Hi everyone,
This render shows 13 models from the new Oceania bundles of XFrog.
The 2 grass populations are from NWDA.
I'd like to thank Stewart for letting me have a good with these very nice bundles :)
More to come of other new bundles soon.
Cheers,
Martin
Full resolution.
Nice!!
I think that´s what called "lush" vegetation in english, isn´t it?
Great vegetation , the kind that also in the real world makes one want to be in the middle of it, until one finds the thorns.
risking to sound singleminded, I dare to say the rock reminds me of Phobos.
Best regards,
J
I like the rock the best.
Very nice, Martin. I like the way the ferns cling to the wall, but especially this; it seems like an object that is tilted one way, and you might have restricted the rotation to let them all have their leaves 'hanging'.
The water part may get some more light, I'd say. It's a bit obscure and I think you can get more out of that.
I like the rocks too.
I very like the color and the texture of the rock. Very nice !!!
You've got a good scene here Martin. Love the vertical streaks. They could quite easily be darker/reflective water drainage streaks as well.
To me, the red seems too far away colour wise from being dry erosion of the verticle texture.
Ivy Generator might be quite cool on this.
Quote from: Hetzen on September 15, 2012, 04:17:28 PM
You've got a good scene here Martin. Love the vertical streaks. They could quite easily be darker/reflective water drainage streaks as well.
To me, the red seems too far away colour wise from being dry erosion of the verticle texture.
Ivy Generator might be quite cool on this.
Jeez...this is eerie Jon!
why? My next iteration addresses all these 3 suggestions :)
Thanks mate!
Quote from: Dune on September 15, 2012, 04:18:01 AM
Very nice, Martin. I like the way the ferns cling to the wall, but especially this; it seems like an object that is tilted one way, and you might have restricted the rotation to let them all have their leaves 'hanging'.
The water part may get some more light, I'd say. It's a bit obscure and I think you can get more out of that.
I like the rocks too.
Thanks Ulco. About the fern objects (Bird's Nest Fern, Oceania 1 Bundle) on the vertical wall: it's in the model. In the XFrog documentation these are described as "epiphytic" and thus are actually meant to grow on other vegetation. Like we know that's not really possible (although you can do some tricks with fern offset position and have it seeded along with trees, if you know what I mean).
Anyway, I liked the idea of these Bird's Nest Ferns on the vertical wall.
The water has some density added to it which may affect the overall appearance and may make it look less 'bright'. Maybe I can increase reflectivity to 1.5 in the future in similar situations. It's pretty hard and as you can see the issue of blotchy shadows appeared again. Shame.
Martin, out of curiosity, what render times are you getting for your super real stuff. You don't need to be too specific. But in general you output at what size for a final, and in general you have a render time of what(ish) for your finals? Like I said, just curious.
Hi Michael,
I don't mind answering very specific questions :) Actually, rendertimes are always very specific for every scene, that's why.
As usual you can take it almost anywhere you like.
I rendered this at 2400x1920 resolution and it took 8 hours I believe. I used AA8 with stringent adaptive sampling and detail is 0.75.
Furthermore I use increased ray detail multiplier for underwater detail/refractions and to reduce the dependency of GI on the detail setting slider.
As you may know the ray detail multiplier is set to 0.25 default. With detail set to 1 in the renderer that means that under water features are rendered at 1 x 0.25 = @ detail 0.25.
This also accounts for GI rays.
Increasing the detail slider in the renderer will increase the # GI rays (dots in the GI pass).
Increasing the ray detail multiplier will also increase the number of GI rays.
*Basically the #GI rays = detail x ray detail multiplier x GI relative detail.*
Just render the default scene and compare the number of dots in the GI pass when you increase the multiplier to 1.
Do the same with the default scene, but instead of increasing the ray detail multiplier to 1 increase the detail level to 1.
This should look the same.
Anyway, I rendered this in two steps:
1) Water disabled and GI 4/4/4, no surface details. I needed this to get detail in the lighting under the leafs of those ferns/palms onto the grasses/mosses.
2) Water enabled and GI 2/4/6, no surface details. I needed this to have the water render considerably faster. Logically, I only rendered a crop of the image to only render the water and I used some ray detail region padding to make sure that surfaces outside the cropped area were also accounted for in reflections and shadows.
3) Combine the two in PS.
An interesting approach is to not render this with GI 4/4/4 initially, but double the resolution and use GI 2/4/6. I haven't investigated yet which is really faster and/or which one is more memory conserving, but to get detailed lighting in tiny areas of screenspace you can choose to increase render resolution and use a lower GI sample density (GI relative detail that is and is the same as GI rays).
If I would render this image at 1k tall/wide and GI at more normal settings like GI 2/4/8 then this takes about 1 hour on my 2600K with 16GB RAM.
I could talk for hours about how to achieve realistic images, but it's also in the eye of the beholder.
Ryan (RArcher) renders from a photographers perspective and the lighting in his scenes is more esthetic and approaches the way a camera would capture it more than my usual work.
Frank (FrankB) uses different shading colours and lighting than me. Consequently he creates realistic images with sometimes huge contrasts.
Something hard for me to as I have another philosophy/approach.
I work from the perspective of how I would see it with my bare eyes. That would mean that in one image I'd like to have detail in shadows of surfaces as well as detail in shadows of atmosphere. With a digital camera that's not possible in a single shot, unless you resort to HDR solutions.
It's a challenging way of working and I admit it's definitely not the best and most realistic one in terms of how a real camera would capture it.
Basically my advice for realistic work is:
1) lighting: I pay attention to my shadow/direct lighting ratio in my images and how I can use it to emphasize aspects of my image I find interesting. In this situation the lighting direction offers enough shadows in the vegetation but also silhouettes a significant part of the rock.
Lately I really have the tendency to have >50% of the image space in shadow while the vast majority of work you see out here uses the opposite.
2) consequently to #1 you need good lighting and either need to use good GI settings or high resolution rendering as another approach to catch detail in the lighting. See above.
3) use decent AA for your objects. Either use AA6 with full sampling or AA8 with adaptive sampling and noise threshold to around 0.03. AA6 full sampling is almost as good, mostly eerie similar to AA8, but definitely faster.
4) Be gentle with everything: colour-contrasts (I made a mistake here which Jon/Hetzen perfectly pointed out) and contrast in displacement.
The strata shader here has plateau steepness and builtup values of <0.1!
There's also quite some voronoi involved, but not that much visible directly. I think/hope at least!
5) probably more, when it comes to my mind I'll post about it...
I'd say my weakest points of my work is that I have no photographers eye when it comes to TG2 and that I find it hard to sell a picture.
To make an interesting render or photograph you need some central subject or something particularly interesting.
Mostly my shots are just shots of a nicely built scene, but with no specific point of interest or grand breathtaking vista.
2nd POV. I will apply some ivy's here and there and some other improvements, mainly on the foreground soil and grasses.
Some nice translucency in those ferns Martin. And the rocks are looking stunning. Those reflective dark streaks really help them, maybe a little more overall reflectivity on the rock? Even so, this POV and those tweaks mean you can now see all the detail you've blended in the displacements.
Totally different, but also a great image, Martin! Although I would personally prefer some more light on the rocks it IS very photographic this way, with the 'blinding' light from the sky.
Really great Martin! I really like the vertical white textures as it adds a very realistic look. Also the water looks pretty much perfect to me. Some of the vegetation looks a little too clean and almost plastic, but I know you are just working with the stock Xfrog stuff.
I agree with Ryan about the latter, it was my first impression too that they are very clean. But some PF over it can do wonders.
Thanks guys :)
Yeah they look too plastic, I know.
It's actually not XFrog stock settings.
Those aren't setup with any reflectivity and most of them with 96% translucency.
Something they may actually have too look into as you can't really use them straight out of the box this way.
Good idea Ulco to use a PF to reduce the clean look. I'll try that tonight.
At the moment I'm rendering a new version with more mossy looking grass and with 3 huge ivy's :)
Hi TU
Thanks for the in depth response.
I was also curious about the plants near the waters edge. I don't think I have seen grass like that here before. They do look like moss at this distance.
Which plants are they, and did you have to anything *extra* to them out of the box to get them to work like they are? I am always on the look out for plant objects I could use as moss!
Hi Michael,
I use Walli's grasses as moss. I don't know the exact models right now, but if you like I can post them later.
Just make them very small and use a very dense population. Also, as moss tends to follow the contours of a terrain more than grass, increase the lean to normal effect.
All shader settings are untouched.
For the coming render I've resize the grasses to min size = 0.2 and max size = 0.4 and density is ~0.08.
Make sure to use the smallest population size as possible, because with these densities it can take quite a while to populate.
The lean to normal is set to 0.8 and the instances don't lean below 10 degrees slope and have reduced lean below 20 degrees slope.
The default settings (0.5, 45 degr, 90 degr) result in mild leaning and only on quite steep slopes.
Cheers,
Martin
Thanks martin.
Now that you have said it, I think it is "ND01_Grass3". I have it and like it a lot. I have tried to use it as moss and got ok results. The results you have here are much better.
But now that you have made me think about it. I have not tried to do anything like this since the update. The lean to normals are really working here!
All I need now is the ability to populate an object and I can finish my maze world enviro. Come to think of it, do you, or does anyone know, if you can at least populate a TG2 native object? For example a plane object? That could work for simple things * like a wall*!
Since you can replace the planet object with a plane object and also can populate that then I think the answer to your question is YES.
Next iteration. Perhaps a bit too contrasted and saturated, but still experimenting...
There's a setting in the rendernode I forgot to increase and I'm curious who will notice it...it should be fairly easy to spot.
This is really coming together. Water Detail?
I'd be tempted to have a hack at that ivy geometry to remove some of the lower right third stalks to show some more of that awesome rock texture you've got.
Thanks Jon :)
Quote from: Hetzen on September 19, 2012, 04:37:08 PM
This is really coming together. Detail?
I'd be tempted to have a hack at that ivy geometry to remove some of the lower right third stalks to show some more of that awesome rock texture you've got.
What do you mean, detail? Want to know some settings?
I have grown a couple of ivy's, perhaps I can choose another one which should expose some more of the rock.
I still think the rock can use a bit more detail and roughness though?
:) I edited my post whilst you typed. Water detail is back on that standard 0.25 setting I'm guessing.
I think your ivy growth is fine. I'd probably want to take the ivy obj into Max and remove the stems where there's little foilage in the lower right third.
The rock displacement roughness to me looks right, although an experiment in blending the reflectivity with a low contrast PF might bare fruits?
The plant population is getting 'unnoticeably' natural. Great scene mate.
That sounds like a good idea of just chopping some geometry off...hopefully that's pretty straightforward to do, you know how much a noob I am ;)
You were pretty close with your guess about the water. That's what's off here.
The reason the water looks a bit strange, especially on the left, is that there's no ray detail region padding enabled. I forgot that.
The reflections are based on poorly subdivided geometry just outside of the frustum.
For the reflections on the bare rock I think I will just reduce the spread/roughness instead of a PF.
At the moment it's a bit too wet looking compared to the vegetation (which became plastic looking after modifications) so reducing it a bit in general this way maybe quicker and more effective. I'll see.
I just got a supercool cloudfunction working which creates vapor in/above the vegetation :)
All based on terrain displacement driven altitude offset of the cloud layer.
It's slow because it uses the compute terrain output instead of an image based mask through an image map shader.
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on September 19, 2012, 05:20:11 PM
I just got a supercool cloudfunction working which creates vapor in/above the vegetation :)
All based on terrain displacement driven altitude offset of the cloud layer.
It's slow because it uses the compute terrain output instead of an image based mask through an image map shader.
Look forward to seeing that. Displacement to vector might be a useful node if you have any problems translating planet displacement to cloud.
That's exactly what I did and therefore the reason it is slow, despite that I'm using a localized cloud.
This took 15 minutes or so with only GI 1/2/6, while I want to render this with GI 3/6/4. I guess I will have to tune it down a bit to not have it render into eternity.
I use 'compute terrain -> displacement shader to vector -> length to scalar -> colour adjust -> altitude offset'. The colour adjust isn't necessary but it can be used to tweak the contrast (rate of altitude change) of the altitude offset function.
Going to sleep now, will render it overnight and see how it looks as a whole.
Cheers,
Martin
Look forward to seeing it in the morning.
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on September 19, 2012, 04:38:01 AM
Hi Michael,
I use Walli's grasses as moss. I don't know the exact models right now, but if you like I can post them later.
Just make them very small and use a very dense population. Also, as moss tends to follow the contours of a terrain more than grass, increase the lean to normal effect.
All shader settings are untouched.
For the coming render I've resize the grasses to min size = 0.2 and max size = 0.4 and density is ~0.08.
Make sure to use the smallest population size as possible, because with these densities it can take quite a while to populate.
The lean to normal is set to 0.8 and the instances don't lean below 10 degrees slope and have reduced lean below 20 degrees slope.
The default settings (0.5, 45 degr, 90 degr) result in mild leaning and only on quite steep slopes.
Cheers,
Martin
Martin, thanks for this explanation. I've been looking for an explanation for attaining the mossy look on a project I'm working on.
Here it is with the vapor and with another ivy. Took <3,5 hours with GI 2/4/6, detail 0.7 and AA8.
The vapor didn't turn out as being that special, but it could be a nice touch. Not sure whether if will make the final, what do you think (guys)?
Same goes for the ivy, I liked the previous one better.
It's pretty evident here that rendering with higher GI settings pays off in certain situations.
Now I'm rendering an iteration with the previous ivy, vapor with higher sampling, better GI and some more ray detail region padding as the water still has that artefact.
This is getting pretty incredible, Martin. Beautiful lighting. You're giving me a boost with this project to do more than I usually do, so thanks for sharing! I must say, though, that I liked the previous version better. This one seems harder/darker somehow, but that may be the settings. Maybe just a little softer light? I liked the ivy stems, pity they've gone. I would go easy on the mist, you don't want to obscure too much. And you could add some drops on the leaves to give them a dewy look.
This will definitely go into my folder of favorites.
Thanks Ulco, much appreciated :)
The other ivy will return :)
The drops on leaves sounds interesting. What would your approach be?
The darker lighting is because of the decreased GI settings, but also because of the vapor clouds I think.
Indeed I need to be careful with those.
However, if I would really like it the way they are now and I don't want them to cast the shadows they do now then I'd only need to disable the "enable secondary" checkbox in the cloud node.
If you disable secondary (rays, I think?) then the clouds will not cast shadows anymore and I think it will also not influence GI anymore.
If you disable primary, then the clouds will not be rendered, but shadows will still be cast and also the effect on GI will remain.
This is also a very useful way of determining whether it is atmosphere or clouds which causes noise in your render if it is there.
If you disable primary for atmosphere and still see noise then it is the clouds and vice versa. Very useful.
Anyway, just keep waiting with adding to your favorites, it's not done yet! Thanks of course!
Cheers,
Martin
I did some drops once, can't find the tgd as quick, but here's a screendump of the nodes (rot is not German for rood, but rotting color). You'll find out, no doubt.
This is really killer, great realism
Thanks Danny :)
Ulco, thanks for sharing. I think the example is pretty clear. Would need quite some trial and error to get it right I think, but worth a try.
Closing in on the final I think. As you can see there's quite a difference with this one and the previous in regard to darkness and detail in lighting.
A good example that increasing GI relative detail from 2 to 3 can be worth it.
Unfortunately I can't render it much bigger as this already uses about 12GB of RAM.
I'll probably leave out the vapor and still need to overthink the ivy on the bottom right. Jon want's to see the rocks so badly :)
Any more suggestions?
Cheers,
Martin
Beautiful work.
I think it might help the composition to widen the lens and tilt down a bit. You'd raise the shoreline and see a little more water without losing the upper areas.
James
Two more suggestions: the mist is a bit straight-bottomed at the right hand side, I'd like it more whispy. And I notice a little dirt on the leaves in the upper end, but you should add some really dark patchy rotting dirt on the leaves very near the water (centrally), and maybe the tree ferns on the left. They're very vulnerable to 'rot spots' and debris from other plants above it.
I envy your realism, but what the heck; 12 GB for this size?
Nice image Martin.
I like the comp of the first and the contrast and colors of the last one.
I did not want to say much because i could not post without saying something about the objects you use.
You didn't liked if i remember much those kind of discussions because they are not your objects etc.
I think just a little color variation would be enough here. I would not change anything much besides that.
On the other side your-our images do not have to be photographic-realistic bla bla bla...
My last images are maybe kinda more on the painting side too...maybe...
But when i look at your image it gives me the feeling that you want that realistic look.
Only because of this i think your real and only point you should maybe change-be careful are the objects -their colors etc- ...
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on September 20, 2012, 03:54:52 PM
I'll probably leave out the vapor and still need to overthink the ivy on the bottom right. Jon want's to see the rocks so badly :)
Any more suggestions?
They're smart looking rocks. :)
I think I would expect to see mist all the way down to the lower surfaces, so maybe more depth in the cloud layer, which you rise up the slope?
Regardless, I think this is a cracking image.
Jaw dropping!
GREAT WORK Martin!
I think the final render should have a tad more exposure, though. Everything else is pretty perfect!
Cheers
Frank
What have you been up to the last 3 weeks, Martin? How about a nice big final?
Hi Ulco,
Thanks for asking :)
Actually I haven't touched TG for the last 3 weeks. Still a bit undecided where to go with this one.
I suppose I only need to redo the Ivy on the right a bit and render it bigger?
Cheers,
Martin
The ivy is just fine, IMHO. I like that you see some thick stems and the leaved parts. I don't like the mist, though, and I would add some dirt or rotting parts to the leaves of some plants. And a line of quite rotten mosses near the water line (maybe just add a surface layer and a color adjust, blended by some world transform, well you know).