Landscape

[kiwi]

And color.

[sad]

:applause: the pictures are very good, though the black and white version is better. the coloured version lacks atmospheric blue and haze.

i'suggest to remove the rock on the lower right because it might create a very artistic spread of brightness areas.

the transition from the hill in background to the plane is too edgy.

please let us see more!
:bounce: :bounce:

[kiwi]

Ya agreed thats the problem with a 50k jpg as well Sad :)


Heres what happened I rendered the image in C4D and then realized their was no real atmosphere so I added a slight gradient of blue grey in Photoshop,but balancing its opacity against the sky was really difficult,so I had to have more opacity in the atmosphere then I would have liked,and normally I would add a slight blur to the top of the mountains,but with the atmosphere the way it was it screwed that up so I just had to cross my fingers,hence a b and w version with levels and curves adjustments in PS,plus I use a Mac and I forgot to adjust the levels slider from 0.8 1.2 for Windows gamma :)


Heres an adjusted version as well :)


I am going to go back and tweak the scene I feel,I might just render in black and white actually.



Stu.

[slouchcorp]

kia ora Stu,

very nice mate i agree with sad about the B&W version nice..
what did you use for th sky?

mike.

[kiwi]

Hi Mike :D


The sky is a photo of clouds {in a C4D material},the atmosphere is a layer of blue grey gradient of foreground to transparent in Photoshop.The problem I can see now is that clouds orientation is wrong and that the wispy bits are to close to the ground,plus the bits Sad mentioned :)


I am going to play with this,I think with some tweaking and a bit of practise I might be able something pretty close to a photo.


Cheers

Stu.

[Grey]

Kiwi, can we see a wireframe?

[kiwi]

Ya ok Grey.... I am 2 hours 40 into a new render as we speak :)


You mean a wire frame?,not a screen shot right?



Stu.

[Grey]

a screenshot of the wireframe... just interested in some of how you constructed it.

The depth on the render looks damn good.

BTW, what size camera you using?

[fxgogo]

Nice stuff dude.

[kiwi]

Thanks guys heres some new ones :)


Grey just the standard camera.I do my dof in Photoshop.Heres what you do there are 2 ways I do it.


1 - copy your whole image,take the dupe layer and g blur it until the bg at the highest point looks about right for depth.Add a layer mask to the copy and using black and foreground to transparent drag a gradient of black down your mask,voila {sp} a gradual blur.


2 - copy every object in your image and make alphas,then use the above method and gradually blur as you move forward in from the bg,you dont have to blur much more as you mve though,and usually it is not really apparent until you turn off those layers,but then you will see a big difference :)


Oh when I say color tweaks I mean Photoshop color tweaks.Levels adjustments and curves,brightness contrast etc.Its tedious but it seems to work.


Cheers

Stu.

[kiwi]

.

[kiwi]

Heres one with a nosey Dragon :D

[kiwi]

And the wire frame :)


Most of the rocks are just standard C4D landscape objects at various heights.



I dont like the new front rock I made for this one.



Let me know if the gamma levels are ok please,its looking really bright to me,but I hope it looks darker to you guys :)


Stu.

[sad]

of this tread is the best i think! my points are staiing where they are but of course it is a matter of taste.

thank you for posting a wireframe version.:wavey:

[kiwi]

Ya I am going to have one last go Sad :)



Last night I thought of trying area shadow for a radiosity render......ooooh bad idea this morning it was through a pre pass and half way into a render after 9 hours :surprised


Thanks for the compliments.

Anyway one last go :D


Cheers

Stu.

[kiwi]

Finally finished it :)


Stu.

[Grey]

Okay Kiwi,

I'm impressed!

Now how did you do it?

[kiwi]

Hmm ok I am crap at explanations,but here goes :)


Ok first thing was I used a plane for the frontal sand area,floors usually make a texture look crap.I then used the magnet tool and made some ruts and creases,then added a sand texture,made a new plane used a different sand texture,placed a landscape object way back for the far big rock/mountain used an ffd to make it rounded again.I then added a sky put on a sky texture of clouds I have,made some more landscapes areas and tweaked the shape using the magnet tool,put a good rock texture on the landscapes,made some smaller rocks.


Aw thats a totally crap explanation,sorry.The main thing is the balancing of color and levels and saturation in post process or Photoshop,if one is wrong it trips up the other and so forth.


There is so much that I did that I dont really know where to start explaining it Grey.I am also a PS mod on a different board so I have a good grounding in PS,and I am also a natural media artist originally,so I basically take what I know a landscape looks like and then convert it to C4D and PS.........Is there something in particular you would like to know?,can you narrow it down a bit for me :)


Stu.

[LucentDreams]

Wow that looks awesome, really great job. Love the sand texture too. NOw did you do the DOF in C4D or in PS? It looks a little bland. I would suggest avoiding C4D's DOF and rendering out a dpthmap, which will be brought into PS as an ALPHA. then you it as a selection for your DOF blurs. this way you can also do a little mosaicing and such to make realistic lense artifacting and such. but you know about that better than I.

Again though Great job Whats your PC specs, and the Radiosity and Area shadow specs. I think you could have optimized it way more from the sounds of it.

[kiwi]

Thanks Kai :D


I did the dof entirely in PS,I can see what you mean now,I think my problem is my perception is also a bit screwy so thats why I missed that.


Does C4D output a depth channel as say a gradient of blur?,or is it a bit more technical then that?.What I do is make an alpha for each piece of scenery and blur it add a layer mask and then add a gradient to the mask,and then blur each piece a little less as I move into the foreground.On the masks I usally start with black and then use shade of grey as I advance,but I can see I have to much blur on that rear rock :)



My puter is a 400mhz Imac 512m.


My radiosity settings are diffusion 4,min res 15,max res 40,stoch samples 40,accuracy 70%,prepass 1/1,


For lighting I am using 3 omnis,I have one using a shadow of soft.



I do however have luma in the sky material,also in the rocks at a low setting,and the sand and rocks use oren nayar shading.


The render above took 7 hours I believe.I usually find a render take 1 - 1 and a half hours so I asume its the oren nayar shading which slows down the pipeline with its anisotropic settings and the roughness as I have renders which using the same settings have taken about 1 - 2 hours approx for the same size.I have found though oren nayar does work better for the rocks and sand :)



Cheers

Stu.

[sad]

i like it. is the shown image original sized? how big did you render it?

one thing: the mountain in background cuts off quite apprubtly (is this word existing?) on the left.

great!:bounce:

[Grey]

Kiwi,

I'm impressed because it looks so photorealistic I'd swear it was a photo if it wasn't posted here.

Mainly, however, the photorealism comes in the foreground, and from what I can see looking at your image that's mainly about the materials you used to create the sand and the rocks.

I think that's mostly what I'd like to know :D

[LucentDreams]

Originally posted by sad
i like it. is the shown image original sized? how big did you render it?

one thing: the mountain in background cuts off quite apprubtly (is this word existing?) on the left.

great!:bounce: ]

LOL abruptly LOL

As for your settings they seem to be quite good, ummm is the ocean a floor object? Aother thing to speed up renders it to avoid Floor objects as they need far more sampls and can affect the size of samples needed. 7 hours just seems a little long to me.3 hours maybe four would make a little more sense, Maybe I'm just not thinkking straight.

And for the depth channel, here is an example

[sad]

as you can read, english is not my native language.
so does the word exist?

lol
:rolleyes: :thumbsup: :beer:

[LucentDreams]

yes, I corrected the spelling though. Thats why I was laughing cause well I guess what you typed doesn't exist, but I knew what you meant, so In a way it is a word just spelt wrong. Wasn't laughing at you , just at the thought.

[kiwi]

Thanks Sad the original is 800 x 800 :) About the mountain the look I was going for was standing on top of a sandy type of mountain and the receding blue in the bg is meant to be distant hills/mountains at a lower altitude :) so thats why I have the cut off. I can see now everyone thinks its a beach scene:D


Thanks also Grey - The trick with textures is to where possible use photo textures.I am quite fluent with PS so these textures I made myself using a combination of lighting effects,the clouds filter,color balancing etc.It would be more of a painting tute then say a 3d one,but I would visit some of the PS sites and see how they create their rock tutes then pull them apart and see how they tick.The sand was mainly hand painted,then I applied some blend modes of a sandwhich,which is one layer set at a bend mode,one in the middle set on normal,one on top on a different blend mode,then I flatted the image and desat it and mixed my own colors to taste,applied curves adjustments and levels then back to color balance,hue and sat etc etc.Once you get your rocks and sand looking good the key is with an alpha for your rocks and sand to use - auto contrast in PS,thats what gives you that photo type effect :) Oh and where possible I almost always use cubic for rocks and sand,uvw sucks I feel for this,but I use it sometimes to give a different random effect to rocks.


Thanks for the example Kai:thumbsup: ,I see every object gets the same degree of depth.I would have thought the more realistic way to do it would have been a gradient on each object,ie as what you can see clearly comes closer so does the image,but then again I suppose it would not change as abbruptly as that would it.


Sad English is my native language and I still spell really crap,mind you I am foretting how to spell wihich doesnt help.



I will have another go at the dof.



So does Oren nayar slow down renders any?


Cheers

Stu.

[sad]

i'm very amused about my apprubtly . sometimes i use words that don't fit the thing i wanna express. i keep asking and am happy if someone corrects my spelling.

thanx to anyone who helps me writing better english! on the other hand - it does not matter if it is right or wrong as long as everybody understands what i'm talking of.

:D

[kiwi]

Your english is fine Sad :thumbsup:



I thought you guys might like to see how the pic looks before work in PS has begun :)


Stu.

[kiwi]

Heres the final one again so you dont have to keep on browsing up and down the page to compare :)


Stu.

[Caravaggio]

It was just the other day that I noticed you could control the degree of fallodd in the depth channel by using the depth of field options within the camera, suppose there isn't a way to use that as a blur channel in paint shop or something without cutting it up?

[LucentDreams]

Thats sort of what the depth channel is for, instead of cuting it up, you can simply make a selction of certain tones and apply different blurs to different levels of tone. This example is 8bit, I reccomend having a seperate image at 16 bit, but PS won't take advantage of that as you need to convert to do the tweaking anyways. Bodypaint however does allow for 16bit editing so I just wish bodypaint had better blur tools. anyone have a free good blur plugin for photoshop that may be compatible with bodypaint???

[kiwi]

Not that I know of sorry bud :hmm:


One thing I have not tried is using native PS filters in BP3d...I suppose its worth a shot :)


It makes me wonder what new improvements BP3d will have in a new version though.They {Maxon} will probably sort out XL8 then release a new BP3d version a bit later maybe.


Stu.

[LucentDreams]

I don't know man, XL 7 came out and they haven't updated yet. It sells great so I don't think they are to worried about the next update. I have a wishlist I am building to send to them soon. As I get more and more into BP.

[kiwi]

One thing I do want is curves adjustment,a clouds filter would be nice for building textures,a must is the ability to be able to export with your PSD etc a shot of all the current polys instead of having to paint highlights and fill areas in different colors etc etc.It would be nce to be able insert an image into the spec channel,and a glossiness channel would be nice also.Actually is there any way we can export an image of the mesh with our file that you know of Kai apart from say a screen shot?



Stu.

[anobrin]

Good work!!

[kiwi]

Thanks anobrin :thumbsup:


Stu.

[LucentDreams]

In fact as I really started to get into BP on Martin's tiger, I found this to be anissue too. then finally someone pointed out the not so wel documented tool in the right area of you texture view. select a pintbrush, set the brush to a small setting with the desired colour of your polies you want, and the there is a small icon that has polieschanging into checkerboard with a paint bucket or something (don't have XL open right now will do a screen cap later if you need.) And viola there is you mesh, (one note make a new layer first so you can paint underneath the layer)

The specular colour is a mixture of both GLOSS and Specular colouring. You can also mix LUMAS with Fusion and anything you want in the luminosity channel for more SPecularity control than in any other app.

[kiwi]

I just had a thought using that method you could probably use the magic wand as well...thanks for that bud :)

The thing I like about the paint bucket in PS 6 is select a color and shift click you can change the color of the outer bounds of your document window.



So what would you put on your wish list for BP next version Kai? :)



Stu.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.