Look at this!

FrankB · March 26, 2009, 02:27:46 PM

Look at this, guys - isn't this render awesome?

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=132&t=746258

The trees are made with Onyx Tree.. looking brilliant.
And the lighting is really fantastic, with those rays and really bright areas where the sun beams with the tree stem.

Can anyone here achieve something similar with TG2? I would suspect Ryan could, given that he really mastered lighting in his past renders... but how close can TG2 get?

Frank

cyphyr · March 26, 2009, 02:33:26 PM

It dose look very impressive, great work with Onyx Tree, could never get anything that good out of it myself

.
I'm thinking that the bloom and rays are added in photoshop although I dont really know the capabilities of MentalRay.
thanks
richard

Mohawk20 · March 26, 2009, 04:01:42 PM

Wow, that really is a very nice render! Good foliage helps a lot in this case...

It needs some foggy clouds to get the rays, so it will take a long time to render, and you might want to use some postwork on the exr to get the lightness like this, but I'm convinced we can make something like this...

Klas · March 26, 2009, 04:12:07 PM

Wow!
I wonder how many polys one tree has.

JimB · March 26, 2009, 05:57:48 PM

Quote from: cyphyr on March 26, 2009, 02:33:26 PM
I'm thinking that the bloom and rays are added in photoshop although I dont really know the capabilities of MentalRay.

That's all possible with Mental Ray if you spend a bit of time on it.

rcallicotte · March 26, 2009, 06:36:57 PM

Thanks Frank. Beautiful image.

FrankB · March 26, 2009, 07:22:15 PM

I'm still waiting on you guys to take the challenge

Mohawk20 · March 27, 2009, 05:50:54 AM

Maybe when my 200+ hour render finally finishes (which could be another few days)....
But I have lots of ideas I want to try for other stuff, so no promises here.

RArcher · March 28, 2009, 08:32:55 PM

That is a beautiful picture indeed. I do think, that with the right quality of vegetation that TG2 can match the image in the example with little problem. Here is my first attempt at creating something similar. There are no sunbeams yet unfortunately as they seem to be very unpredictable and difficult to get right. It also does not have near the variety of vegetation as the render Frank posted. The only plant in this example the Oak Tree from Klas. I adjusted the colours and saturation of each of the 4 leaf textures.

Seth · March 28, 2009, 08:35:23 PM

very very good !

rcallicotte · March 28, 2009, 10:46:53 PM

RArcher, you've certainly done better than any tree scene I've ever witnessed with TG2. This is superb.

cyphyr · March 29, 2009, 08:38:03 AM

Excelent work here. I'm trying something similar myself but the only way I've found of making the rays is to put a very defuse cloud layer at camera level with ray traced shadows enabled. Renders take ages, like 2 hours just for the prepass @640x480 so I'm really hoping for another solution. I'll post my results when I get home.
@RArcher: did you do much post work on that image?
richard

RArcher · March 29, 2009, 11:48:41 AM

Richard, That is pretty much how I have done beams in the past. For this image I must have just missed with the sunlight to hit something to scatter the light better. I was hoping the gaps in the leaves would be enough but it wasn't. Render time was just under 40 hours which is terrible. For postwork I duplicated the background layer and set it to soft light, adjusted levels and then added a slight lens blur to the corners.

Mandrake · March 29, 2009, 03:24:01 PM

Nice lighting RArcher!!

FrankB · March 30, 2009, 02:45:48 AM

I knew you could do it, Ryan

Terrific render, very well done. 40 hours are terrible, indeed. It would be nice to have some sort of "ray simulation", where the renderer wouldn't have to take a whole lot of samples, and instead create rays by default in a defined area of the scene. I hope that eventually, we may get a "ray shader" (or "glow shader") like that.

Cheers,
Frank