Here's my first little close-up play with Walli's pine trees. My verdict: They are fantastic! Great detail and yet they still render pretty quickly.
Cool trees! I suppose these are from the new free package, aren't they? Haven't checked them out yet.
I guess the fuzzy-ness in the image is partially because of the renderquality and then some blurring by you?
Very nice image though, like the lighting.
Martin
Beautiful. I guess with more GI relative detail the lighting would be much more natural (and the rendertime much longer!! :().
The treees are really good.
WOW
looking good, Ryan. The pines indeed are pretty nice. And your setup puts them into scene very well.
One question though: do you happen to have the translucency set to anything higher than1 or 2? The colors of the tree in the middleground look wrong, too light.
Cheers,
Frank
Hi Frank, TU.
There are certainly still problems to resolve with the scene as it is. First off it is really grainy (and this was rendered with 128 atmo samples). I am hoping that increasing the GI from 1/4 to 3/4 will help. The render was done at 0.9 detail so there isn't much that can be changed there. The colour problems come from two things I think, First there is a layer of mist/fog and second, I had a small bit of reflection on the leaves. The reflections are a problem with this model as all the leaves are on planes which causes some unnatural bright reflections. I have changed a few things and am re-rendering a bit now to see if things look better.
great render!
something that I do in other renderers with models that use "flat" leaves or needles - I add a bigger noise on top of the regular bump, this "bends" the normals of the plane and so they don´t look that flat anymore, which helps especially on speculars/reflections
Looks very nice, Ryan. It's good to know Walli gave us awesome foliage. GROOVY!!!
Beauty RArcher!! :o
Wow, nice. Definitly motivates me to get into objects soon.
May i ask how you archived the HDR look, especially on the top half of the image?
Slight update. Removed the mist, reduced the translucency in the needles from 0.8 to 0.4 and removed the specular reflections on the needles. Adjusted the sun position slightly. Also switched from Mitchell-Netravali back to Narrow Cubic and increased the GI to 3/4.
It definitely turned out less fuzzy, but almost too much so in some areas.
The nice thing is that it only took 3 and a half hours to render at 0.9 detail, 10AA, 3/4 GI.
Sen: You can blow out the sky pretty easy just by increasing the camera exposure. I also usually increase the bluesky glow amount and bluesky glow power.
Really good!
... shame that the needles are just a flat image.
Walli, if you are reading this: would it not be feasible and an improvement if you'd add two planes for the leaves. Same texture, but tilted 90 degrees?
Or, cannot xfrog create real 3D needles? If yes, is the concern that the object file would become too heavy?
Regards,
Frank
Looks realistic, Ryan.
wow good shots !
Looks really good! Incredible render time btw. :o
yes, cross billboards are of course also an option, but sometimes look worse - as you simply have the problematic area where the planes cross each other (GI), also the resulting shadow sometimes can look strange.
Full 3D with needles also is possible, but it will kill most machines due to overuse of polygons. But perhaps Matt can create a special shader that creates those needles on the fly, some sort of "hair" system.
But I will do a 3D needle test as soon as possible.
I would be very interested in the 3D needles one. Could always place those in the foreground and use the lower poly ones in the distance. I always like placing single trees close to the camera anyway for precise placement. I'll keep an eye out and wouldn't mind at all paying for them.
Quote from: Walli on May 11, 2009, 05:21:45 PM
Full 3D with needles also is possible, but it will kill most machines due to overuse of polygons. But perhaps Matt can create a special shader that creates those needles on the fly, some sort of "hair" system.
Thinking out loud, maybe you could create a stem profile of a black strip with a line of radial gradient dots on it representing the needle start points on the stem, that you could then extrude in the displacement function within the objects materials?
yes, that also might work. Displacement often is used in other renderers for grass stuff - but the results only hold up in mid distance to my taste. Apart from that, this is also a performance killer. Well, TG handles displacement well, so it might actually work better then I think..
Well, to be honest, it would very much depend on how close you wanted to get to it. I reckon you could very easily disappear up the proverbial if you then applied lateral displacement to get the curve of the needle through functions. Maybe it would be better to populate an instance of the needle on the twig, but know that's beyond TG at the moment, or more likely my knowledge.
yes, some sort of nested instancing would be great, but I guess to be really effective the placement of instanced needles or leaves would have to be done on a procedural way - otherwise there would be way to much translation information needed.