what went wrong?

Started by EdgeFx1, April 24, 2020, 03:26:31 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

EdgeFx1

i'm a complete noobie and i have been trying to learn with great difficulty due to lack of  comprehensive teaching and learning material, but making due with any and all videos i can come across and understand i have created this first trial scene just  to see if what i learned is correct or not.

what i have included in this post is the tgd file  the node network, the 3d view and the rendered image, what i'm hopping for is to understand what or where i went wrong  to have the rendered image look so differently from the 3d render, thank you in advance to anyone who can help me to understand this program, i come from a photography and Photoshop back ground so this field of 3d rendering is all new to me and i have no idea how to make heads or tails of it. my eventual goal is to be able to render some background to use in my Photoshop work.

N-drju

The problem lies in the extreme values you have entered into the "Fake Stone Shader". Pancake effect set to 15 is an insane value. Renderer will almost certainly fail trying to resolve such values.

If building a terrain was what you were after, it is best to just use PF-based displacements, which are easily controllable and specifically made for the purpose. Fake Stone Shader is generally used only for adding some extra detail / sand / debris on an already "formulated" terrain.

On a different note - fantastic sky, I like it. :)

 yours.png
"This year - a factory of semiconductors. Next year - a factory of whole conductors!"

WAS

In contrary fake stones can be used for terrain, and can add a lot of interesting detail and variation to many scenarios.

In this example I lowered the detail of the main terrain, and added large fake stones as mountain variation, and also some fake boulders for the valley.

EdgeFx1

Quote from: N-drju on April 24, 2020, 03:42:58 PMThe problem lies in the extreme values you have entered into the "Fake Stone Shader". Pancake effect set to 15 is an insane value. Renderer will almost certainly fail trying to resolve such values.

If building a terrain was what you were after, it is best to just use PF-based displacements, which are easily controllable and specifically made for the purpose. Fake Stone Shader is generally used only for adding some extra detail / sand / debris on an already "formulated" terrain.

On a different note - fantastic sky, I like it. :)

 yours.png


i wish there was a way to determine what "1" is was the pancake setting the only setting that was throwing it off?

EdgeFx1

Quote from: WAS on April 24, 2020, 04:22:16 PMIn contrary fake stones can be used for terrain, and can add a lot of interesting detail and variation to many scenarios.

In this example I lowered the detail of the main terrain, and added large fake stones as mountain variation, and also some fake boulders for the valley.
i have no idea what i was trying to do wth the fake stones, they came out looking like slabs of upturned rocks and i thought hey that looks kinda cool, but the 3d render screen doesn't show a true enuff representation i guess, i guess i dont know the diffenrce  of a +1 can make to a setting yet  :o

WAS

Quote from: EdgeFx1 on April 24, 2020, 06:48:38 PM
Quote from: WAS on April 24, 2020, 04:22:16 PMIn contrary fake stones can be used for terrain, and can add a lot of interesting detail and variation to many scenarios.

In this example I lowered the detail of the main terrain, and added large fake stones as mountain variation, and also some fake boulders for the valley.
i have no idea what i was trying to do wth the fake stones, they came out looking like slabs of upturned rocks and i thought hey that looks kinda cool, but the 3d render screen doesn't show a true enuff representation i guess, i guess i dont know the diffenrce  of a +1 can make to a setting yet  :o

Yeah the 3d preview takes shortcuts in approximating the terrain, and with low poly count it can have trouble with extreme displacement, fake stones or not.

N-drju

Quote from: EdgeFx1 on April 24, 2020, 06:45:31 PMi wish there was a way to determine what "1" is was the pancake setting the only setting that was throwing it off?

Exactly. You could get away with all the rest. Pancake effect is a setting that allows you to flatten the stones a bit and make them rounder. A setting of "0" value will give you pointy rocks all over. Slide all the way to "2" however, and you will get oblate stones. Slide to 15... and you get a parallel universe. ;)

What I also noticed - you could easily reduce the micropoly detail and AA. I usually never go beyond 0.8 / 7 setting in my final renders, let alone testing.
;)
"This year - a factory of semiconductors. Next year - a factory of whole conductors!"

WAS

I tend to use aa7 just to test now. Don't usually go above mpd 0.6 or 0.7 in PT for non-PT you may very well need MPD1 or sometimes even higher if you have a seriously detailed displacement setup.

EdgeFx1

Quote from: N-drju on April 25, 2020, 03:27:21 AM
Quote from: EdgeFx1 on April 24, 2020, 06:45:31 PMi wish there was a way to determine what "1" is was the pancake setting the only setting that was throwing it off?

Exactly. You could get away with all the rest. Pancake effect is a setting that allows you to flatten the stones a bit and make them rounder. A setting of "0" value will give you pointy rocks all over. Slide all the way to "2" however, and you will get oblate stones. Slide to 15... and you get a parallel universe. ;)

What I also noticed - you could easily reduce the micropoly detail and AA. I usually never go beyond 0.8 / 7 setting in my final renders, let alone testing.
;)


is the detail in the final render controlled by the renderer or is it controlled in the shader?  when i look at my render it would be considered grainy  by photography standards, and im trying to understand where its coming from, is it from the environment node? or is it a texture thing?

WAS

#9
Quote from: EdgeFx1 on April 25, 2020, 03:41:59 PM
Quote from: N-drju on April 25, 2020, 03:27:21 AM
Quote from: EdgeFx1 on April 24, 2020, 06:45:31 PMi wish there was a way to determine what "1" is was the pancake setting the only setting that was throwing it off?

Exactly. You could get away with all the rest. Pancake effect is a setting that allows you to flatten the stones a bit and make them rounder. A setting of "0" value will give you pointy rocks all over. Slide all the way to "2" however, and you will get oblate stones. Slide to 15... and you get a parallel universe. ;)

What I also noticed - you could easily reduce the micropoly detail and AA. I usually never go beyond 0.8 / 7 setting in my final renders, let alone testing.
;)


is the detail in the final render controlled by the renderer or is it controlled in the shader?  when i look at my render it would be considered grainy  by photography standards, and im trying to understand where its coming from, is it from the environment node? or is it a texture thing?

Both.

The MPD settings control the calculation of the polygons, higher settings are more accurate to the data it's fed. Shaders themselves have a roughness setting for both disp and colour, as well as min and Max scales. More detail (roughness) will add to render computation as well as smaller scales, which is where we balance these settings based on our scene. What looks good to us without being too lossy.

For example take a note from the default fractal terrain. It's min scale is 0.1 instead of 0.01 because we aren't that close to the mountains in the scene for that 0.01mm scale detail. So we don't need it altogether. The detail roughness of the displacement is I believe 0.875 or around there, because we don't want the terrain too noisy because again, it's pretty far away, and we may want to add surface shaders with slope limitations which when their key is set to position in texture, will catch all these little displacements, breaking up your shader trying to constrict to all the micro slopes in the detail of the terrain.

N-drju

Image graininess can also be caused by a variety of other factors such as atmosphere quality (I always bump it up a little), path-tracing with low samples, or even the type of shadows that you use (soft / sharp).
"This year - a factory of semiconductors. Next year - a factory of whole conductors!"