Bioluminescent Plants

[Xenonnoble28]

Made this for a genetic engineering project i'm working on.

Any suggestions you have would be welcome

[Walli]

funny!

I also have a bioluminiscent plant for download on my page: http://wallis-eck.de/2013/2010/01/exobotanik/

[masonspappy]

Curious as to how you are illuminating the plants. I would have expeceted to see light relections on the grass (or othe rvegetation)  surrounding the glowing  plants, but see none.

[cyphyr]

I've tried this before (not with such complete results as here though) using Walli's luminous plants and others I've made my self. I was never able to create anything as good as the night time plants in Avatar. I think possible that rendering with some very high GI settings might help but that will be a huge hit on render times.
Nonetheless a good render
Richard

[Xenonnoble28]

I made the petals glow by replacing the surface shader of some of the petals with a default shader. Then I set the color image and luminosity image as the original shader.

I did the same thing to the windows in the castle as well.

Ideally I would like the glow from the petals to reflect off of the grass but turning up the grass's reflectivity didn't seem to have an effect.

I did ray trace everything thinking it would help but that doesn't seem to have done anything either.

hmm...

[Jo Kariboo]

Nice experimentation and original ! 

[Oshyan]

Neither of those two approaches (turning up reflectivity or RT everything) are going to really help, particularly the latter as RT everything doesn't affect lighting in that way. First off, make sure you are rendering with Global Illumination (GI). If you're not, you'll never get light off of those objects. Second, you could try turning up the Luminosity (put in numbers higher than 1), but this will affect the look of these objects, possibly too much (you might be able to compensate for extreme brightness with higher Soft Clip values). You could also try increasing GI detail/sample quality. Lighting up the surroundings with luminous objects is certainly possible, but it takes fairly high values most of the time (which is actually realistic, generally speaking).

- Oshyan

[Dune]

You might be able to fake it, using a plane object with brightly illuminated spots (perhaps perlin 3D) hanging over the flowers, but invisible to the camera. Use the same seed for plant distribution.

[Tangled-Universe]

Yeah I'd go for the GI solution as well.
This is quite challenging though, but should be do-able.

Oshyan's suggestions are right. It's difficult to estimate though what would be the best approach.

GI surface details may be beneficial here, but that's difficult to say. I believe it's mainly meant to be used if you want very detailed shadows in small shadow areas, like in vegetation. So I'm not very convinced by it's usefulness, but it might be worth exploring.
Also, using GI surface details in combination with water-rendering will make TG cry for mercy.
So if you go for GI surface details at some point then render the grass area as crop without water.

First I'd say try a little crop with pretty insane values, just to see if the principle works.
So instead of systematically working upwards with the settings we're going to do it the other way around.
Just hit the renderer's GI with a big hammer and if it doesn't show improvement, then leave the idea.

So for instance, try the following:
Render detail 0.8
GI relative detail @ 4
GI sample quality @ 16
SS prepass enabled
Optional: increase "strength on surfaces" from 1 to 1.5 or 2 in the enviro light node.
Optional: GI surface details enabled

GI relative detail @ 4 will give you very dense GI sampling (many dots in prepass) and the value for sampling @ 16 16 will make sure that whatever you sample at each GI dot will be very accurate.

Also be aware that you use enough atmosphere samples, as this also can affect GI.
I don't think you need to crank it up to insane values, but just make sure you don't use less than 64 samples for example.

This may seem a bit lunatic and uneducated, but this crop will finish in about an hour or so and then you'll know if it's a feasible approach or not.

You might be able to fake it, using a plane object with brightly illuminated spots (perhaps perlin 3D) hanging over the flowers, but invisible to the camera. Use the same seed for plant distribution.

Using the same seed wouldn't help if the geometry it's placed on isn't the same as the planet's surface where the plants are on.

If you would make a population of spheres/rocks, disable visibility, give them the same density/area size/area position/seed then they would be on the exact same spot.
Then in the object maker of that population you set the offset on Y to +X metres.

I'd go for the GI approach though, still.

[Dune]

If you stretch the Y, you might get close.

[Tangled-Universe]

If you stretch the Y, you might get close.

No need to if you do it the way I propose, because instances will be created at the exact same spot as the plants through the populator's cloned settings. The object maker will then shift the object position up in Y.
This won't be close, but exact.

[Dune]

Didn't read your last sentences properly, Martin. Good idea, I'll keep it in mind.

[TheBadger]

Thanks for that link walli!

I like the idea of the OP image. Hope there will be more of this! Some of the best (or my favorite) renders on this site, have gorgeous lighting, but as a result have some very dark foregrounds. Bioluminescents looks like a great way to keep that great atmo lighting you can get near twilight, but also keeps foregrounds from going to waste.

[Xenonnoble28]

Here's a test render that i did with the settings that Oshyan recommended

It's already looking a lot better. The light from the flowers light up a big section of the willow.

I changed a few settings and i'm just waiting on that to finish. It's looking good so far though!