Translucency Woes :(

[spinner]

I know, I know  :-) I've had some prety big feuds over photoreal/realistic over at rero back in the day - but then pertaining to skin.
I'm using the image verison on Google to find reference and also to use as colour pickers.

As Matt posted as well ( thank you for clearing that up, btw :-)) - I have a small feature request in regards to colour pickers: Could we please have i.e an xml-based palette option? It would make it ever so handy to work with terrain, water and vegetation shaders if one could add/use palettes other than Add Colour in the native colour palette. I think there's an API for that somewhere already?

Walli - i picked up some of your grass the other day at NWDA - I saw you use images instead of a colour function. I was wondering  is the shader function too complex to run as clips or tgd's, or do phototextures just give better realism when you don't know where or how your wire is going to end up?

thanks again :-)

~s

[mr-miley]

spinner

By all means give it a try, but I have found that using colour pickers on photos to get similar colours into TG2 is a bit of a waste of time. I used to do it a lot in old TG. It seemed to use the colour you picked as the default "colour in the sun" mode. TG2 seems to use the colour that you pick as a "colour in the bottom of a coal cellar" mode ie the colours that TG2 produces in the render are a lot lot lighter than the chosen colour if its in direct sunlight. Try to sample a colour from a shady area on the photo, it gives much closer results.

Miles

[spinner]

I usually pick from a range of photos to have a subset of greens?
But yeah, I noticed the coalcellar myself ;-)

~s

[Henry Blewer]

I have made good color choices for my grasses and sands, etc; only to have them cancelled out by the atmosphere settings and the lighting. Now I do the atmosphere and lighting set up, then go back an pick the colors.

[spinner]

For stills or animation?

~s

[Henry Blewer]

Since I am using the free version, stills.
Every time I get some money saved, something comes along to cause me to spend it. Oh well, that was my complaint for the day, thank you for reading...

[Cyber-Angel]

There is an old trick that still works form version 9.0.XX days and that is load a photograph that you need colors from in Photoshop and change the mode form RGB Color to Indexed Color [Image > Mode > Indexed Color] and from the Pallet drop down select custom [Indexed Color > Pallet> Custom] you can then select a color from the pallet provided a copy over the R,G,B values in to TG2.

This is an effective method of getting real world colors into TG2. 

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel   

[spinner]

Thank you for sharing.

My featurette request was to generate a custom palette editor/keeper, though. much like the swatches function in PS.
Despite TG's way of handling colour, I would find it dead handy to be able to generate custom(isable) palettes for scenes I was working on, and to be able to load them via the colour popup.

I can fire up Visio and write a spec of how I see it working?

~s

[Henry Blewer]

It's not so much a problem getting real world colors to select. I often use low angle sunlight. I do this for the drama and beautiful atmosphere effects. When the angle of the sunlight source gets closer to the horizon, the colors are washed by the atmosphere into one range of yellows or reds.
It only bothers me when I have spent a long time coloring a surface, move the sun for a sunset/sunrise, and bam, all that careful consideration for color is gone.

I asked for a better palette editor also.

[spinner]

You should come up here in winter, you'd love the sunsets here, they're very intense :-)
And maybe go crazy in summer when we only have dusk a few hrs in the south and midnight sun up north.


You get the colouring issues to an extent in Vue too, I think. but it seems to autocompute a lot, so even if it looks good out of the box, you still have to do the same tinkering if you want it to pop, I find. OTOH, I never upgraded my Vue 6, as I found it incredibly crashprone. Even Bryce, despite DAZ' code-mauling was more stable on my old work-box

having a hard time adapting vegetation to the enclosed light - I'm on the verge of lightcrossing and firing up Max, just to save time. I'm keeping the colours really soft/cloudless on purpose - its what a sunny 3 a.m here usually looks like.

~s

[Cyber-Angel]

Spinner,

May I ask where "Here" is, you didn't specify where you meant? 

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel   

[spinner]

The effect I am looking for is right outside my window - a sunny summer morning in the wooded outskirts of Oslo :-)

//forgot - Norway :-)
~s