Lupine River Bridge (redone)

Started by pclavett, June 10, 2024, 03:01:42 PM

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pclavett

Hi ! Posted this on the weekend but it seems to have evaporated after a site maintenance ! I had comments from Ulco and Stormlord as to doing a waterline on the bridge and dirty it up a bit. Also had a floating rock in the foreground that I had not seen. All these things have been attended to in this redo and will restart the post. I have a night version cooking and it took me forever to learn to manipulate lights and eager to see how it will turn up. Thanks for any comments ! Paul

pclavett

Second render done for a misty dawn appearance, probably need more adjustments ! Appreciate any suggestions !

Dune

First of all my compliments for the misty version. Awesome! The light is great. As a matter of fact, I almost find it a pity that I don't like the bridge itself, but that's personal. My taste is for more subtle, natural old bridges, like old Italian ones. Is it an existing bridge, or fantasy? The bump on the stone is a bit too much as far as I can see, I would soften it and/or reduce. Or is it post sharpening?

The waterline is nice, but light. Did you add a reflective shader? I would personally go for a darker waterline, like in these photos, where mosses/algae grow in the always wet low areas, getting a bit patchier higher up. Just my 2 cents, though.

pclavett

Did think about it afterwards.... darker would have been better for the waterline... must be my frequent visits to the USA Southwest where waterlines are paler for some reason. Will dirty things up a bit and possibly add mossy patches on the stone. Will check the displacement on those stones, might be too much ! The bridge was based on a movie I saw recently where this modelling seemed to please me.....wanted to see if I could produce this kind of effect. The surface is textured from old boards and will appear in future renders. The nightlight version is still cooking....lots of lights, 28 in all.

Stormlord

#4
The seed is much better in this version.
The misty version is very moody, a great rendering!

Question Paul:
The water in the first version render looks quite nice, is it a standard water?
Which water settings are you use here?

To answer your question regarding to use negative multiply to enligten darker areas in an image, I created a short video tutorial...
See here... https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,30816.0.html

STORMLORD

pclavett

Hi Dirk ! For the water, I used 2 different water shaders, one smooth, the other one rough, merged together with a merge shader with a Power fractal that was warped for current effects used as a masking the merge. My initial trials with this merge were horrible but found the masking that made it acceptable. Both water have the same values for colour and such but different for reflections. I will include the .tgc with this post. Take care !

pclavett

Hi all, I have rendered nighttime versions of the bridge scene and experimented with lights for the first time. learned a lot of things. Tried initially to put the lights inside the lamps where the bulb was, but to no effects, no light came out, blocked by the model even with those parts being transparent glass. Then redid the model with no glass but simply open areas, light came out but the shadows from the frame blocked so much that this was not valid. Tried invisible lights in the middle of the space between the lights, bulbs luminous, great lighting but the reflections in the water were not realistic. The option that seemed to work best was individual lights for each bulb, placed on each bulb and subsequently moved outside the lamp object in line with the camera axis of view, very close to the lamp object, lights all invisible, but the bulbs luminous. Played with the atmospheric light settings. The results are below, first the failure, second the relative success. The bridge was the one before the water line and the floating rock fix. Sorry !

Stormlord

Thank you for your water current clip, great idea!

STORMLORD

Dune

Great idea about the merging. You can also warp the water shader itself, or use a warped power fractal for wavelets, but I found it takes a lot more render time. Don't know why - and it was a long time ago I did that. But your effect is great.
What would be the best solution is to make the glass of the lanterns a separate object, unchecking shadows, and using a glass shader. That way a bulb inside would work and also throw light on the inside of the lantern, and throw shadows (set to soft) of the small sides (don't know the word). A bit more work though, to separate and place objects.
I like the lighting of the first render better actually, but would probably hover an invisible plane over the scene to lighten up a little of the grass and such.

pclavett

Noted a big problem yesterday when posting to FB from my Mac..... the image is totally different on Mac as compared to my PCs. They are so dark on the Mac that you can barely see anything. Looking at the FB post on my Mac is an entirely  different experience than looking at it from my PC. Same for my girlfriend's MacBook Air, same from my MacPro, same for a friend with a MacBook Pro. Display brightness was at max on all my attempts to see the image as it appears on my PCs. Funny thing is that as I was doing some Facetime with my friend with the Mac, my Iphone taking shots of the screen was seeing much more detail than my eyes could from the screen. When I looked at my post on FB on my iPhone, the image was a lot clearer and less dark than on the laptops and desktop. Went and Google and nothing recent on this issue. This morning took a screenshot from my MacBook Pro of this post and compared it to how it look from my PC on this same post. The Mac screenshot even made it look a little better on the PC but there is definite differences mostly in the shadows with the grass and flowers and the difference is also quite evident on the moon. When I tried yesterday to make a image set to look good on my Macs, looked way overexposed on the PCs. The difference is less evident on daytime scenes where there seems to be practically no difference. Think I will continue to use mostly my PCs for the major works and posts, in any event, they are a lot faster. I may just have made the transition complete to Mac to PC..... or as most Mac people (including myself) often say..... passing on to the dark side !

PS: image below is a composite of how it shows on Mac (left) and PC (right), and whatever difference is incredibly more evident for the eye (not just mine BTW) as compared to screenshots but the difference is still evident.
POSTED ALSO ELSEWHERE on the forum for further discussion.