A quick render in which some adjustments will be made; namely, increasing the size of the Bristlecone Pine and reducing the sizes of the flowering Mouse Ear Chickweed - my friend Thelby offered these ideas - thanks Mark.
The light source for the fire is quite noisy; but, after doing a crop and full render, a much smoother image is attained - so, I'll leave that alone.
Any other suggestions would be appreciated; thanks,
Bob
Very nice start. I like the idea of a bushfire (virtual), but perhaps you should thicken the smoke. The sparks are nice, keep them!
Quote from: Dune on June 27, 2013, 01:24:48 AM
Very nice start. I like the idea of a bushfire (virtual), but perhaps you should thicken the smoke. The sparks are nice, keep them!
Thank you Ulco. I'll try thickening the smoke, As for the sparks, they're only the result of a noisy light source. When I did a cropped segment of the fire and did a full render of it, the noise is almost completely smoothed out.
The *shape* of the smoke is very good! I like it a lot. love to see fire in renders here. Waiting to see what you make happen here!
Quotenoisy light source
Or tick off 'glow in atmosphere'.
I like the "sparks" too! :) And the smoke looks great.
Two suggestions: the terrain in the background looks a bit too smooth. Maybe you could add a little more fractal detail? And the tree could use some more bumpiness imho.
Thank you Ulco and Hannes. Although I finished the final render last night (10+ hours). I'll take a crack at trying your suggestions.
Ulco, the final render really smoothed out those sparks; but, if I turn off glow in atmo, I suspect that the reflection on the smoke won't look right.
Hannes, I agree about the terrain smoothness in the distance. I'll work with that and see if I can improve that. As for additional bump on the tree trunk, maybe some additional contrasts would help also?
I'll post the new final on a new thread.
Hannes, I'm wondering what might be the best way to treat the distant terrain smoothness without affecting the rest of the terrain ...any ideas?
You could mask the additional power fractal by a distance shader. Near: black and far: white.
Thanks Hannes, I'll give that a try.
Will try doing that using a painted shader.
Excellent I too like the sparks. I agree the ground looks a little smooth. Look forward to seeing the next iteration.
Quote from: Hannes on June 28, 2013, 12:14:12 PM
You could mask the additional power fractal by a distance shader. Near: black and far: white.
Hi Hannes,
Tried adding a power fractal to the fractal terrain as a blending shader; added a distance shader to the power shader as a blend shader. The distance default of the distance shader is 10,000 (far) - I left this setting as is. The near setting was set to 800. No results was to be had. I tried many combinations; and, no result was gained. Initially, I had bumped up the fractal shader from it's default of 1 to 6.25 displacement.
???
Quote from: mhaze on June 28, 2013, 01:33:19 PM
Excellent I too like the sparks. I agree the ground looks a little smooth. Look forward to seeing the next iteration.
Thanks Mick, more work to do. Hopefully in a few more days it'll be finished.
Bob, the near distance should be 0. Try adding a test surface layer to the whole terrain with your distance shader as colour function. So you can see which value you need for the far distance. The area you want to change should be white and the foreground black. I think 10000 may be too high. When you're happy with the distance shader you can delete your test surface layer afterwards.
Quote from: Hannes on June 29, 2013, 12:43:13 AM
Bob, the near distance should be 0. Try adding a test surface layer to the whole terrain with your distance shader as colour function. So you can see which value you need for the far distance. The area you want to change should be white and the foreground black. I think 10000 may be too high. When you're happy with the distance shader you can delete your test surface layer afterwards.
Thank you Hannes. I will get to work with your information and see if I can achieve the goal. I really appreciate your time on this. I'll be back.
A test shader is what everybody should use! I always put one at the end of the chain and plug in things I'd like to check; roads, distances, tree fractal distribution, whatnot.
Hi Hannes,
I sent to you a site email. Hope you receive it.
Bob
Received and answered it! :)
Quote from: Hannes on June 30, 2013, 12:33:02 AM
Received and answered it! :)
Thanks Hannes. It is 9:48 PM here and I haven't received it yet. I guess maybe the servers are slow.
I guess your email didn't go through Hannes ...sorry to bug you. It's 11:35 PM here.
This is strange! I sent it about eight hours a go and it didn't bounce back, so I have no idea what happened. :(
I'll send you a pm.
Quote from: Dune on June 29, 2013, 03:34:28 AM
A test shader is what everybody should use! I always put one at the end of the chain and plug in things I'd like to check; roads, distances, tree fractal distribution, whatnot.
Yeah everybody should make that a habit.
I do that too, so easy and effective!
Never know about this and must say, it takes the mystery out of the Distance shader - knowing where to set the 'Far' distance. Further learned that one must link the final Distance shader to the camera in order to see the result of one's objective - thanks to Hannes and Dune for bringing this to light.
On the test shader thing. Can you guys define clearly what your saying? I believe someone told me about this, or I read something. But Im not sure now. I think I know what your talking about, but just want to be clear.
Quote from: TheBadger on July 01, 2013, 08:26:40 PM
On the test shader thing. Can you guys define clearly what your saying? I believe someone told me about this, or I read something. But Im not sure now. I think I know what your talking about, but just want to be clear.
One of the purposes as will be used here explained by Hannes and Dune is to create a test surface shader linked to the bottom of your shader chain; and, a distance shader is set within the surface shader to the 'color function'. Reason for doing this in this case is that we are using a PF and another distance shader that will connect to our fractal terrain such that we are creating additional displacement to a part of our terrain. Now the test shader is employed to see if we have the mask (distance shader/PF) set properly for far distance and near distance - set properly meaning 'are the far and near numbers' giving us the masking we want. In our case, zero is set for near and another greater number set for far distance.
If your are easily confused Michael, don't feel bad, so am I.
I would not have thought before t2 that I was easily confused. Thanks for the clarification though ;D
Here is the 'final'. Many thanks to Dune and Hannes for offering their help to attain better displacements in the distant area; and, their explanations of the nodes set up. The has been a great learning experience for me.