I've seen many beautiful images made with terragen, they all have a clarity of colour that I'm failing to get. my images have a greyness which I can't remove. aside from some tweaks to haze and atmospher, Someone, I think it was Volker? shared with us some post processing tips which I do not seem to be able to find can any one help or point me to them .
Thanks
Mick
Here are two by Volker and others -
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1939.msg19588#msg19588
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1952.0
Check out this page for a few of some very good artists' settings - http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=574.0
Another good page - http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1884.0
Quote from: calico on October 30, 2007, 03:41:32 PM
Here are two by Volker and others -
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1939.msg19588#msg19588
I dont seem to recall reading that topic.....I must have missed it.....thanx calico....
Thanks Calico
Just what I was looking for ;D
Mick
Those links covered some of my suggestions, lighting and surface colouring also come to mind. e.g. most people use lighting/atmosphere settings that kill the blue in the sky for sunsets. This might look natural if you're used to looking at photographs of filtered sunsets, but I find it detracts from the scene (and leaving the sky blue accentuates the warmer colours of the clouds)
GI can make a big difference too (more in the distribution of colours rather than their intesnity), or tweaking fill light settings rather than just using generic fill lights that light everything evenly (washing out some of the colour in the process)..
And while not related to colours, I use a slightly different sharpening method to unsharp masking.
- Duplicate the background layer
- Set blend mode to Hard Light
- Filter > Other > High Pass using a radius of 0.5
- Flatten image
Thanks Ben. The more ideas the better...and this is wonderful to know. As always, information coming from you is exploratory, which means I haven't tried it yet.
Never think you have to get exactly the colours you need with a render, or else you will be just wasting render cycles. The area of 3D image creation known as "Shot Finaling" is comprised of both lighting and compositing (or post processing) collectively, they really go hand in hand. Lighting should take your image about 75% of the way in my opinion. The last 25% of the work is fine tuning your colours and other effects in a 2D package. This just makes your time more efficient. Every image I make in 3D always has some 2D work done to it, some images have extensive 2D work, and look very different from the original 3D render.
Consider this, you want more of a saturated blue in the image that just took you 4 hours to render. Do you:
a) adjust some settings in your 3D package to try and get the result you need, then wait for another 4 hours.
or
b) take your image into a 2D package, create a quick mask and adjust saturation as needed, giving an almost instant result.
I never try to perfect my image from the 3D render, it wastes too much time. I get the colours, shape and form almost there, then spend the rest of my time adjusting it easily in 2D.
I agree with njen here as I tend to work in a similar fashion. The levels, curves and selective colour tools in PS are there for just that purpose. Colour corrections (saturation, contrast, tones) are not only much easier to control in post but they also save precious render times.
njen and Saurav - This advice makes sense, but what about animation? Is this sort of method you're describing just as useful in animated pictures?
AfterEffects, Shake, Nuke and other compositing programs are what Photoshop is for still images as they are to moving images (film and cg animation).
While you may not get the exact colours you want, you still need to have any discrepancies to be fairly even across the image or they can be almost impossible to remove. To use the sunset example from my previous post... restoring the blue in a sky that has too much orange in it because of a lighting or atmospheric setting will reduce the saturation of red/orange in other parts of the scene that you want to be brightly coloured. To some extent it is still wise to get as close as possible to your desired result in TG and save post processing for minor tweaking.
Quote from: calico on November 01, 2007, 09:03:57 AM
njen and Saurav - This advice makes sense, but what about animation? Is this sort of method you're describing just as useful in animated pictures?
You can use PS on an image sequence, just record the correction to an action and use batch processing to apply the same correction to the entire sequence. Not elegant, but it works.
Thanks everyone. I'm smarter by all of this advice. Now, to figure out what I'm going to do... ;D
Quote from: JohnnyBoy on November 01, 2007, 10:14:53 PM
You can use PS on an image sequence, just record the correction to an action and use batch processing to apply the same correction to the entire sequence. Not elegant, but it works.
Actually, in some cases it can make the animation look worse. I tried this a few years ago with TG1. Each frame of the animation was a different brightness, creating a strobe like effect. Programs like After Effects, Combustion, and even Primiere have options for smoothing the correction throughtout the whole animation.
Quote from: Orangebugpro on November 02, 2007, 11:06:21 AM
Quote from: JohnnyBoy on November 01, 2007, 10:14:53 PM
You can use PS on an image sequence, just record the correction to an action and use batch processing to apply the same correction to the entire sequence. Not elegant, but it works.
Actually, in some cases it can make the animation look worse. I tried this a few years ago with TG1. Each frame of the animation was a different brightness, creating a strobe like effect. Programs like After Effects, Combustion, and even Primiere have options for smoothing the correction throughtout the whole animation.
You are probably using the "Auto" functions, always do it manually (so that the processing doesn't vary from one frame to the next) and you will never have this problem. It's not as powerful as compositing software, but it doesn't set you back a few grand either. :)