Been working on this for around a week, Models created in Maya, Trees from the original XFrog freebie tgo files, added some snow to the leaves although its hard to see in this image. Any comments and crit on how i could improve this image i would be extremely grateful for :) thanks
Really a sweet picture. Put something interesting in the lower right in that big green forest.
Good idea - Beautiful realistic render !
@firesuite - Very believable. Reminds me of pictures I've seen of Palomar (sp?) Observatory. Very good.
Thanks for the kind words everyone, Im wondering how i could improve on this image further, As Gregsandor said i could work on the buildings some more i think although they dont have much more details to add and the ones ive seen here in CA (im basing this on my visit to Mount Wilson) is that they dont reflect anything the white coating on them is very matte.
Im not overly happy with the clouds i think and i tweaked the sunset so much that it lost all natural colour in my opinion, also as the sun is so low the bottom right corner of the image is very dark so i kind of wimped out on this and added some snow to break it up a little.
Any thoughts how i could make this more realistic ?
Thanks again people :)
Very Nice work! I think all is fine, however if you want to add a little more drama via sunlight. I would suggest moving the sun more to the left allowing it to light part of the trees and increase the atmospheric decay a little. Think about it? And if you can render a little larger would be sweet.
I think this is a really cool concept and initial execution is good. The soft ambient lighting on the back side of the domes looks really nice. The forest looks a bit overly dark, and I think that would be helped by Joshbakr's suggestion of getting a bit of light onto the trees. That would probably just involve a change in sun angle. I also agree that the clouds aren't ideal. The upper "trails" ones are ok, but the ones below the mountain seem far too ragged. I'd try increasing Feature Scale and/or decrease edge sharpness to get some nice, wispy-looking fog or soft, low clouds. With those improvements I think it would be a real winner.
- Oshyan
great start!....maybe a path leading to the telescope?...and what about adding a moon, or shooting star, or both?....as is this is still a nice render!
I would try using Oshyan's 'Fill Lights' to cast some light on the trees in the lower right.
I think Bob's idea of using Oshyans fill lights is a great idea. Then you could use low setting sun to create a twilight scene, a few stars just peeking out waiting to be observed. :)
Tom
Well done, the observery seems a bit bland though.
firesuite is probably reading all these suggestions and saying: Go to H _ LL! I'm not changing a thing. LOL ;) However if you change anything like I said the sun position would be my choice. :) Adding the fill lights isn't a bad idea, but I think it would just wash everything out. If you could restrict the fill lights as to what they effect in the scene would be fine but that's not the case in TG as they light up everything. And I think all that it needs a little light on the trees. Yeah I know, shut up right? ;D
Quote from: joshbakr on April 04, 2008, 08:20:10 AM
firesuite is probably reading all these suggestions and saying: Go to H _ LL! I'm not changing a thing. LOL ;)
Ha! no ive taken everything you and Oshyan have said into account and changed it mostly, havent used any more lights for fill though at this point, lighting on the trees looks better and clouds are a little smoother now, i'll post and update once its rendered, either tonight or tomorow morning. thanks again guys ;D Wouldnt it be good if a future version of TG had light linking though, its very fundamental in Maya and very very useful ;)
Quote from: firesuite on April 04, 2008, 10:28:27 AM
Quote from: joshbakr on April 04, 2008, 08:20:10 AM
firesuite is probably reading all these suggestions and saying: Go to H _ LL! I'm not changing a thing. LOL ;)
Ha! no ive taken everything you and Oshyan have said into account and changed it mostly, havent used any more lights for fill though at this point, lighting on the trees looks better and clouds are a little smoother now, i'll post and update once its rendered, either tonight or tomorow morning. thanks again guys ;D Wouldnt it be good if a future version of TG had light linking though, its very fundamental in Maya and very very useful ;)
Yeah, I discovered that option in Vue and it's a great thing to have. Perhaps someday TG will also have this option? Hint! Hint! ;D Looking forward to seeing you image with the changes you've made!
Ok so the Image finally finished rendering, Approx 45 hours.
I moved the sun around and it looks nicer on the trees now creating a little more light in the darker areas, The clouds are now more in control and look better but could still be tweaked some more in my opinion, the Cirrus clouds i played with and dont like this result so i will go back to the previous ones.
The main problem now is that our beloved TG2 appears to be having problems with the soft shadowing on the domes of the observatories. not sure why as the geometry for those domes is mathematically perfect, no imperfections. If you look at the Solar towar (top right ) you can make out a nice soft shadow around the object. Any thoughts on how i can fix this ? at the moment the polygons are quads, would triangles help ??
Graham.
Beautiful render ! I love the light !
The object will need to have normals calculated per vertex so that TG can interpolate them correctly. I don't know exactly how to do that in Maya but it should be possible to generate these normals before saving the OBJ. Also make sure that "use smooth normals" is enabled in the OBJ Reader in TG. TG may prefer the object if they are triangles rather than quads, but if that is the problem then there may be a bug in TG's convertion from quads to triangles.
Matt
Quote from: Matt on April 08, 2008, 03:49:47 PM
The object will need to have normals calculated per vertex so that TG can interpolate them correctly. I don't know exactly how to do that in Maya but it should be possible to generate these normals before saving the OBJ. Also make sure that "use smooth normals" is enabled in the OBJ Reader in TG. TG may prefer the object if they are triangles rather than quads, but if that is the problem then there may be a bug in TG's convertion from quads to triangles.
Matt
I have noticed similar smoothing artefacts; I have assumed that they come about when regardless of the direction of the normails at the vertices the entire face, triangle or quad, is in shadow. I don't think I have any examples saved but they will not take long to generate. ;)
Ah.. yes, you're right. It looks like smoothing is working OK and it's just the terminator that's faceted. The model will need to be more highly subdivided, and you may be able to hide any remaining problems by enabling soft shadows.
Matt
thanks for the reply Matt,
I have tried extra smoothing and triangulating the object and the results got better but were not perfect, I will work on calculating the normals later as im off on vacation in a few hours so will pick this one up when i return. thanks again.
I now think the smoothing is working OK so there's no need to do anything about the normals.
Here are a some example spheres which show that there is definitely a problem with certain faces not being lit on the terminator. All sphere were made using Wings 3D and have 48 equatorial and 24 vertical steps. The two on the left have all the edges set to be "Hard" while the ones on the right are fully smoothed. The ones nearest the camera are exported as Quads while the other two furthest away are fully triangulated. The zip contains both the .tgd and the four sphere objects (.obj format).
These rendering anomalies are suggestive. I am assuming that the renderer draws the surface one triangle at a time, splitting quads if necessary. How does the renderer decide if a triangle is lit? Are all three vertex normals tested or is the face normail used as would be the case for a flat shaded object?
The problem is described here:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-234/misc-improvements/
That document describes an optional workaround that they've implemented in Blender, but I don't know whether I want to implement that or how well it will work on more varied models.
The problem is that shading depends on two things: surface normals and ray-traced shadows. Even if the surface normals are interpolated correctly, you may have parts of the object which have normals pointing towards the light-source but are sitting on a face which is geometrically in shadow according to the ray tracer. Both the ray tracer and the normal interpolation are correct, but they convey different descriptions of the surface. The root of the problem is that there aren't enough polygons in the geometry. One way that a renderer can solve this is to subdivide the polygons and displace the surface so that its geometry matches the interpolated surface normals. Otherwise we need to apply tricks like those mentioned in the above article.
Matt
I exposed this same problem a while back with a rendering of a mosque with a golden dome on the roof - http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2495.0 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2495.0). It'd be good if there were some sort of fix for this.