Forests in maya mental ray.

#581

so far…some very nice renders out there.

Tostao_wayne, would you mind if I ask you to upload a example scene of your twosided shader, as you proposed in a post? I´m having some serious problems in building it. I´m on Maya 2011 64.

And a topic which has not been discused for too long in there: the configuration of the mia_exposure_photographic lens shader, and the render settings for max trace depth, and maximum reflections / refractions. Regarding this, I remember Tostao_wayne recommending not to set up more than 1 in reflections, but I also remember the render settings of Alessandro Prodan with values of 4 / 4 / 8 (reflections / refractions / trace depth), or even crazy values like 3 / 14 / 17 (in another post of him) as in the Raytracing configuration. And he got render times of 2-3 h. per image on a Quad core workstation, with that gorgeous vegetation which we all remember.

#582

Sorry Tzady, now i’m on a deadline at job, the next week i’ll try to upload an example shader of a two sided shader.

The main problem is that some conection have changed from 2010 to 2011, in 2011 now you must to use the conection editor to conect some shaders slots and if you try to import an scene from 2010 to 2011 these conections will be broken.

#583

for your answer and help, Tostao. I will not bother you and I´ll wait ´til next week. Good luck with that job!

And for the rest of you, what do you people think about the configuration of the mia_exposure_photographic lens shader? I use the “burn highlights” attribute but not to the extend to get a burn image, and some vignetting.

I found imposible to render in a sane amount of time one of Prodan´s configuration -the crazy one that I mention before. Trying to achieve some balanced settings between quality and time, but still don´t know how Alessandro get 2-3 h. of render time on a Quad core with that reflections / refractions / trace depth values (not to mention 250 / 300 in Final Gather quality, and 3 light bounces!)

I hope somehow Mental Images introduce serious GPU acceleration in Mental Ray…

#584

And a topic which has not been discused for too long in there: the configuration of the mia_exposure_photographic lens shader, and the render settings for max trace depth, and maximum reflections / refractions. Regarding this, I remember Tostao_wayne recommending not to set up more than 1 in reflections, but I also remember the render settings of Alessandro Prodan with values of 4 / 4 / 8 (reflections / refractions / trace depth), or even crazy values like 3 / 14 / 17 (in another post of him) as in the Raytracing configuration. And he got render times of 2-3 h. per image on a Quad core workstation, with that gorgeous vegetation which we all remember.

I tend to run heavier instead of leaner with my render settings. 6,6,12 and 4-6 for shadows, depending. And I get render times roughly on par with Alessandro on my quad-core.

One thing that helps tremendously is per-object overrides for Final Gather and ray depth. Make sure your leaves and whatnot all get some optimizations; it’ll speed things up a great deal.

#585

some fast post (I know that it has burned the image so much).

http://www.quarzhaus.es/Tadaoisi.PNG

I´ve noticed the grass is maybe too big, and the “cut” between instances is not seamless.

This is a quick test, because I am right now working with a notebook and I have to be cautious with high settings and or excessive amount of memory used…

Thank you, Tostao, Infernal and Roy!

(The building is Tadao Ando´s Koshino House)

#586

Looking goof Tzadi other than the color balance (burn you were talking about)…

A quick color-correction in Photoshop yields this result:

Not bad at all!

#587

Nice touch, Infernal!

Anyway this is a quick setup and I´m far of being satisfied. Lots of things to be improved, different passes to be rendered. I´ll post the final images whenever they´re ready.

Here are some two color proposals from my straight render:

Thank you again!

#588

who can tell me where i can find Jim Collins’s Multi Connector script? thanks

#589

Quick test with the same tree posted in the last picture. There are nearly 5k trees instanced, every tree is about a 140k poly. Need to improve the leaves shader and add some more different tree to the “sim”.

#590

Here’s my latest experiment, working on achieving a “convincing” pine tree now that broadleaf trees are under control. Same foreground scene as before, with a few improvements. Any ideas to improve the pines?

Straight out of mental ray; no postwork on this one.

I’d love to figure out materialID passes so I could do more in post; custom alphas don’t work with my batch renderer (Maya 2009) for some reason.

Edit: just realized my render-settings were very low, AA was at -1, 1, and FG was on preview settings. Hopefully the next render will look better!

#591

Good try! But the first think that I notice is that you have grass under the pines. Your trees are so close to each other that the grass, in reality, doesn’t grow up, it will be instead planty of needles!
The colour also doesn’t look great, try with two things, a darker version and a more saturated one.

#592

I’m having an issue with that test-scene now… I evened out the plant’s scale, and most of the colors seems much more realistic now, but I’m having problems getting my light to reach past all those pine needles:

Endless tweaking of the needle shader and the render settings yielded no real improvements so far:

Examining the scene from the top leads me to believe that the FG rays simply aren’t focalized enough to reach past all that geometry from the angle of my main render, as the pines lighting looks fine from above:

So I tried putting a big Portal Light in the scene, pointing down at the ground where the lighting is being obnoxious, which had the desired results but still won’t work for obvious reasons:

Much closer to uniform indirect lighting, but now that cutoff point is making things ugly.

Any ideas how I can get indirect lighting to reach the ground beneath those pines? They’re just a background element, sure, but I’d like to have all the plants and their respective shaders working in this scene, as I use this one to test new shaders and species for my plants/trees…

What am I doing wrong now?

#593

I don’t think your probem with photorealism here is linked too much with MR settings. The more noticable issues here are: overall scales are wrong; pines usually don’t sit so close one with each other, and when they do they are taller, and bald at the trunk base; pines haven’t curve trunks; some repetition on flowers are noticable.
You know, real woods can be very dark in the undergrowth, and there’s no grass just because of that, as Gabba said. But there’s other things like rocks, deadwoods, cones, mushrooms, and planty of dead foliage everywhere.
Woods are one of the most intricate subjects a renderer can decide to do, especially close looks. I don’t think a scene like this could be a good “test scene”. It’s just too complex!
In this thread there are other images that are much simpler but more credible, just because those show a very simple scene, like a flat plain grass. If you start adding complexity to your scene though, observer eyes will look for it and pretend more, and also they will need some focus point to grab.
Maybe I’ve gone a little too far with this… hope it can help. :slight_smile:

#594

I very much agree with what both of you have said about my test scene. The flowers do seem too repetitive; I think I’ll attack that at a texturing level using tastao_wayne’s script though, to output four unique flower materials instead of just one here.

Agreed about the pines, only these are curvy pines (yew pines), which also exist right by my residence as a visual reference for me. Perhaps this update is better? Still not happy with the pine needle shader yet…

#595

The ground is nice, the trees need more saturation imho
the leaves and the trunks

o/

#596

The ground is nice, the trees need more saturation imho
the leaves and the trunks

Agreed, my friend. It’s almost like my materials are going non-linear there or something… Gonna work on that!

Anyone using MaterialID passes these days? I’m struggling to get them to work, and have little experience with Maya’s pass system thus far…

#597

I had some fun with Duncans pinetrees he shared from the tech talk event :slight_smile:

High rez: http://www.nicz.net/pineComped.jpg

#598

Gorgeous trees! Not a fan of the DOF, but they look great!

Can you share your shaders? Mine look like garbage compared to these ones… (smiles)

#599

Visua all your renderings are just great. Not just from technical point but artistic too.

I managed to convert onyx tree from max to maya with the wind animation and it looks quite realistic. Animation was transfered via fbx and pointcache. Only wish is wind animation could be looped as longer pointache files can get quite big.

test video

#600

I managed to convert onyx tree from max to maya with the wind animation and it looks quite realistic. Animation was transfered via fbx and pointcache. Only wish is wind animation could be looped as longer pointache files can get quite big.

Igi, that’s a very interesting test and a technique I was considering! Until something better comes along, Onyx and/or Tastao_Wayne’s branch script are the two best choices I’ve found. Onyx Storm is of course only for Max, so I was considering Max and Storm as my next big investment just for the sake of exporting back to Maya for rendering…

Please continue testing? Is there any way to make the primary and secondary branches wave in the wind, perhaps? It looks good, but not quite enough sway to be “convincing”. Definitely cool stuff though! Thanks for sharing.