Hannes' desperate WIP thread. Finally done! (page 4)

[Hannes]

OK, I'll stop whining now. I found a way to get rid of the holes in the terrain. The funny thing is: there were no holes in the terrain! It took almost two hours to find out that the weird render artifacts were indeed reflections of the UFO's blue light on the road's reflective shader. Embarrassing, isn't it?
That leads me to another problem: how can I have the blue light enabled without having blue dots on the road? Unchecking specular highlights didn't help. The dots were still there. The only way is to disable the light.
I didn't notice this before because I always added small crop renders to the image in Photoshop, so that I didn't have to render the whole picture all over. The "dotfree" road was from a render without the UFO and it's light.

[Hannes]

Added some dirt onto the road surface and broke up the road marks a bit. I also added some dry grass patches to the road sides and some more garbage.
Has anybody found the cigarette ends?
Still no idea how to get rid of the reflections...

[Hannes]

Barely visible, but they are there.

[Gannaingh]

The tiny details are what can make or break the realism in a scene. Your attention to detail is superb, nice work so far.

[Oshyan]

This is looking mighty fine. I'm not sure about the reflection issue, it seems semi-realistic given your setup, but I don't think it's worth trying to figure out how to get rid of them; unless it's not allowed, just do some minor touch-up in Photoshop.

- Oshyan

[jamfull]

You could try a single sided plane close to the light source and face it away from the camera. Maybe set to "visible to other rays" but turn off "visible to camera" and "cast shadows". (Or would that show up in the sun rays then?)

James

[Hannes]

Thank you for the great tips!
Oshyan, I'd rather cut off my right hand than using Photoshop for this problem !
Thanks, jamfull, this could work. But in the meantime I found another solution: I masked out the area where the weird reflections appear by a painted shader. Not really elegant, but effective, and it makes me feel much better than cheating with Photoshop.
Before I try jamfull's fantastic trick, I'll see, if the reflective shader looks the same in the image with ray traced reflections unchecked. Then I could try again to uncheck "specular highlights" in the blue light's settings.

[Hannes]

OK, it worked as I said. I turned off "ray traced reflections" in the reflective shader and "specular highlights" in the light's settings. No nasty reflections anymore, the road looks the same like before and it's even rendering a bit faster.
Anyway thanks again, jamfull!

[Oshyan]

Oh yes, no need to use raytraced reflections here! Even without this bright spot problem. In fact, most often in TG you don't need RT reflections, it just burns render time (e.g. with shiny leaves or something).

- Oshyan

[Hannes]

Done! I just sent my final image to nwdacontest@hotmail.com.
I added some more little things and tweaked some settings. Here is a smaller version of my entry. The full res image will be shown in the thread that contains all the entries.

[Hannes]

Hmmm, what's with the address "nwdacontest@hotmail.com"?
I tried to send it twice, but the mail couldn't be delivered: "mailbox unavailable."

[Tangled-Universe]

It should work now!
Looking forward to your submission


Cheers,
Martin

[FrankB]

Good job, Hannes! Great scene!

[Hannes]

Thank you guys, it worked.
I'm feeling a little lost being done after working for a long time on this image...

[cyphyr]

Nicely done, well done
Richard