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General => Contests => VR Challenge => Topic started by: Mohawk20 on March 07, 2016, 09:22:40 AM

Title: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 07, 2016, 09:22:40 AM
I think this is a great idea for a challenge!
There are a lot of places that would be great to view in 360. But only as long as there is something interesting happening in more than one spot, so that requires some new ways of thinking... I like that!

I was recently working on a scene with a bridge that needed to look luxurious, but not sturdy... I came up with this:
[attach=1]
So a nice 360 view would be from the middle of the bridge.
[attach=2]
What do you think?

I'm gonna go to find some more projects with objects in them...
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Dune on March 08, 2016, 02:09:12 AM
Same feelings here. Get creative! I like your bridge setup.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Oshyan on March 08, 2016, 09:52:18 PM
Yes, *on* the bridge is cool! Put fish in the water below you? ;)

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: inkydigit on March 09, 2016, 07:55:20 PM
Cool canyon, neat idea on the bridge!

:)
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: TheBadger on March 13, 2016, 05:43:50 PM
nice image concept  8)
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 14, 2016, 01:43:41 PM
I'm now working on another scene, with lights, water and a ceiling...
Now the problem is that the lights do not have a visible object. And the original viewpoint of the scene didn't have water between the camera and the lights, they only illuminate the ceiling. But as I venture out across the water, test renders show visible light objects in the reflection, but not on their actual location.
Is this a bug?
It's in version 3.3.04. I downloaded the update, but haven't installed it yet (busy rendering ;)
It does pose a problem for the 360 experience if it persists...
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Matt on March 15, 2016, 12:41:41 AM
Lights can be made visible. Enable "visible object", decide how big you want the light to be and enter that in "source radius". Terragen will then render it as a luminous sphere, nothing fancy.

Matt
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 15, 2016, 02:32:06 AM
I know the visible object can be enabled and disabled. I chose for disabled, so no object is visible, because that looks better. However, in the reflection only, object is visible anyway.

Sorry for the confusion in the previous post.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Matt on March 15, 2016, 04:36:54 AM
Ah, I see. To prevent the light from being visible in reflections, disable "specular highlights".
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 15, 2016, 05:13:53 AM
Ah, I'll try that
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: bobbystahr on March 15, 2016, 05:33:12 PM
best bridge so far this year, and I was on a quest for a while. nicely built. this'll be a great entry for sure.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: AP on March 16, 2016, 12:26:44 AM
Fascinating. I like what i see so far.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 20, 2016, 10:07:47 AM
Question that may be slightly off topic:
I'm checking to see if one of my old scenes (Hanging Valley Contest entry actually) can be used for 360 rendering, and it's one big mess! I don't know how I ever could have worked like this...
I have a Compute Terrain node, and directly after that a Compute Normal node, then comes a strata node.
The question is this: I don't need the Compute Normal here, do I? The Compute terrain does that same, doesn't it?
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Henry Blewer on March 20, 2016, 11:39:14 AM
The compute terrain calculates the compute normal, I believe. I always use the compute terrain node myself.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Dune on March 21, 2016, 03:20:39 AM
I think you can leave it out, but you might need the smaller patch size (default in compute normal). Depends on what happens after.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 28, 2016, 07:34:05 AM
So I'm happily rendering away 5 pov's of my Hanging valley scene, but after a few renders (turned on while being away) I'm in the position to view the progress more regularly. Now I see that the rendering process is very inefficient in this scene! Every square it's first the sky (that will be behind the terrain, a cliff face), then the mountains in the background, with trees (which will be behind the cliff face), and then the top of the cliff will be rendered, with the trees on top (which will be obscured by the cliff face due to the low camera pov). Finally the cliff face and water are rendered, right over everything that has been rendered before. All these hours wasted by rendering stuff that's not visible anyways. That has cost me 4 hours per render, on a dozen renders so far...
(So you can imagine why I'm very happy with TeamViewer for Android.)

Why can't the renderer work front to back?

Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Dune on March 28, 2016, 08:33:47 AM
I've been wondering about that as well from time to time, but I guess it would mean a complete overhaul of the render engine, if it's even possible.
One thing that often helps when doing water is setting the sorting bias of the lake (or lake plane/sphere) to some huge minus number.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 28, 2016, 09:12:20 AM
Quote from: Dune on March 28, 2016, 08:33:47 AM
One thing that often helps when doing water is setting the sorting bias of the lake (or lake plane/sphere) to some huge minus number.

I've never bothered to look at that setting... What is the sorting bias for, what does it do?
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Dune on March 28, 2016, 12:13:30 PM
It sorts out what to do first, biasing againt one or another thing to render first or later, as I understood. So if you give it a -1000000 number, it will render the water kind of last, afaik.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Oshyan on March 28, 2016, 04:00:27 PM
Dune is essentially correct. We do hope to have some optimizations in place for better render "sorting" optimization/approaches in the future. But it's not always possible (or at least easy) to know *before rendering* what is in front of what. The very process of rendering is often what determines this (i.e. the exact displacement and position of a terrain or object, etc. is often determined at render time because it's computed on-demand). ;)

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 30, 2016, 08:43:27 AM
Very happy with the extra time! I was searching for an old file to be my last entry, but then I came across something else I couldn't ignore... My first rockface that actually looks realistic, made from scratch, of which I'm very proud ofcourse.
[attach=1]

I also did a version where the canyon walls are made of water... Don't know if that should be an entry. Would be a single POV then, due to rendertime. (This one didn't finish because of time issues...)
[attach=2]
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Dune on March 30, 2016, 10:40:30 AM
Goodlooking rock, looks ancient. Perhaps some ancient rockdrawings would give them a story as well.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Kadri on March 30, 2016, 11:59:51 AM

I like the rocks.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: TheBadger on March 30, 2016, 01:09:10 PM
I like that crazy lighting over the path, image. OR at least the idea it shows if not the test render :D
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: AP on March 30, 2016, 07:12:21 PM
Neat Slot Canyon there. Maybe erode it a bit and some Geoglyphs is a neat idea.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Jo Kariboo on March 30, 2016, 09:03:34 PM
Perfect rocks !!! ... Is it from TU canyon ?
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on March 31, 2016, 01:00:54 AM
Quote from: Jo Kariboo on March 30, 2016, 09:03:34 PM
Perfect rocks !!! ... Is it from TU canyon ?
Nope, made from scratch, to long ago to remember how to do it again quickly... Have to study this file again and definitely save the clip file!

Canyon shape was easy: 2 displaceable cubes, and 1 powerfractal.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 03, 2016, 02:46:37 AM
So I'm gratefully using the extra time to make one of my entries even better by adding grass objects. However, to have all 5 pov's look the same, I use a large population area. But the internal grass clump needs to be small so it can go on the hill without spilling over or sticking out. This means a LOT of instances. I let the computer crunch away at it overnight, just to come back and find low memory errors, the screen resolution set back to 640x480, and noticing in taskmanager that TG has a memory commit size of 32 Gb RAM (I have 12 Gb installed). Don't know if some of that is supposed to be virtual memory, but I don't think so, with all the errors...
How can make this scene look as good as possible without crashing my slightly above average machine?
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Dune on April 03, 2016, 02:57:12 AM
If you can figure out how much grass will really be visible from all POV's you could use several small pops of the same, like a mozaik of squares, all on locations that slightly intersect, and cover all visible areas. You can link to one object from all pops' internals. For further distances you could gradually go into procedural grass.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 03, 2016, 10:14:44 AM
Quote from: Dune on April 03, 2016, 02:57:12 AM
For further distances you could gradually go into procedural grass.

The procedural grass, is that the Internal Gras Clup population? Or am I missing a shader that works like the fake stones?
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: bobbystahr on April 03, 2016, 03:18:25 PM
Quote from: Mohawk20 on April 03, 2016, 10:14:44 AM
Quote from: Dune on April 03, 2016, 02:57:12 AM
For further distances you could gradually go into procedural grass.

The procedural grass, is that the Internal Gras Clup population? Or am I missing a shader that works like the fake stones?

If you have the full version there should be a .tgc called procedural grass in your clip library as it's in the download offered.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 03, 2016, 04:09:42 PM
You know what, I actually never used the library, nor did I use clip files. I'm just now during this contest seeing the need to have clip files on hand, so I'm saving clip files of everything I'm reasonably proud of, like the Rockface of that Canyon. I'll check the grass clip file out...
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Dune on April 04, 2016, 02:27:47 AM
No, not the internal grass. It's quite simple basically; just one or two fake stones in line with very high setting 8-12 for height, none for the bulging (zero), and a small size; 0.005 or so, coverage 2, then some mix of colors, but no further displacement. You could add a reflective shader or a Lambert shader for some shiny grass or translucency. Anyway; there are clipfiles around also.
But beware; it only gives nice results on a bit of a distance and with quite high detail settings, so good for distant hills.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 08, 2016, 04:22:55 AM
In the extra time I found another old scene to render:
[attach=1]

It had only the Case Colours node, and 2 trees.
So I added a few surface layers, about 10 populations and the surf.
I had to brighten the sun 3.5 to 5, to get the rest of the foliage visible.
This is the result:
[attach=2]

Now I'm trying to render another POV from in-between the foliage, to see if it's not too dark. If not I'll submit the 2 POV's, otherwise only the one.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 08, 2016, 05:15:42 PM
Would this add anything?
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Jo Kariboo on April 10, 2016, 12:50:52 PM
I very like the light and moods. I believe that having a "catch eyes" in your final composition would add much. Perhaps a cleared ground level with more light.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 12, 2016, 09:02:36 AM
Quote from: Dune on April 12, 2016, 03:00:13 AM
Deadline is past, so no more secrecy from my part anymore...

As Ulco said in his own thread, time to show what I've been working on.

The first scene I submitted was the one with the bridge that has the glass floor. Images are in the first post of this thread.
The second submission was a scene with a cave.
I made this originally long ago, before the painted shader exiated. I put 2 planets on top of each other and the large displacements greater a cavern. I gave the top planet a luminescent surface like fluorescent lichen. It was during this contest, looking for nice POV's that I discovered the caves actually have an entrance...

I spent most of the time on refining the bright voronoi shape lichen, that originally was only a lightsource, which was ugly in 360.
These are the 5 POV's:
[attach=1][attach=2][attach=3]
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 12, 2016, 09:03:34 AM
The other 2 pov's:
[attach=1][attach=2]
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 12, 2016, 09:06:39 AM
The third submission was a scene I made for the hanging Valley contest long ago. I resubmitted it after the first deadline with added grass objects.

I had made the Hut and bridge myself in 3dsMax. Here is the resubmission:
[attach=1][attach=2][attach=3]
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 12, 2016, 09:07:30 AM
And the other two pov's:
[attach=1][attach=2]
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 12, 2016, 09:10:31 AM
My 4th submission was the copper Canyon, with the Rockface I'm really proud of. There is some misty clouds that would look great in 3d.
[attach=1][attach=2][attach=3]
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 12, 2016, 09:13:01 AM
The 5th submission was the Tropical Sunrise based on a poster I made several years ago.
[attach=1][attach=2]
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 12, 2016, 09:16:05 AM
My 6th submission was a request from my wife, a scene I originally made in TG 0.9, and had remade in TG2. I had put a lot of effort in the surface shaders, which gave some great results in realism.
[attach=1][attach=2][attach=3][attach=4]
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 12, 2016, 09:19:18 AM
And finally I spent the last day changing my scene of the mine tunnel, so it actually had more than empty space behind the camera. Besides the flora, all objects are internal displaceable objects.
There is only one view in this 7th submission, but there was no more time.
[attach=1]

I really hope one of these submissions gets me 10th place...
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: bobbystahr on April 12, 2016, 10:52:09 AM
And I think I was busy with iirc 3 entries...can't stand the word submit as art applies, it never submits.....
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: inkydigit on April 12, 2016, 11:25:48 AM
Busy is an understatement!
Bobby you are right too...
Great stuff here... All looks great, the hard work was well worth it:)
J
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 13, 2016, 03:19:38 AM
Quote from: inkydigit on April 12, 2016, 11:25:48 AM
Busy is an understatement!
Bobby you are right too...
Great stuff here... All looks great, the hard work was well worth it:)
J

As is yours! All of the entries are great stuff. I really like this contest, and what it made us accomplish.
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Hannes on April 13, 2016, 03:29:43 AM
Quote from: Mohawk20 on April 13, 2016, 03:19:38 AM
I really like this contest, and what it made us accomplish.

Indeed!!
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: otakar on April 13, 2016, 02:11:28 PM
I really like Spire Island, but am amazed how much you were able to put out. Stay engaged now :)
Title: Re: Mohawk's 360 scenes
Post by: Mohawk20 on April 14, 2016, 03:42:27 AM
Quote from: otakar on April 13, 2016, 02:11:28 PM
I really like Spire Island, but am amazed how much you were able to put out.

Well, I had all these old projects and this contest made me realize that if I create a scene, I make more than is needed for one POV. I like to make it a big as possible and go exploring. And TG itself makes it easy because surface shaders are global. So all I need to do is just add or extend a population here and there, paint a line of a path, or in some places place another height field behind the original camera.

The cave scene had even more cave than I realized. So when I found an exit,  I was surprised, but then I had to cheat to fake an atmosphere. The scales of the planets was so big that I had deactivated the atmospheres, because double atmospheres make crazy render times. So I made the background object sky blue, an placed a light like a sunlight near the entrance... Had to tweak that quite a bit.

So for most scenes I submitted, I only had to place camera's along an exploring path, as I would do when first exploring a new place where I go in real life. And then tweak stuff a little if it didn't look good enough.