Something I made last night and left rendering when I went to bed.
This is based on a photo of a friend(see next post for reference image). I know it's far from perfect in many areas.
I like doing my own take on certain photos that catch my eye, with TG. I liked this image the first time I saw it so I gave it a quick shot.
Some postwork in Photoshop.
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Thanks for looking! :)
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pretty, the water looks great. :)
I need to buy a new mask, a snorkel, and a pair fins,
seriously.
V nice - the foreground rock is especially convincing, and the water is great.
You have done a fine job matching the photo. I like your render better than the photo!
very good foreground....how did you use blutack?!!! :)
Yeh, I was gonna say; my guess is the one with the Blu-Tack is the photo. ;D
And, yep, I've got my troos rolled up, and my knotted hanky on my napper.
Good work, man.
John
Wow... the foreground and water... Rock ;D The only thing that gives it away is the background rocks. The one at the front is damn cool.
Wow, I sure like the foreground with the water and the very convincing rock! In the background, the cliff and the clouds could use a little work. But only a tad. :)
I also think that the foreground is really well done, sky and background surface would need some more work to hold up against the reference.
Thanks for the input, folks. :)
Inky: You never seen the blu-tack shader? It's in create shader>>>colour shader>>>blu-tack shader. ;)
Schmeerlap: You could probably swim it from there, Laddie! Jist roll up the troosers and jump in! Never mind the hanky! ;)
I know this is a far from perfect recreation but I did only spend a night on it, as with everything these days. Very poor computer. :(
As an idea of just how poor a machine I'm working on: The above render, at the size you see it, detail=0.85, AA=8, GI=0, took me 21.5 hours, pitiful! And this is without the last row of render buckets along the bottom!
I rendered that part on my mum's machine... 2 minutes 50 seconds.
So, just for fun, I rendered the whole thing for comparison...
My pc = 21.5 hours(Still running, mind. I expect it would have been about 24-25 hours to complete).
Her pc = Completed in 1 hour 31 minutes.
I need a Lotto-win! I don't even play the lottery. :(
I intend to win the Mega-Millions 133+ in tonights drawing. ;D I need a newer machine, Full Terragen 2 with Xfrog, Lightwave, new glasses, better apartment... and new shoes. :'(
That's pretty damned impressive, the basic shapes are definately there, which to me seems 70% of the battle to match up. Then you have your colouring and texturing, which seems very tweakable to get that dead on.
Mate, get a better machine, so we can see more of this stuff. Overclockers.co.uk are doing a motherboard with 6gigs of ram and an i7 overclocked and bench tested before despatch at 4Ghz! for £600.
Cheers, guys. :)
Here's some other photo-recreation renders I done a while ago in TG, if you'd like to see more(original reference photos are all in the image descriptions)...
http://dandel0.deviantart.com/art/The-Argonath-106580827
http://dandel0.deviantart.com/art/Morning-93836576
http://dandel0.deviantart.com/art/Neue-Elbbrucke-70310079
This last is pretty crap but it's TG, aswell. Just a very early TG and a very inexperienced me...
http://dandel0.deviantart.com/art/West-mains-avenue-56105009
I could only get the morning image to work, the others seem to be 404 for me. But bloody hell, a bit of z-blur and you're there with the one I saw.
Fixed the links now, they'd been shortened with dots when I pasted them from somewhere else, Hetzen, sorry.
Don't apologize; I'm interested in what you've done. So thank you.
Neue Elbbrucke is a post layer of fog away from being perfect. And 'The Argonath' was the best of the crop I saw in that competition. Not too keen on WMA, but that's more down to the models you had to play with, and that the source probably has a lot more meaning to you than me. But it is technically accurate.
It's not a bad match at all - great use of texture masking - the water's great!
Wow :o... the Morning image is stunning.
Woaw, im simply stunned.. The blurish background gives the front rock a beautiful sharp effect..
Also I think that your water is really nice made and I would like to ask, how you managed to make it? My knowledge is still really basic, so im really impressed by the way you have made the water so clear and tropical..
Beautiful picture,
Mike
I'm uploading the .tgd for anyone who wants a look. I've tidied up the nodes and labelled it clearly from my original. It's exactly the same .tgd settings that I used, just an incremental update with new node labels.
The rendered image you'll get is this...
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The rest is postwork.
Quoteso im really impressed by the way you have made the water so clear and tropical
Oh, Jeez, Sp34k! You think Scotland's tropical?! :D :D :D
Wishfull thinking, although, the heat here of late is pretty unbearable at night, phew! (this is the only heat we get, mind, Scottish summer time. I'm grateful, but calm down, Mother Nature, how'm I meant to get to sleep in this? I'm not, I'll just sit and play with TG some more! ;))
The water part is really simple, the water is about 1m deep. I just make the transparency distance deeper than that(15m), with a
very slight green colour that's barely discernable from white.
There is also my voronoi caustics layer on the ground beneath the water, blended by a PF shader, for incomplete coverage.
It's very convincing. Nice job.
We are have nice winters here in Binghamton, NY; thanks to global warming. :-\
Many thanks for the TGD - a lovely image altogether. Makes me a bit homesick for the homeland :)
Just out of curiosity - why no GI? Is it because there's relatively little shadow?
By the way, I hardly noticed them before, but the clouds are gorgeous.
DandelO, Thank you for making the tgd file available, I will try to rip things apart and see how you've managed to do this..
Well scotland is a very, very beautiful place, I haven't been there yet (hopefully 'soon', I will have to visit it before my hair turns grey), but are you also suffering from the heat? Here in Denmark it's pretty hard to breath aswell, and the nights, huh, it's like laying in a pool of sweat, yummi ;D
but your water looks really tropical I think.. I can't wait to see the settings you have used, eventhough you make it sound so easy :-\ But I will take a look at it after I formate my computer, I was making a yuri rat and released it on my own pc, not that brilliant..
But thank you for providing the file, very generous of you..
Cheers,
Mike
Thanks for sharing here Martin :)
Quote from: domdib on July 05, 2009, 05:19:54 AM
Many thanks for the TGD - a lovely image altogether. Makes me a bit homesick for the homeland :)
Just out of curiosity - why no GI? Is it because there's relatively little shadow?
By the way, I hardly noticed them before, but the clouds are gorgeous.
I'm pretty sure it's because of the rendertime, he can't render everything on his mum's machine :)
He's lucky that she does not charge him rent to use it. ;D
I'm sure the final image will be great!
QuoteI'm pretty sure it's because of the rendertime, he can't render everything on his mum's machine
Correct, Martin. Everything has to be kept to a very minimum at the moment while I'm using this ol' PC. :(
I'm done with this scene now, can't be arsed to re-render with GI, even if I do get a new computer.
The raw render served me fine for what I needed, it looks
kind of like the photo, enough that I could do some post-pro' to get it there, anyway. Done.
Glad you like the .tgd, folks. You can see just how much is postwork and how much is TG from comparing the first image in this thread and the above base render from TG.
On to something else now...
Hi dandelO...
I noticed that you often use a Plane with water shader instead of using Lake ?? why ?
by the way I 've got a lot of tricks from your TGD ...
thanks a lot
Nice imitation, dandelO. Great idea, too. I hadn't thought about mimicking a photo, but that must be very challenging.
Thanks for the tgd file it looks like a good scene to try implementin a further study of your former caustics lesson thread. You are an inspiration not just for your insight into the logic of this software, but for your generous contributions/interface with the members of this forum and the tg2 user at large.
Aymenk: I like to use a plane object for water instead of a lake, for a couple of reasons; The plane can be scaled much easier than the lake, on either axis, it can also be rotated. ;)
Long, thin rivers, imagine the example, would be better rendered as a long thin strip that covers only the area it needs to, not a massive disc of sub-terrain water that needs rendered but is never seen anyway. The lake wastes a lot of resources and time, in my opinion.
I do have a method for completely masking out sub-terrain water with a painted shader and the opacity channel of a default shader, you have used it here, I believe... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6863.0. You'd have noticed that no water rendered beneath the surface of your terrain? This one actually uses an image map for opacity because it was made before the painted shader was released, simply replace the image with a painted shader and paint your own river in the 3D preview to keep the entire thing TG.
Most times, though, it's easier to just use a plane.(you can also mask this, so it makes no difference, really what you use, I just prefer a plane. :)
Also, I'd previously imagined the lake was responsible for the train-track/fanlines in water scenes. This has since happened to me with the plane aswell, though. It seems to me now, to be repeating fractals that makes it happen. This is helped by simply checking 'microvertex jittering' in the render node. As advised by Planetside.
My terrains are planes a lot of the time, aswell. I like planes. :)
Quote from: arisdemos on July 06, 2009, 01:26:44 PM
Thanks for the tgd file it looks like a good scene to try implementin a further study of your former caustics lesson thread. You are an inspiration not just for your insight into the logic of this software, but for your generous contributions/interface with the members of this forum and the tg2 user at large.
Well, thankyou very much, Arisdemos. :)
The caustics work better in this image because they are blended with a power fractal, instead of by their own warper in the internal network. I'm still optimizing the caustics file and, I'm pleased to say, it's getting closer. What I need to learn how to do is to actually 'warp' the voronoi cells, themselves... I've stumbled upon the 'distort by normal' button in the new blend shader fractal for the caustics, this is working the way I wanted(to a point)... Update when I can. In the meantime, you can check the setup in the Iona.tgd for how this works(disable the waterplane and check/uncheck distort by normal in the blend shader to see the difference between different distortion values, or just load the caustic and blend shaders as a clip into a default scene and attach it after your 'base colours')...
Actually, looking at this .tgd again, 'distort by normal' isn't checked in it. I must've just discovered this after I'd rendered, it was very recently. :)
Here's a clip and a preview of 3 different distortion values, it breaks up the solid lines of voronoi, somewhat...
No distortion:
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Distort by normal = 5:
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Distort by normal = 10:
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