Originally was a night time animation with colored lights gliding around the bridge (a Halloween thing :) ). Made numerous tweaks and fixes to the covered bridge model and re-rendered as a daytime image. Most of the veggies are xFrog and the bridge, buggy fence and lamppost created by me in Blender.
Well you are way ahead of me days with your Blender skills. These models are pretty great masonpappy!
That's a good idea, and it looks good. There are a few things that can be improved IMO, if you care to do so, of course.
1. I don't see any reflections in the water (I suppose it's water under the bridge).
2. I would use lower grass in the mid road area.
3. I would make some tracks on the road by simple shapes, where ruts are worn out. Flatten the larger stones in those tracks, perhaps. You can use the same simple shapes (through world space) to extend the sand a bit onto the bridge roadway, so that it looks like wheels have taken sand with them and deposited there. Or worn the stone roadway there.
4. I find the shadowed areas very dark, almost absent of definition. I would say there would be some reflected light inside the bridge and in the tree canopy. In PT that sometimes happens, though RT will probably keep it too light. You could experiment with an extra no shadow sun at high level and very little magnitude (0.5 perhaps), though it should not be that way.
Thanks guys!
@Dune : Very good ideas and appreciate them. Soon as I get this model completed I'm going to develop the image a bit further and will incorporate those suggestions. Thanks again!
Beautiful composition and looks quite a bit like one of the few remaining covered bridges near where I live !
As a matter of fact we just saw the movie 'The Bridges of Madison County' again, where you can also see the bridge in close-up (with beautiful Meryl). Unique bridges!
So I've added changes suggested by Dune and others (thanks all!)
The posting here is a minimally uncompressed JPG (Earlier post was a PNG). I did a blink comparison in PSP and the only difference I could tell between JPG and PNG was a slightly difference in red hue (and that was * really* minimal.)
Big covered bridge fan here. That's a winner. Nice scene!
Great update! Much improved indeed. So, how did you get the reflected light into the bridge? There are several ways, but just curious.
Quote from: Dune on November 07, 2022, 02:48:49 AMSo, how did you get the reflected light into the bridge?
It was a couple of steps. I put a light inside the bridge and increased the diameter to roughly the size of the entrance-way to mildly illuminate the interior (so, I cheated a bit :) ), and added a second light above the bridge entrance. ALso increased the sunlight intensity by 1 step. Then had a "du-oh" moment when I realized the foremost population of trees did not have specularity maps. Also added a luminosity image to to the leaves of that same population. That seemed to help brighten and randomize the reflections. The water reflections were interesting. I think the stream bed was too close to the water. So I lowered the stream bed (did not change the water level) and played with the water color until I go something closer to what I wanted. Near as I can tell, pushing down the stream bed provided more water area around the bridge where the bridge wall surface reflections could be seen.
Thanks again for the critiques. That was very helpful!
Thanks for your explanation. There's a lot to think about to perfect a render. I often lower the opacity of leaves to 0.8 or even lower (never under 0.50001), as that seems to leave more light through in canopies (at least in RT renders). An extra weak sun with no shadows and just lighting surface also would have been a way. Yes, cheating, but in fact everything is a cheat ;)