I downloaded Chikako's Elven Village Inn and Elven Village Dock from here (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=36428) and here (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=42712) a while ago, and decided it was time to try it.
Then I decided a statue would be nice in front of it, maybe standing on a pedestal/fountain.
So I made a Fairy figure in poser and exported. I textured it with only a water shader to create a crystal effect.
The fountan I made in 3DsMax. Just a tube and a cylinder with curved taper modifiers.
You can view images from early testing up to now in this Ashundar thread (http://www.terragen.org/index.php?topic=4758.msg38003#msg38003).
Below is the newest version with road (a painted shader with displaced voronoi pattern), which I made a bit lighter in PhotoShop.
Nice composition ...how did you do the light from the the house ,?...
NKAID...
Placed 3 lightsources in the object by hand. Bit of trial and error.
I could have opened the model in Max and create an extra object so the lights are always fixed in position.
Maybe I'll do that later anyway for future scenes.
I'm planning to animate this scene, but that will be a long project, as frames will take quite a while to render, even at half detail.
It's going to be an eclipse by a moon with an atmosphere.
That's rendered by a lot of people at different stages of TG2 development, but it's never been animated, so that should be cool to see.
I am considering adding a magic effect (just a simple extra light) at the darkest point of the eclipse, that will result in the original textures of the statue fade back onto the object (I think by using a merge shader), so the statue will come to life.
Rendering a 360 degree scene after the eclipse will give me a basis for Image Based Lighting in poser, so the statue can actually come to life.
But it's just an idea so far...
It's a nice model. Are you going to add any plants? Unfortunately it will add to render times.
Grass is rendering right now.
Maybe some trees in the background later.
Good job. I like the lighting and, whether you meant to do this or not, the sense of being in a miniaturized world. I'm not sure why I got that impression exactly, but I do like the setup and enjoy what you've done.
nice job, love the pathway, add some 'status symbol' chariots and you have a winner!
WOW!
Quote from: TheBlackHole on October 13, 2009, 06:18:55 PM
WOW!
Care to elaborate on that? :P
Problem with this scene is that when grass is added it's very heavy on RAM, like 3Gb, which is on the limit of an 32-bit app, even in 64-bit os.
So animating will be tricky, as the render bucket will be full after rendering like 4 frames or so.
But first I have to finish adding all the scene elements... so when I'm happy with the grass, I add some trees, and then change the sun position to get an eclipse.
Patience is key!
Problem with this scene is that when grass is added it's very heavy on RAM, like 3Gb, which is on the limit of an 32-bit app, even in 64-bit os.
So animating will be tricky, as the render bucket will be full after rendering like 4 frames or so.
Patience is key!
[/quote]
Depending on where you go with the camera, you could remove a ton of polys by deleting the back of the house.
The house isn't that large on RAM, only 35 Mb, so that's not the problem.
The problem is 5 populations of small grass objects, instanced millions of times...
the elven village inn sorta reminds me of one of those inns in oblivion, just with trees.
Here's a problem for ya!
I've seen quite a few eclipse renders in TG2 in the past. Some moons had an atmosphere, some didn't.
But I don't remember ever seeing any bit of extra atmo noize.
Look at the render below.
Planet2atmo: 256 samples
Planet1atmo: 128 samples
Render detail: 0.5
AA: 4
Atmo RayTrace Shadows: off
There shouldn't be this much noize should there?
Is there a noize bug in the program?
I'm not happy about this result... is there something I can do about it, or is Matt the only one who can fix this?
Whatever the case, this took almost 50 hours to render, so no animation of this scene!
wow now that is noisy. Maybe you can raise the samples to 1000 or 2000? ;D
Sorry don't have any sensible suggestions.
I don't know TG2 much. But maybe it has to do with the internal render settings in night. Maybe there is or is not a way for this. Matt will say something if it is so.
This is not what you are after...But have you tried a fake night render(make a day scene and dim it)? .With exr output it will easier to do i think and who knows maybe faster too :)
Kadri.
Quote from: Kadri on October 19, 2009, 04:55:33 PM
This is not what you are after...But have you tried a fake night render(make a day scene and dim it)? .With exr output it will easier to do i think and who knows maybe faster too :)
Kadri.
This isn't a night scene, it's an ecclipse. So the sun is right there in the image, only there's a planet in front of it...
TerrAde just did this one, I don't know if this is where your going but I found it interesting.
http://www.terragen.org/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-6071
Quote from: Mohawk20 on October 19, 2009, 05:18:51 PM
Quote from: Kadri on October 19, 2009, 04:55:33 PM
This is not what you are after...But have you tried a fake night render(make a day scene and dim it)? .With exr output it will easier to do i think and who knows maybe faster too :)
Kadri.
This isn't a night scene, it's an ecclipse. So the sun is right there in the image, only there's a planet in front of it...
Yes , but you can still fake it. You know this software way way better then me.
Unfortunately what we see in real life is not always the same in software.You know this :)
Edit : For example : Make the planet like a sun too. And make the brightness relative to the real sun....But i have not tried this of course.
Kadri.
However the end result can be achieved, the presence of noize is strange.
I guess it's coming from the moons atmo, that's why I increased the amples of atmo2 more than atmo1.
Strange. What happens if you disable the other light sources? Is Soft Shadows enabled? Is there a cloud layer present?
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on October 20, 2009, 11:20:22 PM
Strange. What happens if you disable the other light sources? Is Soft Shadows enabled? Is there a cloud layer present?
- Oshyan
1. Don't know, haven't tried that. But the noize around the lights isn't that big.
2. Yes, for all light, all with Shadow Samples at 9 (which might be the problem with such distance between planets...)
3. Nope.
Thanks for thinking along, I'll try a render without soft shadows, and one with higher samples.
Weird, I've only seen this happening with lightsource objects, never sunlight. I'd say it is the glow from the lightsources being in front of the sunlight that's making all that noise. But, the lights don't appear to be that bright to illuminate so far away from their source. Weird.
It's a great scene, though. :)
Quote from: dandelO on October 21, 2009, 01:35:29 PM
Weird, I've only seen this happening with lightsource objects, never sunlight. I'd say it is the glow from the lightsources being in front of the sunlight that's making all that noise. But, the lights don't appear to be that bright to illuminate so far away from their source. Weird.
It's a great scene, though. :)
Thanks!
Well, disabeling the soft shadows of the sun did the trick, though the sky becomes a LOT darker. So now I'm trying more samples. But the little bit of render that is done still shows lots of noize with samples at 64, so I need to go a lot higher.
Below two small test crops.
The dark one has no soft shadows, but no light in the atmo either.
The othe is really small, bu has still noize even at 1024 soft shadow samples!
Both crops took a long time, around 20 hours, even these small crops.
Success!!!!
I finally found the solution!
Well, Oshyan did, but I found the correct settings.
Since 1024 Soft Shadow samples still left noize in the render I tried 10240, but that also had noize.
So I skipped to 51200 samples and finally got a smooth render (see below). Took over 11 hours to render only this crop.
Since 9 samples is default, 51200 was needed, I think some changes are in order, either in default setting or programming?
I'm just glad I got it to work... now let's see how it looks and how long it takes when I lower the atmo quality samples.
Fantastic, but with that lag, are you going to incorporate that in you movie?
Quote from: Mohawk20 on October 24, 2009, 05:19:28 PM
... Took over 11 hours to render only this crop...
You are insane... LOL...
I think you are realy happy now ;D
Kadri.
Quote from: Mandrake on October 24, 2009, 05:22:36 PM
Fantastic, but with that lag, are you going to incorporate that in you movie?
Well, both atmo's (of the the planet and the moon) had 64 quality samples. Those are down to 16 again (should be enough), and if I keep the render size small it could render fairly quick (though a crystal [or watershaded] statue is in every frame as well it's still pretty slow).
So we shall see. I have 10 seasons of Agatha Christies Poirot to watch if I really go make this anim, so I'll be fine :P
The reason this is so challenging - and mind you this is not a problem that other renderers have necessarily solved either - is the tremendous scales involved here. You're working with millions of miles of distance, most likely. Or at least 1000s. Numerically it's very large, in any case. And the renderer has to cast "rays" across that space and hopefully hit something relevant. The larger the distance, the smaller the chance of each ray hitting something and creating a correct pixel, but even if it doesn't "hit", it still takes time to calculate. So you get lots of noise due to few rays that are cast making contact and creating a pixel of the image. You need extremely high samples to saturate the image space and essentially guarantee through brute force that you get enough quality "hits".
Try working with a million mile across scene in 3DS Max or really any other app, you'll have probably even more problems. ;) TG2 is one of the few programs that actually handles such scales well.
Mind you it's only the soft shadows that cause this problem. Granted you need the soft shadows for a certain effect in your render, but as you've seen others have had good eclipse images without this issue, and I believe that's because they don't use soft shadows. The results can still be good, and without the render time.
- Oshyan
Oshyan has a good point. Maybe using smaller scales to achieve the same effect would be faster and easier. Render the sky effects/images separately. Then render the landscape and objects. An image can be made to use as a shadow mask (not sure how). Then use compositing software to combine the two.
Quote from: njeneb on October 24, 2009, 10:24:36 PM
Render the sky effects/images separately. Then render the landscape and objects. An image can be made to use as a shadow mask (not sure how). Then use compositing software to combine the two.
No, I don't think that would work. I can always see when image are composited, and when you try to use it to buy some time it's even more obvious because of mismatchng light/effects.
Quote from: Oshyan on October 24, 2009, 09:27:51 PM
The reason this is so challenging - and mind you this is not a problem that other renderers have necessarily solved either - is the tremendous scales involved here. You're working with millions of miles of distance, most likely. Or at least 1000s. Numerically it's very large, in any case. And the renderer has to cast "rays" across that space and hopefully hit something relevant. The larger the distance, the smaller the chance of each ray hitting something and creating a correct pixel, but even if it doesn't "hit", it still takes time to calculate. So you get lots of noise due to few rays that are cast making contact and creating a pixel of the image. You need extremely high samples to saturate the image space and essentially guarantee through brute force that you get enough quality "hits".
Try working with a million mile across scene in 3DS Max or really any other app, you'll have probably even more problems. ;) TG2 is one of the few programs that actually handles such scales well.
Mind you it's only the soft shadows that cause this problem. Granted you need the soft shadows for a certain effect in your render, but as you've seen others have had good eclipse images without this issue, and I believe that's because they don't use soft shadows. The results can still be good, and without the render time.
- Oshyan
Ofcourse I know that. And I know that I'm always on the edge of possible/doable in TG2, so there's nothing wrong with the software, there's something wrong with me (but you guys noticed that already :P )
Quote from: Kadri on October 24, 2009, 05:32:47 PM
You are insane... LOL...
But I'm also fearless in the fact that I'm not scared of big figures ;D
I don't think SoftShadow Samples really add so much render time, but we shall see.
Hi
How do you create models?
3d MAX?
Quote from: R3igN on October 25, 2009, 04:06:51 AM
Hi
How do you create models?
3d MAX?
The statue is from Poser, and fountain was made in 3Ds Max.
( By the Way: I'm looking for a 2nd hand version of 3Ds Max, because I don't have the funds to buy a new license. And demo's tend to run out after a while. So if anyone can help me with that, that would be nice.)
But back to topic, I'm about to start rendering the complete scene. Let's see how long it takes...
There is a book I bought by Roger D. Wickes, "Foundation Blender Compositing". It's really quite good. I have started using Blender for image correction because of it. Believe it or not, using the node network in Blender seems somehow familiar. ::)
Anyway, the image compositing part of Blender is actually quite good, after you get to know the different tools a bit.
Below pieces of two crop renders that I stopped because it took too long. Total render time was over 120 hours, and this is all that was rendered of a 800x600 scene. It's really dark, but upping the exposure of the exr shows a lot of terrain and grass that took way too long to render without even being visible!
So a lot of Soft Shadow samples really do affect the rendertime heavily...
So I'll have to try to make it look nice without soft shadows.
Honestly I don't think soft shadows (from the planet) are even adding much/anything here. You're probably better off without them.
- Oshyan
This was done in 20 hours, so great improvement there, but the shadows are a bit too sharp now of course.
I'm going to get the 2nd planet closer to the 1st, so it's show next to the sun. And tweak it so it's in the perfect spot for the atmo colours.
You can dull the shadows but using ambient occlusion.
Quote from: njeneb on November 01, 2009, 09:04:38 AM
You can dull the shadows but using ambient occlusion.
I didn't mean the shadow lightness but the shadow edges.
Shadow lightness is good, but if it wasn't I would have increased the Enviro Light.
It would be great to use separate render passes for spec, shadows, color, and alpha. Then you could blur the shadow render during compositing.
Latest render, took 'only' 58 hours...
I really like the lighting but it needs some more, like trees.
very nice....what about some drunken elves, falling about the place with tankards of orc ale?!
Your thinking of dwarfs, Inky
The last is a very good image.
I would like to see a bunch of Terragen 2 users, stumbling out drunk. Going to see if their latest renders were finished. ::)
Quote from: njeneb on November 06, 2009, 09:32:13 AM
The last is a very good image.
I would like to see a bunch of Terragen 2 users, stumbling out drunk. Going to see if their latest renders were finished. ::)
give me a cuppla hours lol!
Quote from: inkydigit on November 06, 2009, 05:26:46 AM
very nice....what about some drunken elves, falling about the place with tankards of orc ale?!
:D :D :D
Elves don't get drunk, at least in LOTR they don't
though i think the elves in Elder Scrolls probadly do.
Now we're talkin'! Last one is great. :)
- Oshyan
Thanks guys!
If anyone can provide me with decent free elven outfits for poser characters, I might consider it. :P
Memory use will go trough the roof if I add too many though.