First signs of spring

Wow. Great to read about the process used here. Glad to know this is an example of the foliage transparency I developed, very good. The results are very natural, both for the petals and for the fairy. I should have noticed the transparency magic right away. Your excellent overall lighting and as you say lack of strong direct sunlight prevent us from seeing the transparency cause a glow. Still, even under indirect light the transparency has a very powerful impact on the way the models interact with the lighting. In this case your techniques all work together seamlessly, no one technical consideration overpowers the others. This is a very fine render in so many ways!!!

Hard to beleave it isn't a photograph? Your kidding me. Like richter said, the grass is way to low poly. I am currently working on a smaller but similar piece, where I am trying out differed ways of lighting. It has a higher resolution ground covering (actualy, trees for the grass and terrains for the trees:P ). I will post the results here. I'm just starting to explore the more realistic side of 3d rendering, so the tips of color saturation are very useful. I go and study trees to get a more realistic result. I actually used leaf transparency on all the leafs (including the planes that makes the leaf shadow on the ground. It isn't just visible, because the direct light). The wings of the fairy are the same way transparent, and her skin too (bump map in transparent channel). I did calibrate my monitor last night with the software of my graphical card. I'm not sure about the colors yet, but now at least the gamma is correct. I think you where right about the cable, Horo. I replaced it and I haven't encountered the problem since then. Because I start with my master this summer (3 years extra college), I can't afford a new pc. But when I am studying, I shouldn't be behind my pc. So, I think long renders are a good mechanism to keep studying. (^^) But my centrino duo machine with 2 Gig internal memory is good enough for now. Well, thanks everybody for the nice comments and the positive feedback. This makes the long wait worth. (alongside the nice render of course :P)

There are already fairly nice 3- or Quad core PC configs on affordable prices and Bryce uses all of them. If you used a laptop to do the render, then I see why it took that long. Three weeks is a frustrating static image rendertime. I believe the high rays per pixel, and respectively the ibl ray count in the sky lab, are responsible. Though the result counts, I can tell! I doubt I'll point out more then the others here but... really nice lighting. Also the number of grass-blades, despite the angularity. Now depending on your installed ram memory you can use [URL=http://3dp2.0catch.com/weeds1.html][THESE][/URL] in your future projects in order to avoid the unsmooth regions. You've been already told about the trunks' saturation. Nothing to add here, except that those rich colors will do nicely if it was a cel-shaded image. Realistic Piece, no doubt, Boekenwuurm!

Beautiful image! TA and HDRI gives great result, I wish it would't take so long on normal PC to render such tandem!..

awesome

Hard to believe it is not a photograph. Now here we have a render from a seasoned brycer. Nice detail, the rabbits. I agree with Rashad that the trees are a bit generously saturated. The form is good, terrains do make nice tree trunks. The grass is the weakest element but it is difficult to get well smoothed blades and if you get them, the file size grows very high. The fern at right looks very detailed and since the light shines on it, there is no need for some transparency. Lighting is very good. I'm not sure whether it was necessary to use TA along with HDRI. But I can't say for sure if I can't compare. The white HDRI distributes the light nicely and makes good ambient light. That was a good choice. There is a display calibrator in many graphics applications. I know how frustrating it can be if you look at your artwork on different displays and it looks different. It sounds that either the cable to the HDD is broken inside or at the solder joints in one of the connectors or the cable is not firmly plugged in or, worse, the connector in the HDD case or computer has a bad contact. Start with replacing the cable, if you can. And yes, this is a 5/5 from me, too.

I swear, I thought the thumbnail was a photograph. As I have always suspected, IBL combined with TA gives highly professional looking results. The render times however make the combination hardly feasible. But good for you for biting the bullet and really going for it. At least now you can always look back on this and know what you are capable of when you can afford the computer render time. Critique: You used a white hdri this time, just fine. The colors from the light all seem just right. I would say the tree bark is too high in color saturation, not grey enough to look real. In fact I would say that for photorealism purposes less color saturation is always the way to go in regards to materials. With TA, your color saturations become even more important. I never use the standard color picker, I always press cntl + alt to bring up the numeric value setting where you can keep saturations low where they should be. If you had more detailed models for the grass and whatnot, this could pass for a photo. Excellent work keep it up! 5/5