Preview on HD Pine Pack

[FrankB]

Jay, I understand what you are saying: you want the plants to work out of the box and I agree with that. Let us settle on that the spruce needle textures have been too dark and required some tinkering with to be used in unfavourable lightling. And the needle density hasn't made this easier.

I know it might look like picky, but the trees you had issues with were spruces, not pines. The spruce pack was dense and therefore hard to cope with for the renderer, the pines which I posted a preview of here don' have that problem.

regards,
Frank

[Tangled-Universe]

Just for the record I changed every needle in every tree in the pack and still not what I'm looking for.  I have 100 ft pines in my back yard and they aren't all that dense or dark so I know how a F--king pine should look. I'm not as dumb as you might think I am Martin........Guess I'll have to take a picture and it post here.  Of all the trees I've used I've never had problems like this.

Martin, have you used the firs in any renders? If so I must have missed it? I'd love to see what you did. So put you money where your mouth is!

Easy Jay, easy. I'm simply pointing to an easy way of adjusting them which many many users seem to miss.
I don't mind that you consider that as me thinking you're dumb, which definitely is not the case, but keep it either for yourself or a ease a bit.
I think you should know (me) better

Everybody has their own reference on how things should look. It's a mix of taste and perception.

And Frank is very right about the renderers limitation. We can only mimic realism to a certain extend as the renderer does not provide enough detail and light bounces (I suppose) to really "fill" the dense areas with enviro light. It might be possible with insane settings, but those would likely be very unpractical.

Cheers,
Martin

[Walli]

hi,

if you take a look at the textures and compare them to other textures of my creations, you will see that they simply are not dark at all. And now I think I understand better what you mean, but what you describe is indeed more a problem of the renderer, having problems to spread the light inside of an object.
And thats something that happens with many renderers and thats the reason why I adopted a linear workflow long ago and in the meantime linear workflow is even included in many packages.

Now back to the spruce. As example I attached a rendering of one of the spruce trees, carefull, slightly exagerated ;-)
It´s standard render settings and also standard camera exposure settings.

I loaded the plant and simply set the diffuse color to "2". This takes just some seconds to do and you can see that you get a bright green. You can do the same to Translucency, you even can crank it up to 100 so that the outer parts of the tree start to glow. Those higher values help a bit to spread the light further, but in general there´s not much I can do about that. And thats also not something that only happens on the spruce pack, it happens on every object that has such dense foliage.
Sometimes it can help to use the transluceny texture inside the luminous slot, only with a low value.
But those are settings that for sure will brake most other scenes and so I dont use them.

So if you have your scene ready and only this object is to dark, then you can change the according setting. But I simply can´t offer a setting that works for all people on all scenes. Thats not possible at all.