As the title suggests, this piece is an attempt to reproduce a scene that I saw in the Moravian countryside recently. The sky was very dark because of thick clouds, but behind, the sun was shining through, creating beautiful contrast and glow effects, and where the ground was brighter than the sky during the middle of the day. I like the simple composition and I'm on the way with the lighting, but I would love to have some input about the stones and the plant distribution. The plants, by the way, are primarily Floraworks models, as well as Walli's free grass pack.
Lovely scene. To my eye, the birds need to be more brightly lit, as they don't seem to be nearly as bright as the tree. The grass and the rock look good, but I would add a few more splashes of the red flower in the middle ground.
Great! I really love this one!
Wonderful mood and lighting, as well as the colours!
Very beautiful.
I think this is one of your best work.
- Terje
Good work, o_b! Lovely use of light.
Very nice render!
I love days like this, with a dark sky but sun shining bright from behind. Wonderful job capturing the feel.
I like it... it's a summer's day and it's about to chuck down. I can almost smell it... ;D
Thanks for the comments. As promised, a little more color to the grass. Any other comments? I'm really looking for tips on how to get more realistic color on the foreground stone.
I love this kind of pre-or-post-rain light, and you've captured this brilliantly. To give the foreground more diversity perhaps a bush or two, or paint a few bald spots in the grass dispersal (if that's possible) to show the ground/soil.
Indeed is it possible to do negative painting (black on white) with the painter shader?
Oops, didn't see the last word, "stone". That looks ok to me.
I'll let this comment stand, though, as I want to know about negative (black on white) painting.
John
very nice work O_B...I would prefer a balance of flower distribution, between the first and second shot, maybe by clumping groups of flowers instead?...just my prefs' of course!
cheers
#J
Agree with inkydigit re the distribution of flowers - somewhere between the two shots. I think the rock looks pretty good. Still wonder whether the birds could be lit a bit more brightly - as it stands, to me they look like they've been postworked in. But all in all, a fantastic image!
Thanks for the additional comments. I'm working on them now. As for negative painting, you can just hook it up to a Color adjust shader with inverted white and black points to flip the values.
Quote from: old_blaggard on May 28, 2009, 06:35:10 AM
As for negative painting, you can just hook it up to a Color adjust shader with inverted white and black points to flip the values.
Thanks for that info o_b.
John
Does anyone have any tips on how to make the vegetation smoother without using extremely high AA that obliterates detail? I'm looking especially at Frank and Ryans' recent vegetation images.
I guess that depends what you think extremely high AA values are. ;D
My final rendering settings are usually 0.8 detail, 10 AA and either 1/3 or 2/3 GI detail. I've been mostly using the mitchell-netravali or Cubic B-spline filters, though I wish you could hook the filters up to a distance shader so you could use the sharp filter up close and the smooth filter for distance.
Personally I think sometimes adding too much sharp detail on the vegetation can be a bad thing, but maybe that's because I rarely wear my glasses anyway and everything is a little fuzzy ;)
That sounds reasonable to me. I've been working with similar values for my final renders as well, but I've been having difficulties finding the right balance between unrealistic sharpness and ugly, soft blobs.
I second what Ryan describes as good practices. I am using pretty much the same values.
I am very happy with the "last thing I saw" render with regards to the mix of softness and detail. It was rendered at 0.85 quality and GI 1/3 + SS, narrow cubic AA and AA 8.
However, the important finishing touch was achived in postwork, but carefully balancing out levels, and equally important by applying the glow filter from paint.net. Awesome filter for vegetation - and it's free.
Regards,
Frank
Again, sounds similar to what I do. I guess it's just a matter of balancing all the settings for the specific scene. I always add a slight diffuse glow to my images in Photoshop to try to get that extra bit of flair to things
Pretty satisfied with it now. Thanks for the comments!
I like that Tree! and the Grass distribution and mix is very nice. Just a thought, the flowers look rather low quality, especially in the foreground and perhaps the image is a bit over sharpened. Also sky is a little blotchy, perhaps increase the atmo samples if you intent to continue with this project. Yeah, I know, Shut Up Buzzzzz. :D
Seems to be a problem with the yellow flower, it is lacking any sort of detail and just turned into some yellow blotches. Not sure whether it is because the translucency is too high or the model just doesn't have much detail anyway. The tree and the grass mix are really nice though.
The lighting's really great but for my taste it's a bit too saturated ;)
Thanks for the input. The only comment I'm not clear on is Jay's about the blotchy sky - it looks pretty smooth to me. Could you elaborate a little?
There was no sharpening on this image, although a little more AA might not hurt. The saturated colors are deliberate: the landscape I am trying to recreate from my trip through Moravia was really popping with color.
Quote from: old_blaggard on May 29, 2009, 01:34:47 PM
Thanks for the input. The only comment I'm not clear on is Jay's about the blotchy sky - it looks pretty smooth to me. Could you elaborate a little?
There was no sharpening on this image, although a little more AA might not hurt. The saturated colors are deliberate: the landscape I am trying to recreate from my trip through Moravia was really popping with color.
Yeah, sure. It's as if you have a dense haze colored blueish and rendered with a low atmo quality or lost quality in jpeg compression. Not a big deal, if you like it that's all that counts. In a perfect world all our monitors would be calibrated the same so we all see the same thing. :)
Hmm... looks like I'm seeing a little bit of .jpg compression, but not a whole lot. Looks like you've got picky eyes :P. I'll try to improve it for the next version.
As you should be o_b. The rock could look a little more realistic, but this final image looks like it would fit in with the film "Up" no problem. What do you think?
:P
Quote from: old_blaggard on May 29, 2009, 01:49:38 PM
Hmm... looks like I'm seeing a little bit of .jpg compression, but not a whole lot. Looks like you've got picky eyes :P. I'll try to improve it for the next version.
I guess I should put my Magnifying Glass away. ;)
Nice shot - that tree is cool. I'm currently rendering something like this, but er, yours is better :)
Quote from: calico on May 29, 2009, 01:56:57 PM
As you should be o_b. The rock could look a little more realistic, but this final image looks like it would fit in with the film "Up" no problem. What do you think?
:P
Heheh, any tips about the rock? Also, I'm "stuck" in Europe until the 10th, so I probably won't be able to see Up before I start my internship over at Pixar because I head straight over when I get back to the States. ;)