FROM THE COMMUNITY COLLECTION
Peninsula
Experiment with dhama's (and David's) idea to use terrains with spikes and transparent materials to create a fir tree forest a bit in the distance. There are 10 trees in the foreground submerged in the terrain, after an idea of Rashad's. The tree at left was made in Arbaro. Lit by my Simplon HDRI and at the opposite side a radial with no falloff and no shadow casting to brighten up the shadows. Rendered with DOF. The first incarnation used transparent leaves on the trees, HDRI Q=32 and 16 rpp which took 48 hours to render. Unfortunately, there was severe shadow banding on the sand next to the dhingies and the twigs of the tree at left were noisy. I sacrificed the transparency on the leaves, set Q to 64 and turned up rpp to 36 and ended up with noisy twings after 46 hours. I then rendered an object mask of the tree at left in 40 minutes. The mask and the render were blurred in Photoshop. The render and the blurred picture were blended in HDRShop using the blurred mask to get rid of the noise.
Comments 7
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What I like so much in this gallery is the constructive feedback I get. While it is certaily nice to be patted on the shoulders, it doesn't help very much to improve. Thank you all and particularly richter for the time taken to scrutinize this one.
Very nice overall, Horo! The positive points/places - lighting deserves applause, ballanced composition concerning the number of plants/trees used, water surface has just the right amount of reflectivity, very natural skycolor and horizon photographic exposure impression! The points/places that would require some work (rather then just typing "negative points" because there are none) - the blurred branch is taking too much place within the render, as if you wanted to direct our attention to it, then again you blurred it so the viewer's eye is forced to "go around" the branch and pay attention to what's in focus. A little bit of compositing contradiction we have here. Either the branch has to be much less blurred, or if it has to retain the current lvl of blur then it needs to be just partly visible in the frameshot. I love what you did with the terrains as a matter of shape/relief and separate materials, it suits nicely, though I doubt that there can be so different types of terrains so near to each other. You'll have to settle to either the greenish or the more rocky appearance. While the water has this really nice reflection, it lacks a certain amount of transparency to make it look less like an "ink" around the shore. The boats are well positioned, naturally tilted to a side, but the lack of some haze combined with the bushy-like trees on the right, that all make the boats look like toys. I was going to criticize the right part if the horizon for this noticable transition between the light-blue and dark-blue.. though the more time I spend looking at it, the more I like it.. sort of a intriguing artist's choice horizon, or a thick mist, that's how I perceive it. So overall you get my point, I hope I don't sound too harsh, it's always about helpfull suggestions when it comes for my comment/opinion. P.S. Yup, don't mix dof and ibl, lens-blur the (48-bit dithered) depth-map from bryce in Photoshop.
headline Not bad at all Horo, and to enhance it further, use the rotate control in the edit texture to distort the texture and give the 'tree' a more natural look. In the foreground trees, I would shrink the size of the leaves, so that they are more in keeping with the size of the boats. One thing that I noticed with my attempt is that a slight change in the lighting can mess up the illusion, and of course the slight blurring on the nearer trees. But all in all, I think you've got it sussed. If it helps, it took a number of failed renders before I got it to look just how it does in the uploaded version. Stick at it. Between you and Rashadcarters ideas, i'm sure you'll discover something else. Thumbs up!
Wow Horo. The scene feels very tangible. Textures are responding well to the lighting. The sky color is fantastic, incredible even. The dof was a costly but necessary decision. Funny how a technical choice added so many hours to the rendr process. I really makes a person wary of using any premium effects. In fact it is the IBL combined with Premium AA that makes me sad, the two combined are staggering render times. The trees are working very well. The foreground trees or should i say midground look more like plants than trees, probably due to the size of the leaves. For Green and Blue I coul dnot find a single installed leaf that wea complex enough to appear as a group of lkeaves. So I used a blend transparency image of a branch with 30 or so leaves on it as the leaf meterial, turning my plants into full trees. However, the blend trans and the IBL makde for a very long render. If you would have done that here you would still be 3 weeks away from completion, so I understand why you did not do that. The background trees look awesome also, just as Dhama would have expected I am guessing. Finding ways arount he lack of instancing will keep us awake many a night. Very nice here, The crisp clean feel of the render is most noteworthy.
Alexandr: Exactly. The colour of the sand came out too blue due to the blue skylight from the HDRI. I went to great length to remove it. I wasn't completely sucessful. Bullit: I have a version without DOF that brings out the tree sharp. But I rendered it with DOF on purpose to create a better sense of distance. Without DOF, the render time was 11 minutes instead of 46 hours.
Horo, its tuned beautiful! Front treee fits this image very giid. Very nice vegetation and lightning! But the sand shore turned a bit bluish. Anyway very good!
I think this turned out really nice,though I must admit the blurred branch messes with my vision somewhat..