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Stezza, Sounds promising and the bottle looks great! :) I am looking forward to figuring out what the whole image is going to be about as you keep working on it :).
MDO2010 That's one neat and very cool scene. I like the rotated view and the image idea. May I suggest zooming in into the scene a little? I think that would allow you a bit more freedom of rotation.
Bob Ross would be proud. And I mean that as a compliment!
Thank you- I mean that. I grew up with his happy little trees; the shows helped me when I first started learning how to oil paint in my early teens.
It was a simple mixture of the "Red Mesa" preset and the "complex green" preset with a fractal blender. Ugh, indeed.
Here is an improvement (I hope) in which I edited a shader acquired in the store.
- I loaded the forest floor shader from Dartanbeck's Woodlands product. Great environment kit. See attached store screenshot!!!!!!!!!
- under the global tab, which uses some pure colors, I replaced the colors with gradients of similar color in which a narrow band of white was included so there could be occasional spots of snow
- I then edited the component terrain layers by
-- increasing the bump amplification (there is a map based bump)
-- changing the "land" type layer to a mixer, Dart's texture map -based shader automatically moves to the first slot
-- change the second slot to yet another mixer (a mixer within a mixer? love Carrara shaders)
-- in the blender slot, used a "slope" in the environment category so that second shader only appears on relatively flat areas
-- Dart's shader slides to the first slot here as well
-- In second slot, create a white shader for snow (so areas with vegetation will have spots with snow where flat)
-- Copy bump map from Dart's texture map shader to the bump of this vegetation/snow mix
-- For the mixer, used a cellular but increased intensity so more black and white and less gray
Intention
1) broad areas of smooth snow are created with the dual terrains
2) spotty areas of rough snow appear scattered over the flat parts of mountain that appear to have vegetation
3) occasional spots of snow appear if the global "brown" is ever invoked
I will keep experimenting but to my eye this is an improvement.
Improvement? (Note - the render settings were lower for this test render)
I deliberately used a wider angle camera on this one than I normally do in order to get all the stuff I made into the shot, but I think you might be right.
This happens to me all the time - I get a couple ideas and then try to cram them all into one image and when it doesn't quite work I can't make myself scrap any of them. The resulting image often looks OK but there's no real point to it - no focal point or story. I need to get better at editing myself. :)
I'm going to finish this one up and then save all the pieces to my object library and see what else I can construct that has a clearer focal point.
Mark
diomede64 Yes, that is much better! I love how the more vertical bits look like bare rock, while the shallower ones seem to have vegetation. The suggestion I would still want to make is to bring out and brighten up the snow patches in the complex shader terrain, so they would match the snow terrain snow better. Also, what is the implied scale of this terrain? Are we seeing it from very far away?
One of the issues I've noted about terrain shaders is that it's hard to get them dark enough to look, say, like wet earth, or to have sharp contrasting patches like you would see on a hillside with dark wet earth interrupted by light-yellowish and greyish clusters of dried up grass. Even when I used extreme colors like near blacks, the terrains rendered washed out and lighter than I expected. Is there a setting in the terrain shader that I am missing or misusing?
I think I am seeing a similar effect in your terrain. Or maybe you are just not using dark colors here?
My own issue, however, requires help from more experienced users here. I got inspired by DUDU_00001's use of metaball particle generators to create snow here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/714340/
And I wanted to try using a particle generator to cover a roof with snow. But my problem is that the particles don't stay put when they collide with the surface. No matter how much I increase the friction.
Is it even possible and how would one set it up?
The goal is to have a wide area particle generator which would rain down metabals, which would drop onto any surface below and just stay there instead of bouncing back or sliding off.
I am a total noob when it comes to particles and I was never able to get the to do what I want, so I think I will need a lot of help with this.
I deliberately used a wider angle camera on this one than I normally do in order to get all the stuff I made into the shot, but I think you might be right.
This happens to me all the time - I get a couple ideas and then try to cram them all into one image and when it doesn't quite work I can't make myself scrap any of them. The resulting image often looks OK but there's no real point to it - no focal point or story. I need to get better at editing myself. :)
I'm going to finish this one up and then save all the pieces to my object library and see what else I can construct that has a clearer focal point.
Mark
This is one of the reasons I so often use ready-made content :) - I don't get attached to it, and have no problem excluding it from the final frame, deleting or replacing it, or morphing it into something it wasn't meant to be.... ;) if I had to spend over an hour on each element of my scene, I'd get attached to each and every one of them, too, and would want to show them off. Working in film, however, taught me that the person who wrote the script should not be allowed to make the final editing decisions on which scenes to keep and which to cut, because they will wan to keep it all in, even at the expense of the final product pace, dynamic and coherence. (There are some exceptions to this rule, and people do learn to make those tough decisions, but it's a skill that's not easy to acquire, even when people deliberately try to be objective and detached.)
What I am trying to say is that I can wholeheartedly relate to your experience here :).
But I think your scene lends itself well to the POV change. You can duplicate your row of houses and have them make a sort of T-shaped street intersection (we'd see one row of houses and running up to the road in front of it would be your second row, so you'd have your houses on both sides of the park, with the streets and cars on both edges), and then the park trees can be moved around to fit into your frame whatever that frame ends up being. But if your focal point is the jogger, then we should see him/her more prominently and the composition should lead us to that figure.
I also loved that you have two other pedestrians in the frame, and I'd love to see them more up close to see their reaction to the crazy jogger :), there is a great comedic potential there. You can probably even position the camera behind the jogger to showcase the reactions more.
I think you can even do a much lower street level view, and still be able to showcase your park trees, your house rows, your streets, cars, lights and figures.
(I found some images which show low angle POV with plenty of background details both natural and architectural)
Antara,
In this case, try to use metaballs as primitive and mix them manually.
You could try also these metaballs with a surface replicator...
So, is it really impossible to make the particles plop down and stay put where they fell? (I am asking this not just for this example, but to have a broader understanding on how this works.)
Yes, if you put the gravity to 500, collision distance of 1 and look at the materials: no bouncing and a maximum of friction and mass.
You must look also at the interaction between metaballs.
The material of the ground is important too (no bounce).
Sorry, I think I will require some more help on this. In the image I am attaching, I am showing the settings I have for my emitter. The emiter is placed ABOVE my objects in the scene (but the orientation of it is not changed). The physical properties in the little sub-window are shared by all objects in the scene, including the particle emitter, yet the blasted things bounce all over the place after they initially come down. Although I'd think that with these settings they should have just stayed down... no? (I have a plane on the ground level and some text objects on which I wanted to plop these things.)
I'm going to take your advice and move the camera down and closer to the characters (although they are all just Loretta/Lorenzo LoRez so they may suffer at closer range). My instinct is to set it up looking over the couple's shoulders toward the jogger, but I'll try it both ways and see which I like. If I'm showing the couple's reactions I may need to switch them out for V4/M4 to get better expressions.
I already have enough houses in this image to make a small town. :) I originally had a higher POV on this and need more to be visible behind the first row, so it's just a matter of moving them around.
Before I put my Legos back in the box and start over, here's the more or less final version of this POV. I think I may need to redo the spiral the lights are on and make it visible after all - at full size it's really obvious the lights are floating in midair. :(
Also attached are some images of the shader on the waterfront cement. I used an Elevation function to make it darker, shinier and a little bit reflective close to the water. Looking at my render I may have accidentally reversed which part is reflective.
Mark
Sorry, I think I will require some more help on this. In the image I am attaching, I am showing the settings I have for my emitter. The emiter is placed ABOVE my objects in the scene (but the orientation of it is not changed). The physical properties in the little sub-window are shared by all objects in the scene, including the particle emitter, yet the blasted things bounce all over the place after they initially come down. Although I'd think that with these settings they should have just stayed down... no? (I have a plane on the ground level and some text objects on which I wanted to plop these things.)
Antara,
I'm looking at a test which I made a few times ago, it is a logo which appears in the sand.
It's an animation, but it has been more than one hour that I launched the render of the last image and the simulation is only at 11%… I devoted many many hours to the particles and I know that enormously requires calculations to the PC, especially with metaballs.
What you do you want to make is a still image, why do not use a surface replicator ?
I see in your screenshot that you have velocity, it must be to zero, gravity does the work.
Some quick rearranging and here are two tests of a lower POV with the fog and snow turned off. I think I like the one with jogger coming toward camera more.
I'm going to have to fix some textures working this close - most of that was set up to be seen from more of a distance. Maybe I'll add a little bit of replicated grass to the park ground too since you can see it so much more clearly from this range. :)
Mark
The thing about Carrara is that the particle system is not a fluid simulation. You can't really fill a glass with a meta-ball particle emitter even though it looks fluid. The same goes for piling them up like snow flakes forming a pile of snow.
I wonder if it is possible to make a slightly lumpy flat-ish shape and use Bullet to drape it over a surface such as a rock or something? Can Bullet simulations be frozen?
Hi EP,
The bullet simulations for the rigid bodies can be converted into keyframes thus froozed at each image, but can you imagine the enormous work of calculations for the computer ?
For the soft bodies, to export like .obj at the desired image and to reimport it should work but, for one object at a time ! %-P
Ah, thank you for the velocity tip! I'll try that now :)
I am not asking about it for the still image sake. I want to do an animation at some point and understanding how particles work would be of huge help. For example I was wondering whether I can use the image setup I am thinking of for this challenge to create an animated New Years card, kind of like you did with that excellent Santa animation. So even if I do the surface replicator for the challenge image, I would still need the particles for the card :).
I really like all the elements here. The garbage bins, the benches, the water and the concrete parapet, the details of the tree trunks being also wrapped in lights - those look really cool up close, especially where they follow the bend of the bendy tree. These details make this little world look lived in.
I like both compositions. And I think the key factor that drives this story now will be the posing of the 3 figures. You sell the cold through the girl shivering. And the man looking stunned, or by giving the jogger a more nonchalant trotting pose while the man half-turns towards him, eyes bulging :). If the figures get closer to each other it will give them more interaction and bring our attention to them more.
Very cool image. I look forward to seeing it with the fog and improved textures.
Here a progression of my work.
I spent my Sunday to recreate a specimen of the first inhabitants of the European far North, a Sami.
I used as model the photograph of a very a good friend with which I carried out films during of long years, with him and his family.
Difficult to recreate the traditional outfit, and moreover, there is many shader domains for the strips.
The second photograph is the image which I carried out in PS for these strips.
I changed lighting to test because it's the moment of the year when the reindeers return in the mountain after they passed the summer on the Norwegian coastal islands and it's the polar night soon!
OUPS, after the render, I see that the belt is badly placed...
PS: VERY nice atmosphere, Mark !
I'm still working on fixing textures (replaced the tree textures, added real grass to the grass, painted "no diving" on the cement, added some dirt around the tree bases and increased some bumps here and there) and I think I'm going to have to replace the characters with more detailed models, but I was inspired by Stezza's post and added a secret message to my image. :)
secret messages... how cool is that.. :-)
I managed to get a few models made during our dismal cricket loss to South Africa.. oh the pain...
Managed to get an esky made with ice cubes in it ( using the replicator )... the bottles of beer with caps on them for the esky.. of course I did a cricket bat & ball as well as a ladder and some iced up guy that my Granddaughter absolutely loves... apparently it reminds her of something... hmmm
and a pair of tongs... need to make a sausage now for the tongs..
never ending!... lol
time for a drink ;-)
I'm glad to see you doing this stuff. That's my intention for making them into such broad "Kits" instead of just single-setting products. The maps are very simple to use, and there's a matching collection for colors, bump, and highlights. So there are MANY possibilities therein. Same goes for everything else in the kits - terrains, effects, and lights are all super simple to tweak out and make your own, now that the example are there, all set up already! Bravo, diomede!
BTW, you honor me using my stuff like this... thanks, my friend! :)
OK, I turn my back for a minute and the thread explodes. Too much to comment on. There is a lot of great stuff going on here. :)
Hopefully, I've got my head around this Challenge. I'm going for a sort of glamour model shot using a close up of the figure as the main focus of the poster. My first challenge was getting a character I liked. V4 and her morphs ended up being my go to girl yet again. I have no clue what texture set I used because I went through so many before deciding. I'll pay more attention next time.
My next challenge was to create some geometry to simulate a fur hat and collar. I modeled both objects in Silo (because we all know I'm Carrara Vertex room challenged). After modelling the hat and collar pieces, I moved them into Carrara and added dynamic fur. For some reason, Carrara wouldn't let me add guide hairs to the tops of my hat and collar models, so I had to use the hair shader to control the way the fur looked. There's a lot of frizz, kink and length variation going on there. :) In the end, it worked better than I was expecting.
Next, I've got some experimenting to do with replicators. :)
Hi all,
here my first image for this challenge...
Will post more later as I have questions for several of these great ideas ... have lots of work this week but catching up as I want my new computer setup working before I start on the challenge. Am afraid to move my kit until after work is done in case something does not work after relocation. It's happened before. :down:
Nice effect with the fur! :wow: I have something similar but will not be the main object in the scene. She was a WIP for another project I did not use at the time and will have to re-work her. See below for a demo shot as she was just an idea for my author friend's book and not refined.
What did you mean about not being able to add guide hairs? In the hair room you can REDUCE the size of the cursor down to a tiny size to both shade in the green area by holding down CTRL (on PC) and to place guide hairs in awkward places areas if that was a problem. Sorry if it isn't.
DUDU .... love the reindeer, but then you know my fondness for them! :)
Stezza ... sorry about the cricket, but they only beat you by 3 wickets! Secret message? :ahhh:
MDO .... I love the trees in your scene and will look closer at how you did them! :cheese:
:-) Silene
My first thought was a bit naughty... snowperson on right should have branch/arm resting on snowperson on left's bottom (tier)! 8-/
:-) Silene
it was also my thought ...:red: but we are so close to Christmas that we must to be good... :)
First of all, I want to thank you all, because I noticed that every time I get a chance to follow these challenges, I get extra excited to wake up in the morning, because I know I'll have a page or 2 of great interesting and inspirational posts to read. Some much better than news with my morning tea! (News just make me depressed for the rest of the day...)
pimpy love the lovey-dovey snowpersons!!! :) Can't wait to see what the context for the image is. There is a slavic folk tale about a snow maiden. I wonder if she was this couple's love child :).
SileneUKbest of luck setting things up in the new place! I am looking forward to your take on the theme.
booksbydavid, That fur looks gorgeous. I can't wait to see it fully rendered. Are you going to use replicators to put some snow on it? :) If you do, please share the details. I have an image I need to rework with a similar effect, because I don't like how it worked in post. http://fav.me/d793g46
Pity we cannot use the dynamic hair for the surface replicator.
Stezza You are having a fun collection of objects there! :)
Mark, your scene is shaping up nicely. And I agree with Stezza, secret messages are fun! (and a good way to invite people to look at the full resolution version :). I should try doing it too! :)
DUDU_00001 That scene is looking better and better. Love the historical research and detail that's going into your image!
(on a side note, I still wasn't able to make the particles stick to the text objects, but at least now they fall to the ground and most of them stay there - not all, though...)
diomede64 Thank you so much for keeping on top of the Commons thread!
TO ALL: If you can spare a moment, please help us keep the Commons thread up and running, so it wouldn't be just diomede64 and me in there :) http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/48769/ Also, as this thread gets more and more pages, the first few responses in the Commons thread serve as this thread's index, so if you are looking for a particular topic discussion you know you've seen in the last N pages of this thread somewhere, head to the Commons thread and it will help you find what you are looking for!
This is one way to have the shader for the snow embedded on the shader tree of the main mountain terrain match the shader applied to the second more smooth mountain terrain that is acting as the big snow banks. One way is to focus on either (a) the opacity mask (if you are using a layer list) or (b) the blender (if you are using a multichannel mixer). Make sure that the mask/blender is made up of pure whites and blacks, not grays.
This also suggests a way to darken areas of a terrain. Use a mixer of the terrain shader with a dull black as a second color, and make sure that the blender applies grays where you want the terrain darkened.
In the attached, I demonstrate how to match the snow patches to the snow banks. I created similar terrains as my WIP, but applied the preset "green and rock" as the shader for the main mountain and a simple white color for the terrain that is snow. I chose the "green and rock" preset because it starts with darker colors that might be closer to what you were discussing.
1 - a render to show start presets
I then made a quick black/white map in paint program (no grays).
2 - quick black/white map
I then edited the shader tree of the main terrain. I made a layer list, with the "green and rock" preset sliding to the 1st slot. I then applied the same white shader of he second terrain to the second slot of the layer list. For the second opacity mask, I used the black/white map that I made (I also inverted the colors).
3 - edited shader tree
Pure white patches now appear scattered over the mountain terrain that match the big snow banks created by the duplicate terrain.
4 - render of terrain with edited shaders
To answer your other questions, the snow patches/bank mountain is intended to be far away, which I will try to convey by improving the foreground and mid ground so it doesn't look like the foreground is part of the same mountain. For a couple of reasons, I am going to choose not to match the distant snow patches with the big snow banks. One reason is that the patches would be partially obscured by the vegetation (including fallen leaves, needles, branches and other debris) while the big snow banks are on top.
To everyone - I have made some of my comments on your WIP in the commons thread. I'm probably wrong so feel free to set the record straight. :coolsmile:
I'm glad to see you doing this stuff. That's my intention for making them into such broad "Kits" instead of just single-setting products. The maps are very simple to use, and there's a matching collection for colors, bump, and highlights. So there are MANY possibilities therein. Same goes for everything else in the kits - terrains, effects, and lights are all super simple to tweak out and make your own, now that the example are there, all set up already! Bravo, diomede!
BTW, you honor me using my stuff like this... thanks, my friend! :)
Love your enviro kits, Dart. Among the many reasons that these are such great products is that I can explore all of the shader settings that you used, where the lights are (and their settings), etc. to better understand how different Carrara elements work together.
You made a great work. Thank you!