15 miles on the Erie Canal

bobbystahr · March 05, 2019, 05:06:00 PM

Quote from: archonforest on March 05, 2019, 04:18:45 PM
Looks fantastic! Awesome model.

echo

DocCharly65 · March 06, 2019, 01:20:30 AM

I can only admire! Cool!

Dune · March 06, 2019, 01:51:41 AM

Your skills are obvious. Terrific work.

sboerner · March 06, 2019, 12:38:56 PM

Thanks, Ulco. Modeling seems to come naturally to some people but it certainly doesn't for me. I'm not an artist by training and that's probably a prerequisite for anyone who aspires to be a really good modeler.

Anyone interested in organic modeling should take a look at Silo. I can't recommend it enough. It's lightweight, fast, and focused exclusively on subdivision modeling. And it's relatively inexpensive. Its sculpting and UV tools are rudimentary but you can move the model into ZBrush or another app to finish up.

As far as Terragen goes everything I've learned is because of the good people at Planetside and everyone on this forum. Such a great community. I've learned so much over the past year and am eager to start on more scenes to put that knowledge to work.

Edit: New avatar, Doc? Nice!

sboerner · March 07, 2019, 12:23:56 PM

New POV. The scene was getting cluttered and that was bothering me. This angle is cleaner and puts the bridge front and center where it belongs. A better composition, I think. Need to fix parts of the scene that were not visible before and add a few details (leaves on the water etc.) and people.

bobbystahr · March 07, 2019, 08:56:37 PM

I agree with this PoV...love the way it shows the wake.

DocCharly65 · March 08, 2019, 12:19:27 AM

Though I like the original POV too, this one is even more impressive!

...New Avatar? - No - an old one I modified with grey hair and grey beard for more realism

Dune · March 08, 2019, 01:42:42 AM

I agree, this POV has more power (though I too liked the other one), but if all modeling is finished, you can render every POV you like.

sboerner · March 08, 2019, 10:29:44 AM

Very true, of course! But I am thinking about turning this into a printed piece, so will have to choose eventually.

QuoteI agree with this PoV...love the way it shows the wake.

Thanks, Bobby. May reduce the displacement on those a bit. The boats are going just 3-4 mph.

Quote...New Avatar? - No - an old one I modified with grey hair and grey beard for more realism

sboerner · March 08, 2019, 05:17:20 PM

A new wrinkle . . .

I've been using a reflective shader for the surface, not a water shader, because it shaves off rendering time and with low camera angles it looked OK. But now the high camera angle means that the water surface should be partially transparent in the foreground where the angle is greatest.

No problem using a water shader instead, except the path tracer doesn't yet support it. I know we've been warned about using the path tracer for production but now that I've been using it I don't want to give it up for this scene. The quality difference for foliage, objects, and shadows is just too great.

What to do? Have to think on this.

With partial opacity applied to the water surface it might be possible to fake it. But AFAIK opacity is either on or off, nothing in between.

Maybe two renderings (path traced and standard) could be composited in post.

Open to suggestions here . . .

Dune · March 09, 2019, 02:05:39 AM

The latter is the easiest; just a crop front water render and some fiddling with color matching in PS. Otherwise you could transport the land colors through an 'adjust saturation' node to a surface shader (where you input in color tab and you can adjust the color darkness) before the reflective.

sboerner · March 09, 2019, 09:38:23 AM

Ahh, OK. Thanks Ulco. Your second suggestion might be more practical with shallow bodies of water where the bottom is mostly visible. Filing this away for future use . . .

I was able to extract an accurate mask by assigning a luminosity value of 1 to the water surface and rendering out an emission render layer. Once the two renderings (standard and PT) are done I can make a test composite. Don't see any reason why this wouldn't work.

archonforest · March 09, 2019, 10:53:20 AM

Love the new POV a lot!

sboerner · March 10, 2019, 04:32:13 PM

QuoteLove the new POV a lot!

Great, thanks! I think I'll probably go with it.

Here's a composite image with the standard renderer for the foreground canal surface and PT for everything else. Water shader reflectivity settings need to be tweaked but it looks like this approach will work.

bobbystahr · March 10, 2019, 09:28:38 PM

That's working...well sussed out man.