FROM THE COMMUNITY COLLECTION
Sealife
Testing Horo's redbluesun.hdr I found a lot of unexpected yellow in the light which seemed to lend itself to an underwater environment. I wanted the scene to look busy so I placed a few "oddworld" creations (obtained from DAZ) in a mirrored box. The underside of the sea was created with an infinte plane with a transparent material applied and above that is a high frequency cloud pattern. A mixture of blue haze and green fog was used to make the sea murky. The IBL rendered image was processed in PSP8 to increase contrast, this was then combined with a second render of the scene without organic materials and only ambient light with three cones of Frozencrys streaming sunlight material. This was then further combined with an unmodified version of the IBL render again in PSP8 to give the illusion, hopefully of the streaming light being part of the scene and not a grafted in addition.
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MIRROR HOW DOSE ONE MAKE MIRRIR EFFECT CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN WOULD HELP
Strange picture. A bit scary these worm-like beings. You hid the mirrors very cunningly. Great idea of yours to use the sky as water surface, it looks quite convincing. I don't think a higher quality setting in IBL would much improve the shadow issue. There are about four strong lights, hence the clusters. I had seen these clusters in the median-cut representation. You put a lot of labour in this test picture and the result is quite extraordinary.
Thanks! Aye, the lighting is maybe a bit exotic for the subject, but I was looking at pictures of coral reefs and saw how colourful they were and fancied trying to replicate that impression of busyness and colour. We are not inside a volumetric water plane, that would have been rather too time consuming. The effect of being underwater is comprised of haze and fog, blue and olive green respectively, also muted colours chosen for materials blues, greens and some odd bits of red, all mixed with grey. The streeming light I wasn't sure about, I thought it might only stream from the point where the sun was? I don't know really... maybe it should sprinkle down generally? I used, "medium" quality for the IBL lighting, over a hundred simulated light sources, but because of the way the hdr is sampled, some clustering seems to occur which might explain the distinct shadows. Given that this render didn't take very many hours, I could probably have gone for a higher quality. But I wasn't sure it was going to be quick, partly because of the mirrors and partly because of the "glass" plain between us and the sky. The mirror work saved a lot of memory in terms of the source file, there is only 12 or 13 sea critters and a single terrain - but of course that compromised the composition somewhat since I had to choose my camera angles to disguise the fact I was working within such a limited stage. That however, is half the fun.
forgot the headline, ooooops............. "Are we inside a refracting volumetric water plane? If so, how long was the render in this transparent world?" lol thats what I want to know. I like this render a lot, the lighting does seem a bit red for an underwater render. You can see the shadows of some of the objects in front on the ground. The terrain by the way looks fantastic, as well as the texturing. That texture really brings everything together.
Interesting scene. There are alot of fun techniqes at work. Nice mirror work again. Nice animal life. Weird animal life. Almost looks like bacterium. Very effective water surface using clouds to look like waves. The lighting has good and not so good aspects for me. First, stark realism is clearly not your goal. You have taken some artistic license I feel. Even still, the .hdr seems to do a fine job of ambient lighting without employing the ambiebnt channel. I feel very little if any ambient channel at work. If there was you reduced it considerably when raising contrat levels in post production. The water seems rather bright, even the entire scene feels a bit bright. The streaming light does indeed appear to be a natural part of the scene, though I cannot help but to wonder why the light shines through there and no place else. The image holds my attention and won't let me stop looking at it. Sounds like you hit your mark. Curious, are we actually underwater? Are we inside a refracting volumetric water plane? If so, how long was the render in this transparent world?