Snowscape

[chikega]

And for those who can't download the project, here's just the shader file (http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/IceTest.mrm). :)

[kpalazov]

Hi chikega,
Thanks for sharing your work, I think we new messiah and new 3d users in general owe alot to those gloomy , rainy sundays:)

Approaching snow but now yet....maybe some more specularity or finer noise?

Thankyou


KP

[chikega]

Thanks for the suggestions, I added a fine grain noise and spec, but this made the snow appear more macro, or what you'd get with a close up of snow and with specularity, wet snow. I fine powder snow wouldn't have much specularity. But, feel free to tweak the project file and see. I guess that's why the eskimos have a zillion words to describe "snow". :)

This image might be of ice/snow a little closer up.

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/Iceberg1.jpg

[ThomasHelzle]

Very interesting how the recognition of size changes with more detail, the second one should be perfect for todays snowman closeup :-)
The first one gave me immediately the same idea about adding some finer grain - but maybe just in the specular channel? Or just some glow/glitter in post?

Nice stuff! Thank you.

[Suricate]

Good work :applause:! One can see that winter time is approaching ...

Gary, could you upload your material to Zoogono.com ? It seems to me that there is a great desire amongst m:s users to learn and master the powerful shading system, so any reference is helpful.

A question to the moderators, Wegg or mg3d: What about having a sticky 'Post your shaders' thread ? This might be a good thing to push the render side of messiah.

[chikega]

Hey Suricate,
I've actually uploaded the project file as well as the shader above - but, I could also upload it to Zoogono.... :)

[Suricate]

Gary, of course I've seen that you posted your snow material already :) . I suggested uploading it to Zoogono just to have a central place where all the cool :buttrock:looking shaders can be found (like in the old LW days with PresetCentral.com), so no-one has to search all the forum posts.

Thanks!

[chikega]

This image is mainly testing out water reflection. The water is displaced using the Art of Noise Crumple shader. The iceberg needs work, I threw a noisette shader on it for this quick test. The clouds were painted in Photoshop to break up the rather sterile background gradient. :)

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/Iceberg2.jpg

[chikega]

Here is the straight render without any post. Rendering took about an hour with raytracing, Monte Carlo GI, AA Level 3, at 1280 X 1024.

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/Iceberg2a.jpg

[ThomasHelzle]

Cool :thumbsup:

Did you use smooth reflections or is it only dithered by the bump like in reality?

Keep that good stuff coming!

Cheers

[chikega]

You know Thomas, I did try Soft Reflection, but it ended up scattering the reflection all over the place. I'll do a quick test render to show you what I mean. The reflection is dropping off as you guessed through the dithering effect of bump mapping.

This was a fine balancing act to get everything just so. For instance, the water is reflecting the sky (environment) which is by default a light blue/gray which makes the water look too light. But, if the environment were made a darker blue, then radiosity doesn't work as intended. And so on and so forth.

The rendering was done in the 2.0C beta - Taron was kind enough to work on the basic shader since it wasn't showing up in reflections properly in the current public release. :)

[ThomasHelzle]

You should love TLHPro:RayType - different materials for Reflection, GI, Transparency, Camera etc. on one Surface :)

I don't use Soft Reflections often - way too slow for me. And if the stuff is bumped anyway you can have the "real thing" - I was just curious.

Be careful with AoN:Crumples Iteration settings - It can become rather slow if you use too high values. Crumple and Multifractal are the most "expensive" procedurals...

Cheers!

[chikega]

Looking forward to Tender Loving Helpers .... :) Thanks, for the heads up, You da' man, Thomas!

Here's the soft reflection cranked up to 1. Not so watery feeling now...

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/Iceberg_soft.jpg

[ThomasHelzle]

Yes, this setting is very high at 1. Better start with something like 0.1 or less. 1 is like 100% in LW... :)
But you wouldn't need it in this image anyway :applause:

Is this just a test or do you want some critique?

Cheers!

[chikega]

I'm just messing around ... I have a little free time since it's Thanksgiving Holidays here in the U.S. :)

[chikega]

Here's the same scene ... but it's now dusk and there's a washing machine floating by....

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/Iceberg_late.jpg

[chikega]

And here's the updated iceberg texture. I used two AoN Multi Fractal textures layered with a gradient affecting slope. The image took 41 min to render at 1024 X 768 with Enhanced AA Level 3 , raytraced reflections, Monte Carlo GI Level 4, GI Depth 2, GI Noise Reduction ... on a HP Laptop 3GHz, 1G Ram.

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/Iceberg4b.jpg

[AlexK]

Getting better and better Gary. :thumbsup: Way to go.

[dobermunk]

Looking good. Great water surface and the ice is getting better and better.
The ice looks like its sitting on the surface though. It would be great to see the ice disappearing beneath the surface, illuminating it a bit too.

[ThomasHelzle]

Boah - very cool!
Floating washing machines - unheard-of wonders LOL

Yes, I agree with Dobermunk, the Iceberg doesn't feel as if there is an even bigger part under water.
Otherwise the Ice now looks extremely cool. Ridged Multifractal could be also interesting with it's more flowlike structures.
If you have some more time to spend, think about making an UV map and use that for the horizontal layering to make it follow the overall shape of the ice some more - this adds an amazing amount of realism and natural feel in my experience.

It is unbelievable fun to see my shaders in action used by artists like you! :thumbsup:

Cheers,

[fritz.arn]

Really nice picture.

Gary, would it be possible for you to post a little tutorial about the water shader and the sky, please!

Regards.

Fritz

[xtrm3d]

really impressive rendering ..
nice to see the shader from thomas in action

[chikega]

Thanks guys! I'll be posting some of my findings shortly. I'm still finding new unexplored areas ... especially when I read Thomas' AoN document file. I'm exploring transparency and how to add that beautiful blue glow (http://www.sgisland.org/download/wallpaper/iceberg.jpg) underneath the water that icebergs give off. Although, it might not be as visible from the camera angle I have now. Here's the original inspiration (http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/corps/images/big/corp1417.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/corps/corp1417.htm&h=1180&w=1764&sz=1181&tbnid=GWC3rEaJTggJ:&tbnh=100&tbnw=149&start=3&prev=/images%3Fq%3Diceberg%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG) for my iceberg study.

You know, Thomas, I just realized that you were the one that worked on "Lapin Decadent" along with Christophe Deese. I learn something new everyday. By the way, Christophe, I love your most recent work ... he's got a lot of character. :)

[ThomasHelzle]

Glow? You mean the lower part of the iceberg that shines through the water? Should happen automatically if you have that part modeled... But you are right, from your camera angle that may not be as visible.

Hehehe - yes, our dirty little rabbit project. The model from Christophe inspired me immediately (like most of his stuff)... He used to live 5 Minutes from me here in Berlin before he left for Dallas... :)

I'm looking forward to your findings!

Cheers :bowdown:

[Taron333]

This is getting GREAT, Gary! Frederic Edwin Church would freak out!
If you manage to put a totally flat chunk on the wall of the big berg, that would break up the new regularity of the sides one more time and make it unbeatably beautiful.

Great great work! Exciting render! :bounce:

Rock on!

Taron

[chikega]

Thanks Taron - you have a great shader there! This particular iceberg was modeled very quickly as a test object. I need to spend a little more time making a nice one. Your help is always greatly appreciated ... :)

[sadicus]

Wow, i could have used this a few days ago...
I am looking at getting Massiah Studio 2 (integrating with Maya 6)

How is the render speed with the Disp / Bump Maps...?
the SSS looks great too

Thanks!

[chikega]

Thanks! messiah renders displacement maps and GI solutions extremely quickly. Image-map based displacements render blistering fast. As where procedural-based displacements take a little more CPU cycles, of course.

With Monte Carlo GI, two passes are made over the entire image before AA kicks in. So, I can tell within a couple minutes what the overall image is going to look like before committing. It makes experimenting fun. Some renderers, calculate one section of the image at a time and it can be rather painful waiting to get a feel for what the entire image is going to look like. Although, some have remarked that messiah's AA routine is a tad slow. But the results are worth it! :)

[sadicus]

good to know! i look forward to using holiday time to learn the app...!

http://206.145.80.239/zbc/showthread.php?t=022300

Here is some inspiration too.

[tjnyc]

Gary,

Very nice work. Your iceberg is looking great! Do you plan on giving the scene some atmosphere fog or something. HDRI?

Keep it up.

Cheers,

[chikega]

Why, it's a clear crisp autumn day in one of the driest continents - Antarctica. Well, actually, I tried to give it some depth using the Atmosphere block ... but it was rather unsuccessful. :(

[SergO]

Hi Gary,

Looking cool!! :D

To give Messiah's AA a helping hand, you can use a FogBasic to reduce the Crumple's Iiterations in the distance. You will be able to reduce noise dramatically.

Usefull trick in many situations, even with image textures, using Fog and/or Fresnel to control opacity of a softer copy of the offending image.

Cheers

Serg

Btw, any chance you could show a really obvious example of messiahs radiosity sss? something that makes it really clear what the effect is. plzzz :)

[SergO]

Looking good. Great water surface and the ice is getting better and better.
The ice looks like its sitting on the surface though. It would be great to see the ice disappearing beneath the surface, illuminating it a bit too. Yeah crumple is ideal great for water :)

the only thing I dont like about it (crumple) is the razor sharp edges, makes it so instantly recognisable... I wish all fractal shaders had a control similar to the "Divisor" control in Taron's Noisette creation... it helps so much in taking the sharp edge off the fractal look... and thus would make crumple PERFECT for them ocean renders. :)

Are you reading this Thomas? ;)

cheers

Serg

[chikega]

Thanks for the tips - I'll have to try them out. I agree with you on the crumple shader - I remember LW's being not only razor sharp, but very linear in areas - a dead giveaway. But, I'm a bit confused about your wanting an obvious example of messiah's SSS ... aren't you the one that did that beautiful rendering of the seahorses and seaweed? I believe you used Taron's basic shader for those, right? Maybe you're referring to an example using messiah's built-in SSS shaders instead? :)

[ThomasHelzle]

Yes, I agree too :-)
Mr. Worleys cell noise which is the foundation for AoN:Cell and AoN:Crumple is a bit unfriendly for any kind of smoothing.
I already have an idea how to do it but found the function to be rather slow anyway so adding a smoothing computation wasn't my first choice. But since my water experiments have been leading to the same "razors", I will try to make it a choice in a next version. But be aware of higher rendertimes...

For now, try Some layered AoN:fBm or AoN:Turbulence instead... :)

Cheers!

[SergO]

Thanks for the tips - I'll have to try them out. I agree with you on the crumple shader - I remember LW's being not only razor sharp, but very linear in areas - a dead giveaway. But, I'm a bit confused about your wanting an obvious example of messiah's SSS ... aren't you the one that did that beautiful rendering of the seahorses and seaweed? I believe you used Taron's basic shader for those, right? Maybe you're referring to an example using messiah's built-in SSS shaders instead? :)
Hi,

I was referring to the new radiosity sss feature :)
just curious about what thats about... but I guess I'll find out soon anyway.

Cheers

Serg

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