Pine Trees

[RArcher]

Here's my first little close-up play with Walli's pine trees.  My verdict: They are fantastic!  Great detail and yet they still render pretty quickly.

[Tangled-Universe]

Cool trees! I suppose these are from the new free package, aren't they? Haven't checked them out yet.
I guess the fuzzy-ness in the image is partially because of the renderquality and then some blurring by you?
Very nice image though, like the lighting.

Martin

[Hannes]

Beautiful. I guess with more GI relative detail the lighting would be much more natural (and the rendertime much longer!! ).
The treees are really good.

[Naoo]

WOW

[FrankB]

looking good, Ryan. The pines indeed are pretty nice. And your setup puts them into scene very well.
One question though: do you happen to have the translucency set to anything higher than1 or 2? The colors of the tree in the middleground look wrong, too light.

Cheers,
Frank

[RArcher]

Hi Frank, TU.

There are certainly still problems to resolve with the scene as it is.  First off it is really grainy (and this was rendered with 128 atmo samples).  I am hoping that increasing the GI from 1/4 to 3/4 will help.  The render was done at 0.9 detail so there isn't much that can be changed there.  The colour problems come from two things I think, First there is a layer of mist/fog and second, I had a small bit of reflection on the leaves.  The reflections are a problem with this model as all the leaves are on planes which causes some unnatural bright reflections.   I have changed a few things and am re-rendering a bit now to see if things look better.

[Walli]

great render!

something that I do in other renderers with models that use "flat" leaves or needles - I add a bigger noise on top of the regular bump, this "bends" the normals of the plane and so they don´t look that flat anymore, which helps especially on speculars/reflections

[rcallicotte]

Looks very nice, Ryan.  It's good to know Walli gave us awesome foliage.  GROOVY!!!

[Mandrake]

Beauty RArcher!!

[Sen]

Wow, nice. Definitly motivates me to get into objects soon.
May i ask how you archived the HDR look, especially on the top half of the image?

[RArcher]

Slight update.  Removed the mist, reduced the translucency in the needles from 0.8 to 0.4 and removed the specular reflections on the needles.  Adjusted the sun position slightly.  Also switched from Mitchell-Netravali back to Narrow Cubic and increased the GI to 3/4.

It definitely turned out less fuzzy, but almost too much so in some areas.

The nice thing is that it only took 3 and a half hours to render at 0.9 detail, 10AA, 3/4 GI.

Sen:  You can blow out the sky pretty easy just by increasing the camera exposure.  I also usually increase the bluesky glow amount and bluesky glow power.

[FrankB]

Really good!
... shame that the needles are just a flat image.

Walli, if you are reading this: would it not be feasible and an improvement if you'd add two planes for the leaves. Same texture, but tilted 90 degrees?
Or, cannot xfrog create real 3D needles? If yes, is the concern that the object file would become too heavy?

Regards,
Frank

[rcallicotte]

Looks realistic, Ryan.

[Seth]

wow good shots !

[MacGyver]

Looks really good! Incredible render time btw.