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Under the Shade of a Tree
I used "Whispers in the Woods" as a background hdri for Image Based lighting. The blurring of the image when made into an hdri is very cool as it creates a nice sense of depth, like a dof filter is involved, though no dof was actually used. The foreground plant is the same from "Patio." In this case I have used the transparency trick to the max, so the foreground foliage should look about as real as a computer program can muster. I used the same transparency principle for the wings of the insects. The thin memebrane of the wings and the thin membrane for the leaves behave identically when placed under bright lights or under any lights. So in this case the insects should look pretty good too. This one was a quickie. Plants modeled in Truespace4.3. Feedback is very much appreciated. Thanks all for your time.
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;) good job !it's really so realistic and artistic
Well, my qualms are with the backdrop, mostly. Just for the records: this is a Bryce problem. Bryce does a poor job enlarging small HDRIs. Create you scene with a small HDRI (as here) and save it. Then remap the HDRI in HDRShop to 3000 pixels diameter or double (max is around 6400 before Bryce crashes), load it into IBL lab and render. The file cannot be saved anymore. But the artefacts I complained about above are much less obvious - if at all visible.
For a quickie, it looks very good. Horo speaks about a "closer inspection". You cannot avoid making such closer inspection of an image with this resolution. If it was half the current size most of the issues will be gone. This img will require a lot more and smaller details present or at least the objects have to be more "polished". I.e. the textures are very good and real, but they (as any convincing 3 model should be) have to be correctly UV-mapped. Bump won't go amiss too. Also I see some sharp edged polygon faces in the inner area of some leaves. Perhaps that's why you say the pic is a quick one. So I guess the "homework" will be further evolving the idea and the details. This render of yours reminds me of my "The Life Within" picture. I had serious problems with mapping and such, even with PS I couldn't "fix" the needed areas... No matter, good luck, Rashad.
Thanks guys. Archclan, The render above was only about 11 hours at high priority. The 2 day render was for Whispers in the Woods, the image used as the background. It is amazing to me how a Bryce render can look like a real photo when imported as an hdri and used as background. Reference image link here: http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=3354&mode=search If you look carefully at Whispers you will see the center most area. The process of creating a light probe in a spherical format enlarged a very small area of Whispers to cover the entire background of this current image. A few hundred pixels have been stretched out to cover almost 1300 pixels, no wonder there are artefacts.
` Wow great set up I like the way you made this because It lets the viewer Focus on the Butterfly and the leafs and wow 2 days of rendering you have alot of patience there haha usually my limit in rendering is a day only
Right on Horo, it is a faked hdri surely. The hdri was made from Whispers and it was rendered at only about 1400 pixels across. The render took 2 days so I did not render it larger, sadly, because I did not foresee using the image as a light source in the future. Had I rendered it much larger we would not have those artefacts we correctly observe.
Thanks Alex. Yes, the leaves are produced from very high resolution scans of real leaves from nearby parks, internet photos, or encyclopiea references, I do not remember exactly where this specific one came from, I think this one was on the internet, but it was a scan origianlly. The veins are especially attractive so I often use this leaf for my plants. For leaves in general I think you get much more control over the lighting when you scan the leaf on a flatbed scanner instead of taking a digital photo with a camera, as taking a digital photo of it in the world will give biased lighting that will limit the flexibility of the finished texture. Which reminds me to hit the parks today for some leaf references as the seasons are beginning to change and trees are most colorful. If I do not get the leaves scanned now I will have to wait until next year.
Foreground plant, the butterflies and the lighting are indeed extraordinary. The general impression of the backdrop from the HDRI looks good. At closer inspection, however, it shows too much artefacts. We got the horizontal and vertical lines we know from enlarged pictures that were previously blurred using a convolving low pass filter - or a strongly blurred pixelized picture. I have the impression that the probe used is a faked HDRI, probably created from a JPG and it was too small to be used successfully as a spherical panorama. It looks more like a tissue than a natural background. Therefore, it has not the look of a blurred background created with DOF. The colour and light it gives is very nice, the dark blue patch of sky is superbly placed. Even if the colours are a bit overly saturated (a Bryce IBL problem) it fits in here nicely. Nevertheless, I think the HDRI is too low quality to match the rest of the picture. You're right that a blurred DOF-background is probably the most fitting background for this scene. If the quality were better, I would certainly consider this a 5/5 candidate.
Wow! I'm not the profesional in 3d, but I think this picture is suberb! Did you use photo for the material of foliages?