The Tree on the Hill

[brainmuffin]

Well, not all that epic. It took an hour to render. For some reason, the grass rendered weird unless I rendered it in Multipass mode.

 

There are five dofferent hair emitters (grass, maiden grass, blakeyed susans, clover, and solomon's seal). The images for each emitter were created using Plant Studio 2(which is available for free from http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/ )

 

It will export plants as bitmaps that aren't antialiased, so they're perfect for image based hair. (It will also export in several 3d formats, and I've gotten 3d plants into A:M as props, but their surface attributes aren't editable, and they tend to look like they're glowing.)

 

The tree image was rendered in carrara with no antialiasing, and was decaled onto three 6-patch panels that I aranged to give the tree some volume.

[Zaryin]

That doesn't look half bad. I might have tho check this idea out. Thanks.

[Dearmad]

I admire the effort.

 

What is with the blurriness or- murkiness to the image? I can't quite describe it- it's almost like the whole image is motion-blurred or something. Is that what the latest DOF in A:M? Something in the render can't be right....

[brainmuffin]

That's the DOF settings I have. The focus is on the tree, and the focus falls off halfway between the tree and the camera. But that's what the multipass blurring looks like, apparently.

[KenH]

Nice....very artistic looking. Thanks for the link to that plant software!

[Dearmad]

Is that the best DOF blurring available at a reasonable speed?

 

Grrr. If that's true the renderer needs some serious help in that area. The DOF in 8.5 trumps that, IMO. The DOF shown above isn't acceptable. It looks like a bunch of image layers with alpha channels all average-blurred a bit and then combined.

 

None of this is a reflection on you, Brainmuffin, please don't take offense at all. The stuff you did for this image looks nice.

 

Maybe there are some other settings to smooth out the blur? What's the non-multipass DOF setting look like?

[cmagee]

Hi Lazlo,

 

Would you mind posting a screen shot of your settings for the particles/hair? I'm not familiar with that feature in A:M and am working on a scene that could benefit from that wild grass type of look you got.

 

Thanks,

 

Charlie

[brainmuffin]

Here's the settings, Charlie. Remember, you'll need the pictures of the various plants, too.

[heyvern]

Dude!

 

Cool! I definitely need to play with this technique for Happy Bear and the enchanted forest!

 

That hill looks just like the spot where I built his house... sorry... they had to cut down the tree.

 

Oh my how I wish there were more hours in a day... 27 just isn't enough anymore.

 

Vernon "!" Zehr

[brainmuffin]

And this is how it rendered without multipass mode. There's little dots: