Can Bryce skies be used at all with Carrara?

eponica

Just thought I'd ask, since I have a bunch of 'em :)

Stezza

Here's a quick render in Carrara using the rainbow sky from Bryce..

;-)

I saved the sky as an image file from Bryce and used as the Scene backdrop in Carrara

eponica

Very Nice! ^_^

What size/resolution did you render at in Bryce?

Stezza

Just the default settings .. I didn't adjust anything :-)

see attached

eponica

That is handy to know. Thanks! :)

evilproducer

You can use an image of a Bryce sky as Stezza demonstrated, but not the atmosphere itself. If you do have a spherical camera in Bryce, you can render out a 360º image and use it in the scene's Background, which wraps around the virtual universe, can be reflected and acts as an image based light (IBL) when the Skylight in the render room is enabled.

Carrara does come with a bunch of Realistic Sky Presets, plus Ringmonfort has a sale on, and he does have a set with Realistic Sky Presets.
http://www.daz3d.com/rm-realistic-sky-presets

If you do want to use a pre-rendered 360º sky from Bryce that would go into the scene's Background slot, then it should be a fairly high resolution and equi-rectangular, meaning it should be twice as wide as it is high. So just as an example, a high res, spherical render could be 8000 pixels wide by 4000 pixels high. You can use lower resolutions of course.

Stezza's example used an image in the Scene's Backdrop. Images in the Backdrop do not reflect and do not act as an IBL if the Skylight options in the render room is enabled. Also, to avoid distortions, the aspect of the image used in the Backdrop, should be the same aspect as the final rendered image, other wise distortions can occur in the image used as a backdrop. Basically, if you render a 16:9 aspect picture of a Bryce Sky, you will want to render the final Carrara image at a 16:9 aspect as well. The resolutions can be changed up or down, and as long as the 16:9 aspect is retained, the image in the background won't look distorted.

eponica

Wow! Very informative! ^_^ I am sure I will try this at some point :)

Dartanbeck

Yeah,
I am totally into using Carrara's Realistic Sky Editor (RSE)!
So I bought Ringo's as well as all of Tim Payne's Sky Products to learn from. It's really cool! You can mess around yourself with all of the wonderful settings without having to buy anything like that, but it's really neat to see how these pros do it, and it IS enlightening! Payne's come with fantastic reading material and Ringo's come with environments to show off the skies.

One of the things that really drove me into using the RSE is how the Sun light works with it. You can set the sun's position simply by rotating the light in the Assembly Room, or you can go into the RSE and drag the sun's position around in a little sky dome - and the moon works the same way with the Moon light, just put a check into the "Night" box and set the moon's position, either by rotating the light or using the little sky dome in the RSE!
If you do it rotating the light in the Assembly Room, and you face the light towards your viewing camera, you'll see the position of the Sun (or Moon) in the scene by an outline on the back wall of the working view - but only while the light is selected.

eponica

Hi Dartanbeck!

It sounds like the RSE is something I'll be exploring very soon! :)

I seem to recall last year DAZ had a Carrara-specific products sale. It only lasted a few days. Maybe they will do the same thing this year ;-)

Dartanbeck

eponica said:

Hi Dartanbeck!

It sounds like the RSE is something I'll be exploring very soon! :)

I seem to recall last year DAZ had a Carrara-specific products sale. It only lasted a few days. Maybe they will do the same thing this year ;-)Yeah, that's when I completed my collection ;)

In the meantime, don't let the RSE scare you.
To have some fun experimenting,

Open a new, empty scene

In the Instances Tray (lower right panel where you select all of your objects (Instances)), select the word "Scene"

In the right panel, at the top under "Atmosphere", select Realistic Sky

I usually turn the ground off right there. But that's your choice. You can also set how high the ground elevation is in that simple panel. 0.00 ft is at the point where the ground grid is. So if the ground is left on, anything under that grid will disappear under whatever color the ground is set at - hence my turning it off in favor of using my own ground plane, terrain, or whatever suits me for my scene.

Click the 'Edit' button to enter the RSE in all of its glory!

First of all, I like to turn off the Auto-Update on the preview on the left to speed up my settings changing experience

Have some fun changing the color of the whole sky by dragging the Sun around in the upper sky dome
Drag it all the way to the outer horizon edge (and also try slightly away from it) to see the sky turn red, pink, orange, depending upon how low the Sun is.

Now set the Sun to a good default position for your tastes in designing a sky. I use a range near noon (middle of the dome) and test other positions after tweaking a bit

Notice the tabs on the editor (vertically, along the left edge of the RSE window) and the various settings that accompany them.

For starting out, I suggest letting the Sun and the other aspects control sky color and such, but feel free to ignore that.We're all different, after all!

There's a tab for turning on, and coloring fog as well as turning on Sun Beams (God Rays)

The rest are for adding layers of clouds

It can be amazingly fun exploring the combinations of clouds using different layers of even the same type of cloud, but also varying the different type among the various layers, adjusting their heights, their coverage, etc.,

Now play around with the position of the sun again.

** Fog at a fairly low and fairly transparent setting can add some beautiful atmosphere to your scenes
=================================================================================

Now select the light in the scene, use the drop-down to change it from Distant to Sun

I like to place the Sun light in a place that's easy to see and manipulate while working on my actual scene. The default position of Light 1 usually isn't bad - but I drag it a little closer to the center of the floor grid, and often a bit lower.
=================================================================================

Now you should know that you may also load in a spherical background image or set a background gradient, or any other background setting to further enhance the atmosphere (RSE)

To do so, select the word "Scene" again in the Instances Tray, and see the Background (not Backdrop, which is different - another discussion) options ;)

evilproducer

If you click the Advanced button in the RSE located in the sun controls portion of the interface, you get a window where you can compute the sun's position by time, year, latitude and longitude, etc.

Neither here nor there, just a fun little thing you can do if you want.

Roygee

Bryce can also export HDRI - as Horo told me, it's not true HDRI, more like Medium DRI :)

As EP says, you need a high resolution image to use in the background - at least 8000 X 400 in 2:1 aspect ratio. As far as I can tell, the largest 2:1 resolution Bryce is capable of is 4000 X 200. What Bryce outputs as HDRI is good enough for global illumination, though.

What I did here is to render at 4000 X 2000, export as HDRI and save as .jpg. Put the HDRI into the background and the .jpg into the backdrop. Added a pronghorn sheep and set the HDRI at 200%, then rendered at 800 X 400 for the forum.

No other lights at all in the scene. Sadly, I couldn't give the sheep a shadow because shadow catcher doesn't work with GI. Has this been fixed in C8.5?

If I'd used a shadow catcher, I would have had to add a small light to give better shadow definition because GI gives soft surround light, without well-defined shadows.

evilproducer

Roygee said:

Bryce can also export HDRI - as Horo told me, it's not true HDRI, more like Medium DRI :)

As EP says, you need a high resolution image to use in the background - at least 8000 X 400 in 2:1 aspect ratio. As far as I can tell, the largest 2:1 resolution Bryce is capable of is 4000 X 200. What Bryce outputs as HDRI is good enough for global illumination, though.

What I did here is to render at 4000 X 2000, export as HDRI and save as .jpg. Put the HDRI into the background and the .jpg into the backdrop. Added a pronghorn sheep and set the HDRI at 200%, then rendered at 800 X 400 for the forum.

No other lights at all in the scene. Sadly, I couldn't give the sheep a shadow because shadow catcher doesn't work with GI. Has this been fixed in C8.5?

If I'd used a shadow catcher, I would have had to add a small light to give better shadow definition because GI gives soft surround light, without well-defined shadows.

I knew that Bryce was supposed to be able to render and hdri but didn't know the steps, the quality or if it would be spherical so I didn't want to steer the OP in the wrong direction. Thanks for explaining your work flow. Bummer about the resolution limitation.

Roygee

Yes, it is a pity about the size limitation - what I find a bigger nuisance is that shadow catcher does not work with IBL. If that was fixed in 8.5 it may be enough inducement for me to buy :)