you can get some pretty interesting results, when you make the Ambient Light (EP shows you how to access it) a very dark blue color (low brightness, but maximum saturation and bluish hue) and turn it up to 40% or even 60%. In the daylight, when your other lights are white or yellowish, it can compensate for the warmth of main lights and fake the bluish sky ambiance you get during the day. At night, when most lights are bluish, it can enhance the effect. And at night I might change the ambient light color to purple or brownish-black for a more sinister look. The point is, that when you set the light color to something very dark, you can get away with a much higher Ambient Light brightness level, without the image looking washed out, and you can use it to enhance your lighting without expense to the render time :).
Sorry if this is too confusing, if it is, please ask more questions.
And good luck with your scene!
I have a few more things I need to fix and a few things I want to add but I think it's almost there. This is a low accuracy render of the full scene.
Welcome to the thread! I am very happy you are joining the fun :). You have very nice rim light on the mountains and Evil has got some great tips about the lighting with screen grabs, too.
About Ambient Light. The consensus is that as a rule, you should turn it off or down. But I find that, as with all rules, there are some exceptions. For example, with the outdoor scene you can get some pretty interesting results, when you make the Ambient Light (EP shows you how to access it) a very dark blue color (low brightness, but maximum saturation and bluish hue) and turn it up to 40% or even 60%. In the daylight, when your other lights are white or yellowish, it can compensate for the warmth of main lights and fake the bluish sky ambiance you get during the day. At night, when most lights are bluish, it can enhance the effect. And at night I might change the ambient light color to purple or brownish-black for a more sinister look. The point is, that when you set the light color to something very dark, you can get away with a much higher Ambient Light brightness level, without the image looking washed out, and you can use it to enhance your lighting without expense to the render time :).
Sorry if this is too confusing, if it is, please ask more questions.
And good luck with your scene!
Absolutely Antara! I look at the "rules" and tend to call them guidelines. It is important to know what the rules are, so that you know when it is okay to bend or break them.
If I use ambient light outside, there's an option in the Effects tab to use the sky to drive the color.
I do think it would be helpful to have it turned down or off by default, as 20% is pretty high to start. I
Very cool!
Absolutely Antara! I look at the "rules" and tend to call them guidelines. It is important to know what the rules are, so that you know when it is okay to bend or break them.
If I use ambient light outside, there's an option in the Effects tab to use the sky to drive the color.
I do think it would be helpful to have it turned down or off by default, as 20% is pretty high to start. I
there's a way turn off the ground?! i kept trying to lower it, but turning it off would be even better.
it's kewl how you made the ski tracks in the snow
RE: turning off the ground. If you select the screen in the lower right instances box, and open the atmosphere tab in the upper right, and choose realistic sky, the editor for realistic skies will appear. There is a checkbox to display ground or not. I think it is on by default. Easy to change. The editor also has a separate ability to display the height of the ground. Hope it helps.
Note, the atmosphere is under effects for the scene tab.
Edit - evil producers screen grab above shows the check box for turning on and off "enabling ground" and changing the ground color. You can always turn off the default ground and insert an infinite plane. That gives more shader options and easier control of ground height.
Hi Folks,
Shame, shame on me! I haven't been following this thread.
Today I just started backwards from the last page to about page 17 so far and mostly confined myself to looking at pictures. (A bit like I do with a lot of reading material).
Let me congratulate each and every one on the STUNNING work being displayed.
These are beautiful renders and so accomplished in the use of techniques of lighting, etc.
This completely wipes away all pessimism concerning the capabilities of the software for me. And it's refreshing to see landscapes, interiors and other subjects which aren't figure-centric.
Great work.
Promise to self: read through this whole thread to learn how to do amazing things.
bloodmoon preset doesn't give a checkbox for ground.
There is a "sky" setting, and a "realistic sky" setting. I'm on my tablet, not my computer so I can't test or confirm blodmoon specific features. in the presets tab, is bloodmoon a regular sky or a realistic sky? The realistic sky is the one that comes with more advanced features and more fine tuned controls.
Hopefully someone will show up soon who has Carrara running to check.
Hi Misty
you can change the ground height using different value ... see image ;-)
There's a little checkbox that says enable Ground. Uncheck it if you don't want it.
Just a note about about lowering the horizon altitude. In a medium scene the number value is in inches (unless you choose metric). So, entering a value of 100 will "lower" the horizon 100 inches. You can force it to use feet by typing in "ft" after the value and Carrara will translate the ft value into inches.
One other observation from me, is that the horizon value has a minimal effect on the horizon line in the far distance. Where it makes a real noticeable difference is the if the ground is enabled. If the ground is set at 0, then objects will disappear under it if you lower them. If you lower it, then objects will not, unless you place them lower than the ground. The sample images with the sphere show the ground (and horizon line) set to 0 for the first one, and then -1000 Feet for the second one. The ground plane is clearly lower as there is more atmospheric haze. If you compare the horizon line in relation to the sphere, is has lowered, but barely. This is actually good. as the horizon is a long way away and 1000 feet would look tiny from that distance.
Just saw your follow up! Go with Pimpy for the sky.
I think there are two versions of atmosphere because the Sky presets may be the original implementation and the Realistic Skies may be the more newer implementation. This is just a guess though.
heheh solved the ground problem by tilting the camera up. :)
had my first go at surface replicator :cheese:
gonna try something simpler, like model a gumdrop and then surface replicate sugar crystals or sprinkles
clicking around the interface, i saw something for gel lights. attempted the barnyard doors, then blinds.
@ Misty, you can also use images (maps) as a gel. Either colored, gray scale or black and white. You can also load movies or image sequences under the map option. You can use the gel in the light cone.
Nearly everything in Carrara can be animated, including most shader functions. You can even load movies and image sequences into shader channels if you use the Texture map option. You could load one into the bump channel, the reflection channel, etc. The only one that doesn't handle maps is the Sub-Surface Scattering channel.
Rather than try and go through the hundreds of changes I made to my Dells scene to make it look like winter, I will touch on a couple key changes and provide a before and after shot.
First, I really re-worked the shaders on the terrains and trees. Next, I replaced the leaves on the pine trees with the snow clump leaves that came with Howie's Snow scene which should be included with Carrara's Native Content.
I then created a vertex plane to match the size of the river. To simplify the UV process, I left it square. I then used the 3D paint tool to paint the darker ice's general position. I opened the resulting image map in Photoshop and refined it. I used soft select on the plane to create drifts. I turned on smoothing and displacement painted on the plane to further help sell the look of snow and ice.
The rock outcrops are separate vertex objects. To make it look like snow has fallen on them, I selected the areas I felt snow would accumulate and copied and pasted. I then offset the new polymesh by translating upwards slightly. The new polymesh lost the displacement, which was fine with me, as I wanted them to look smoother. I then used soft select to bend the edges down to collide with the original mesh so that it looked like it was sitting on the rocks, rather than floating above them. I then selected the entire new polymesh and created a snow shading domain.
I altered the shaders on my ferns to look brown and dead. I then reduced the number of replications to suggest that some are buried under the snow.
Just gorgeous! My little green landscape monster is waking up!
Such a great use of perspective to sell the scale of the scene.
I added my replicated crystals. I ended up modelling the crystal - it's the simplest model ever (just a 5-side cylinder with the top widened and split into triangular polys and the center point raised up) I then replicated my crystal on the snow pile on the floor, on the door knob and painted a distribution map on the door and door frame and replicated the crystals there as well. For painting the distribution map, I had to separate the door into a new shading domain and re-UV-map it.
The room model started out as Movie Sets, Country Home by DreamlandModels, but I ended deleting everything but the room itself and removing all the picture frames and rugs from the room itself too. I then re-created the picture frames as separate objects, and UV-mapped them (for some reason the original UVs were completely messed up) and replaced the rugs with the one from Reflections Victorian Bedroom and another from IN Fantasy RiverCottage by winnston1984. I added all the other props in - some from Faveral's Kelly Lodge, some from Jack Tomalin's Holiday Nook and Dream Home: Breakfast Nook Furniture (some of those altered to fit my scene's needs), threw in some freebies and thus created my full interior.
I described creating the view outside the window and frosting over the interior in my other posts.
But at the end of it all, I have the following.
- the last partial render of the resplicated frost crystals.
- composite of the room with partial frost showing at the door - potential final image #1
- the frosted room with the crystals. - potential final image #2
And now I cannot decide which one of the 2 images/interpretations I like best... help? :)
Also any suggestions for better compositing or other improvements would also be very useful! Please, don't hold back.
I was going to add a human figure into the scene initially, but now I kinda like the mystery of not having the figure there... What do you think?
( I should probably mention, that the frosted room version was sort of inspired by this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCuqT2H_-w0
I was listening to the song as I was creating this image - it was the most frequent in my playlist, and the image evolved into what it is under the song's influence. That song is very addictive and plays weird games with my imagination...)
Forgot to add another frosted version with the underlining object textures showing through the frost/ice.
That looks really good Antara. Is there a way to make the frost a bit more white? It blends in to the rest of the picture, and it creates such a nice texture, it would be cool if it were lightened.
Very atmospheric!
Ah which I would like to see this sequence in animation…
If It will be me, I would put two old people died in the armchairs to show the effects of the global bank crisis…
Or..., you could put the avatar of EP which couldn't have repaired its heating ! :-)
Just some reference images of the area I was trying to capture when I built the Dells scene. These are not my photos, but photos I found online and used as rough references.
Sorry, I am a bit confused: Which frost are you referring to? and in which version of the images? the one where the room textures show through, or the one where the room is not frosted except for the door?
The one in the the second post. I can see that it is different in color. It's probably color bleed from the light reflected off the walls making white frost look blueish, if you're using Indirect Light.
Did you mean something like this?:
or as in second image - just draining the color out of the frost?
I've been biting my tongue wanting to say something like "it doesn't look like the Dells without any Ducks!" but now that you've posted a pic with a Duck I am satisfied. :) I think I've actually been on the tour that includes that one with the wooden walkway.
I used to go up there at least once a year (yes, I am one of the many Illinois-ans who invade Wisconsin every Summer). ;)
I think the frost looks more frosty in the second one! Great work on both!
I've been biting my tongue wanting to say something like "it doesn't look like the Dells without any Ducks!" but now that you've posted a pic with a Duck I am satisfied. :) I think I've actually been on the tour that includes that one with the wooden walkway.
I used to go up there at least once a year (yes, I am one of the many Illinois-ans who invade Wisconsin every Summer). ;)
Not framed the best, but does this work for you? ;-)
It's amazing to me how many people from Illinois think that the Dells is the North Woods. :lol:
It also amazes me how many tourists in the Dells never get out of their resort or water park to actually see the natural beauty of the area. If you haven't done so, I would seriously recommend a visit to Devil's Lake State Park in Baraboo.
If you want to head even further north, like all the way north in Wisconsin, Bayfield, Madeline Island, and Cornucopia are all worth a visit. Bayfield is very particular about how they are developed, and many parts of it look like a New England seaside town, with Brownstone buildings mixed in.
For you east coasters that have Brownstone town houses in your historic neighborhoods, the stone was quarried in northern Wisconsin near the Lake Superior shore and shipped east to the big cities along with iron ore and lumber.
Here are some WIPs for my second entry. More figures from Poser. We have Squeaker and the Nutcracker. I fiddled with their textures. I made a crown, a shirt, and a cloak for the king of the rats. For the cloak, I used soft body physics by attaching it at the collar and having a soft body proxy over Squeaks back. Seemed to speed up the drape pretty well. I also made the book. I used a surface replicator for the rat minions so they would look chaotic, but a regular replicator so the nutcrackers would look ordered.
Lots of content so I hope I remember it all.
- holiday nook set from Daz
- Squeaker and nutcracker from Poser
- Wedge cut hair from Daz
- The freak warhammer from Daz
- Sword rapier from Daz
- Sword Valiant from Daz
- Dagger from Daz
Edit to add
- The Kid 4, clothes for kid 4 (boxers and tshirt)
I hope I can get at least one of my projects cleaned up and submitted.