Here is a simple scene of a park using the upcoming Sugar Maple tree from Marc Gebhart. He was kind enough to let me take it for a pre-release spin.
Other vegetation includes:
pink xfrog tree
Walli's grasses and Mouse-ear weed.
It's a very beautiful render Ryan. I have been testing out Marc's Sugar Maples also. I have a render just starting, but I doubt it will look this nice. It's more to 'kick the tires', but I hope it comes out well.
I am rendering with AA 10, 1280 x 720, detail 0.9. What settings did you use?
I should have added that info as well.
1600 x 1200
Detail 0.8
AA: 6
GI 2/4
I would not have thought your AA setting was so low. It works well!
Very nice work, Ryan!
I would love for you to do a little tutorial sometime about how you get your lighting looking so good, both generally on the surfaces and through the leaves of the trees.
Nice image. Tree is looking good!
njeneb, with Raytraced Objects lower AA works much better than it used to...
- Oshyan
Beautiful as always!
Lovely mood and superb lighting - I wish it was like that over here right now :)
I can smell the springtime here...very, very nice!
ah, summer dreaming.....
Very pleasant. Would love to draw my picknick blanket and sit under these trees for a bit, taking a nap perhaps ;D
Cheers,
Frank
I know that the AA is much better now, but here I think a big difference really comes from the lighting. I am rendering a scene using these Sugar Maples Marc made. They look fantastic. I was getting render errors with the translucency setting Marc had. I deleted the translucent node, and they are rendering correctly.
I set the AA to 10, and the edges are sharper than Ryan's, but the 'whole' image Ryan did looks better than my render. Anyway, it should be done Wednesday. It might be good to compare the two images. Maybe both of us can write up a quick tutorial about our methods. I know Ryan could teach me quite a few things. Maybe someone could learn from me also.
The grasses look incredibly soft - how did you do that?
Beautiful image Ryan, thanks :)
I like the translucent leaves on the upper left a lot, great touch!
Martin
A premonition of the coming spring ...outstanding Ryan!
Quote from: njeneb on January 12, 2010, 08:08:19 AM
I know that the AA is much better now, but here I think a big difference really comes from the lighting. I am rendering a scene using these Sugar Maples Marc made. They look fantastic. I was getting render errors with the translucency setting Marc had. I deleted the translucent node, and they are rendering correctly.
I set the AA to 10, and the edges are sharper than Ryan's, but the 'whole' image Ryan did looks better than my render. Anyway, it should be done Wednesday. It might be good to compare the two images. Maybe both of us can write up a quick tutorial about our methods. I know Ryan could teach me quite a few things. Maybe someone could learn from me also.
Interesting. The other thing to keep in mind of course is the Pixel/AA filter. That can make a huge difference.
- Oshyan
I usually render with the default filter. I have also used 'box' on occasion. I wish my system was faster. It would be cool to render the same image over and over using the different AA filters.
Quote from: njeneb on January 12, 2010, 10:37:40 PM
I usually render with the default filter. I have also used 'box' on occasion. I wish my system was faster. It would be cool to render the same image over and over using the different AA filters.
I did a bit of that, determined that Mitchell-Netrevali is generally the best, or at least my favorite. The tests were on a pretty simple scene, I'd like to reproduce on something more complex.
- Oshyan
Mitchell-Netrevali is the filter I normally use. I am working out the details in my head for an image using Marc's Sugar Maples, and other plants he has made. I think I will use the soft filter ___. (The current render is using almost all my ram because I went overboard on the AA. Another thread of T2 will cause a crash.)
B E A uitiful.
Thank you Ryan.
Marc
Thanks everyone, the trees turned out really nice. Not really sure what sort of lighting tutorial I would be able to write up, I don't do much special really. For this image I started with a partly cloudy sky with the sun shining in from the left. It turned out rather dull, so I increased the exposure until I got what I wanted. I lost my clouds in the brightness but the overall look was better.
That's what has been bothering me. When I turn up the exposure of the camera, the sky washes out into white. Gamma does the same thing. I'll keep experimenting, Blender's lights are not that great, but I can use them quite well now.
It is exactly the same as what would happen with a real camera, so unless you are going for a perfectly even exposure HDR effect, having the trees properly exposed while the sky is blown out is the more realistic image.
Henry, you have to keep in mind that TG2 works like a camera. You need to choose the exposure for the element that interests you most.
Let's say this were a real place and you'd be standing there with your camera, you would have to increase the exposure to catch the best possible light on the plants. Your sky would get brighter or white out. Instead, if you'd take a shot of the sky in this place, for example to show off some nice clouds, the rest of the scene would be dark.
That's the same thing here.
You can save in .exr so that you have a broader dynamic range to play with, but like with HDR photography, you can easily overdo the effect of exposing both the dark and the bright parts into the dynamic range of your monitor. To some extent this works ok.... in the end, our eyes have a broader dynamic range than your monitor, but the thing is we're used to photographs, and "find images more realistic" that have a smaller dynamic range than the eye.
Cheers,
Frank
Quote from: FrankB on January 14, 2010, 12:01:20 PM
You can save in .exr so that you have a broader dynamic range to play with, but like with HDR photography, you can easily overdo the effect of exposing both the dark and the bright parts into the dynamic range of your monitor. To some extent this works ok.... in the end, our eyes have a broader dynamic range than your monitor, but the thing is we're used to photographs, and "find images more realistic" that have a smaller dynamic range than the eye.
It's the display that's the problem (TV, computer screen or paper). The usual way to deal with these low dynamic range displays is to expose for a particular part of the scene, and accept that other parts will be under- or over-exposed. That is what tradional photographers had to deal with, but with HDR techniques that are now available there is a trend to try to fight this phenomenon by reducing the dynamic range. What I think it often overlooked is that images that are partially under- or over-exposed
do convey information about how much brighter the sky is compared with the parts that are well exposed. HDR photography which has been manipulated to show detail in every part of the scene usually looks wrong to me. Not because I am used to seeing low dynamic range images, but because I am used to seeing low frequency contrast in the world around me. Most HDR processing which aims to bring everything into the optimal exposure range is actually removing low frequency information, and that makes scenes look flat to me. So many beautiful photographs are ruined this way.
Most of the photos here have been run through what is basically a high-frequency band pass filter:
http://community.livejournal.com/ruguru/830724.html
While it may not actually be a high-frequency band pass filter, even if you manually adjust certain parts to reduce their relative contrast you are basically being a human high-freqency band pass filter ;)
So much contrast has disappeared in some of these photos that they look more like paintings than reality (at least to my eyes).
Ryan, I hope you don't mind me hijacking your thread!
( EDIT: It's art, not reality, I need to remind myself )
Here's a link to my experiment with lighting WIP. We can use this thread to discuss lighting...
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=8596.msg91865#msg91865
Matt, the photos from the link you posted indeed look very flat. Like bad renders ;)
I think the HDR in the photos Matt linked to was not done well. They opted to enhance everything, but HDR works better to enhance a single piece of an image. Oh well. Hopefully the HDR images will get better as people realize how to use it. (I don't get it myself)
Quote from: njeneb on January 15, 2010, 10:38:27 AM
I think the HDR in the photos Matt linked to was not done well. They opted to enhance everything, but HDR works better to enhance a single piece of an image. Oh well. Hopefully the HDR images will get better as people realize how to use it. (I don't get it myself)
Indeed in time it will be at a reasonable level . Do you remember the Morph era ? ;D
Kadri.
It was cool using 3D software but the images...