Dawn at the Rocks

[photoman]

Hi, got an idea for a new project!! Ill see if I can upload a sketch but it involves an ocean shore with 2-3 large rocks and various small ones as the focal point. Grass and maybe a old beach chair or fence in there too. I have some of it done (see pic). I need to work on the sand texture/shader. I really want it to look real so I'm going to be spending a lot of time doing that.... The rocks are going to be a modified version on the one I used on my previous project. The water was kinda interesting to do. I had to adjust the transparency and reflectivity to get the right look. I wanted to use the Index of Refraction, density, and transparency settings for more realistic water but I believe those only work with radiosity. So... more tomorrow (Just got back from a big swim meet).

Photoman

[TNT]

Is the plan for the project to create a single still that is very photorealistic or are you planning to animate your project?

Was the grass created with the hair system?

 

I really like the reflections of the grass in the water.

Looks like you're off to a great start.

[photoman]

The plan (at least my usual plan) is to go not for photorealism but to create something that is still beautiful, a still. It would take much longer to set things up to scale to make a animateable set.

Yes the grass is using the hair system. (Check here for a download of the hair I used in my previous project. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...4764&st=15)

The reflections are a little problematic because I have to find the balance between transparency and reflectivity. Usually for water I just shoot up the reflectivity to 100%.

 

Thanks!

 

Photoman

[photoman]

Update. Did a lot work today. I got the sand material to look better and I modeled a beach chair for the scene. I also did some more grass and atmosphere/lighting work. I used several material effectors to give the rocks and sand a green algae look. Im probably going to change the hair underwater to a image of something ocean like (Google search....). A patch didnt render on the shot b/c the camera is too low so Ill fix that. I also took a eagle model of the AM disc spice things up. I plan to add/tweak the scene a bit more. I still think that the sand needs to look more beach like.

 

The chair, Its a darktree texture with a seperate bump map. Doesnt look great but its not going to be close up in detail.

 

C&C Welcome, I need it

 

Photoman

[Rodney]

Update. Did a lot work today.

 

I'll say! I like this composition much better.

The silhouetted rocks are nice. (although it'd be nice if you could find a place or two to hint at their texture very subtly. Admittedly this'll be hard to pull off and still maintain the pluses you've gained via silhouette. If you are going for ultra-real I think its important not to have anything completely black.

 

The chair is an interesting thing to consider.

My instinct is to suggest placing the chair buried into the sand/broken in such a way as to suggest nature is reclaiming this area. That would give an interesting sense to the image in that we see such a beautiful scene but its lost on those whose lives have taken them elsewhere.

 

Something like that anyway.

 

The torch of detailed environmental scenes has been passed. May you carry it well.

[HomeSlice]

oh yes. Much better! It looks great.

[3DArtZ]

can u do something to darken the sand that is in contact with the water line? like the point where the water meets the land line and then gradually have it fall off to the normal dry colored sand.

I think it would add some nice detail to what you have going...

 

Mike Fitz

www.3dartz.com

[photoman]

More done! I added some flocked birds (Great feature really powerful!) and weathered the chair. I also did a bunch of tweaks here and there. As for the graduated wet-dry sand... I ran into some problems when dealing with the gradients. After about 1 hour of constant change value-render-repeat I gave up, I don't want to create different maps to decal for the placement of wet sand either. I also adjusted the light so one can see more of the rocks detail and other misc details. I think Im about done with this scene so Ill hit the giant render button tonight!

This is not the current scene but close enough.

Screen shot of current scene

Render Settings:

Size: 3000x1600 (YES I KNOW THIS IS A BIG SIZE AND I AM NOT COMPLAINING OR GRUMBLING ABOUT RENDER TIMES NOR FILE SIZES! AND YES THIS IS FOR THE SIDE OF A AIRPLANE HANGER*)

Passes: 9 (3x3)

File Type: OpenEXR

Shadows, particles, fog, reflections: On (Reflections at level 3)

 

I also figured out the Villa plugin from ToonNation is a good plugin to adjust waters reflectivity and refractivity.

 

C&C Always welcome!

 

Photoman

 

*Humor

[3DArtZ]

Wow that has made a big jump!

Cool!

[TheSpleen]

Beautiful!

[Rodney]

Looks like you really nailed the details I was interested in. Nice!

I know you are heading for final render but I hope your final changes incorporate a little of the subtle lighting effect that you have on the rocks on the chair.

 

If you've got that element of lighting incorporated into the final render I can gladly doff my C&C cap and say, "well done"!

 

I like the use of color and negative space as well as the way your composition directs the eye around and into the image and keeps our attention there. This is very effective in how it directs the viewer to drink in the details. Very nice. Very very nice.

[Rodney]

Don't forget to sign your work!

[mtpeak2]

Looks great Josh, though there are a few things that look odd to me. First, the transparency of the water. I don't think you would be able to see through it that well in such a low level light, especially at the rocks. Next is the chair, I assume you set parts of it 100% transparent, but I still see it faintly. This is probably do to the global ambiance settings. The reflections also seem too bright compared to the sky, the global ambiance is probably the cause of that too or the color of your light doesn't match.

[photoman]

Finished! Took only 4 hours to render it! (25min a pass 3x3) I rendered to OpenEXR with light buffers, depth, and all the other goodies. I also rendered a seperate depth image because the buffer in the original image came out bad... All in all this is probably one of the fastest projects I've done. Counting all time spent creating it clocks in at about 5 hours + 4 hours rendering. Hope y'all like it!

Final with a quick levels adjustment:

Screen grab of all the buffers from the OpenEXR

Sand Material (Will post later)

Water Material (Will post later)

C&C Welcome

 

Photoman

 

PS The final OpenEXR file was 70Mb

PSS Not a complaint^

[TheSpleen]

nice warm look. You did very well!

[Eric2575]

Great work Josh. I gave it a 5 star rating. Thanks for posting the links to your work on the Ocean challenge page.

[photoman]

So I have come back to "rerender" and pupdate this project.

 

Reasons:

1. Photo contest at school (WITH a judge from Pixar!)

2. Wanted to see if gained knowledge and skill would help/enhance

3. Bored with current projects

 

So I added my Sun + AO indirect setup of the lighting. I updates some of the textures and other misc things.

 

So here is the update version: (With post work)

 

I also managed to render a succesful depth map. Though I didnt like the look of DOF in the shot so I didnt use it. Maybe I will make a video sweeping the focus through.

Photoman

[Gerry]

this is my first time seeing this thread, and your pic is obviously finished so I'll be brief and gentle.

1) Love the chair!

2) Not getting the diagonals on the water surface that run to the horizon. What are they?

3) Water line is too harsh. there's a transparency that happens where you can see the sand and its color several inches into the water. If you could manage this it would help a lot.

4) Overall it's gorgeous. A few tweaks and it would really be perfect. But it's a wonderful image and nice the way this thread shows your progress on it.

[higginsdj]

As with many landscape involving a land/water transition, the transition looks harsh (too hard edged). Have you considered darkening the sand at the transition (and giving it a but of variation - perhaps with a displacement map).

 

Cheers

[johnl3d]

Nice work as usual!

[HomeSlice]

It looks like the body of water is an ocean, rather than a lake. One of the qualities of the ocean as it interacts with land is that the waves, no matter how small, are always either rolling in, or sweeping out. The water along the shore line is never in a state of rest, like you have in your image. Also David's suggestion of darkening the sand near the water line is a good one.

 

Having said all that, getting a convincing water/land transition is really difficult. What you have already there looks beautiful. I love the colors.

[photoman]

Ok. So i did a lot more little things to it!

 

Check here: (W/ post work too)

 

I may once again rerender to get rid of those stray hairs sticking up and make less pointy and more dense underwater.

 

 

Photoman

[photoman]

I hate to bump my own thread.... but I do need a little C&C ....

 

Sorry if I come off looking pushy or anything....

 

 

Photoman

[HomeSlice]

Very nice image.

Here are some images of various shorelines on the open ocean.

 

http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/1050775382040195993LaRjae

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseact...logId=449530971

http://www.flickr.com/photos/awara/2604120860/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peke_cheeks/123693068/

 

You could probably get away with less dynamic water/land interaction if you turn your ocean into a lagoon or inlet by placing another body of land out past the rocks.

[robcat2075]

I like the shot. A real challenging arrangement to pull off. I agree with the others that water/sand transition is the most troublesome.

 

The reflectivity of the water surface seems to be uniform throughout, but in nature water seen at a more oblique angle (down near the bottom of the image) is less reflective than water seen at a glancing angle (out near the horizon). This is true of almost all reflective surfaces except mirrors.

 

The gradiant combiner (with start and end set to 0 and "edge threshold" set to anything other than 0 or 100) can make surface vary from one attribute to another as the angle it presents to the camera changes. This would be one way of making your water reflection behave more naturally. Of course there would need to be some details under the water to see.

 

Also possible would be to bump map some ripples emanating form the waterline to sell the idea that there is some interaction.

[photoman]

Thanks for the C&C!!

 

I did add a relfection and diffuse map to the edge of the terrain. I noticed if I increased the reflections too much it created a almost mirror finish even with the displacement mapping and bump mapping of the terrain.

 

I am going to update it once again today and rerender it. The final has to be 4500x2400px (15"x8" @ 300dpi), so I render about 2000x1067 (The max my computer can handle without crashing ), and I uprez it in photoshop.

 

Photoman

[robcat2075]

Looking more closely at your image, are those minnows under the water?

[photoman]

No, just some badly groomed hair that needs to be adjusted

 

Photoman

[Eric2575]

PM:

 

making a transition decal for the shore is really easy. Take a screencap from the top of the chor in shaded view to get a good idea of where the water line is. Take this cap and load it into PS. Increase the size to what you feel is a good size for your final render, say 2000xs1067. Now make a new layer and use some kind of soft grunge stamp, I used a moss stamp before for this, to stamp the shoreline. Be creative - should be no problem for you - and random, making sure your stamps all connect, no individual blots, and make sure your stamps overlap the shoreline on both the water side and the beach side. It doesn't matter what color you use or if you used a green moss stamp and now you have a mossy shoreline, because you will be applying this shoreline grunge map as a diffuse map. Depending on the look you get, you might want to apply a soft gaussian blur. Once you are satisfied, save the stamped layer as a TGA with an Alpha map and import it into AM. Go to your beach model, temporarily import the water and now take a shaded screencap of that in top view. Use the screencap as a 50% opaque rotoscope to help you position the new grunge map decal you just imported from photoshop. Before importing the new decal, but after correctly sizing and positioning the top screencap, delete the shoreline model. Now all you have to do is apply the grunge decal using the top view rotoscope as a guide. Again, change the decal properties to diffuse and adjust the % to what looks best in the chor. That should give you a pretty decent water transition for your shoreline.

 

 

Hope that helps

 

Eric

[photoman]

PM:

 

making a transition decal for the shore is really easy. Take a screencap from the top of the chor in shaded view to get a good idea of where the water line is. Take this cap and load it into PS. Increase the size to what you feel is a good size for your final render, say 2000xs1067. Now make a new layer and use some kind of soft grunge stamp, I used a moss stamp before for this, to stamp the shoreline. Be creative - should be no problem for you - and random, making sure your stamps all connect, no individual blots, and make sure your stamps overlap the shoreline on both the water side and the beach side. It doesn't matter what color you use or if you used a green moss stamp and now you have a mossy shoreline, because you will be applying this shoreline grunge map as a diffuse map. Depending on the look you get, you might want to apply a soft gaussian blur. Once you are satisfied, save the stamped layer as a TGA with an Alpha map and import it into AM. Go to your beach model, temporarily import the water and now take a shaded screencap of that in top view. Use the screencap as a 50% opaque rotoscope to help you position the new grunge map decal you just imported from photoshop. Before importing the new decal, but after correctly sizing and positioning the top screencap, delete the shoreline model. Now all you have to do is apply the grunge decal using the top view rotoscope as a guide. Again, change the decal properties to diffuse and adjust the % to what looks best in the chor. That should give you a pretty decent water transition for your shoreline.

 

 

Hope that helps

 

Eric

 

Thanks for the advice!!

 

I did something similar to that to get my lame shoreline now... I screencaped the top view and in photoshop just used the paintbrush to add black to the shore line, then I blurred it quite a bit and saved as a tga w/alpha. Then in A:M applied it as a diffuse and reflection maps.

 

Though I does give a better transition I need to adjust it WAY more.

 

Thanks

 

photoman

[photoman]

Here is a quick render of some recent progress, I turned particles off as well:

About a hour to render

 

Still working on the water line.

 

Photoman

[HomeSlice]

Oh yes. Love the water, and the fish. And I really don't think that the shoreline is lame, it's just that your image has the potential to be stunning, it's already pretty freakin' amazing, and in that context, the shoreline sticks out.

[robcat2075]

I'm a bit doubtful about what look like specular highlights facing us on the big rocks. How would the sun light those from that angle?

[HomeSlice]

I'm a bit doubtful about what look like specular highlights facing us on the big rocks. How would the sun light those from that angle?

 

I could buy the highlights on the tall skinny rock, but I see what you mean about the other rock. Do you think it would look better if it was rim lit more, and the specular highlights were toned down a little?

[Eric2575]

I can tell that your beach line tga is too undefined, and too small. I mean the scale is too small and you are losing detail when it is scaled up. That's what's causing it to look so ...pardon the pun...washed up

[photoman]

I'm a bit doubtful about what look like specular highlights facing us on the big rocks. How would the sun light those from that angle?

 

Ahh you caught me, I place a kleig to give fill because the angle of the sun makes all the detail in shadow. Odd though I dont have specularity on in the kleigs property's. Just diffuse... Ill tweak that in next render.

 

 

I can tell that your beach line tga is too undefined, and too small. I mean the scale is too small and you are losing detail when it is scaled up. That's what's causing it to look so ...pardon the pun...washed up

 

I still need to work on that, probably reopen in PS and spend some more time working on that, I am still having trouble though with realism there.

If i had A:M Paint Im sure it would be a lost easier to add that shore in hmmm If I had the money.

 

 

Photoman

 

P.S. same render as above with particles:

[Eric2575]

Are you using a couple of kliegs to get the underwater highlights? Would you share your water properties with us?

[pixelplucker]

very nice!

[photoman]

Ok here is another attempt at the shoreline. Better?

Photoman

[photoman]

Are you using a couple of kliegs to get the underwater highlights? Would you share your water properties with us?

 

Yes. I plan to do a video breakdown when Im done and Ill explain all about that.

 

Photoman

[robcat2075]

The edge doesn't look wet yet. How about painting that darker, fading into the regular color as it goes up on the sand.

[photoman]

I can adjust the diffuse settings higher (at about 80% in the render above) but the problem with that is that it gets closer to black the higher the value.

[robcat2075]

it depends on what you are "wetting" with that map. I'd just expect the wetness to reach up a few inches not all the way to the top. Right now the whole slope looks about the same.

 

Here's a quick bit of added wetness (bottom half)

 

 

 

The wetness on the far side of the sand might actually be bright, it's in a position to be reflecting the sunlight.

[photoman]

Ok I see what you mean now. Though it looks like that would be easier to do in post. I find it a pain to keep going btween photoshop and A:M trying to get exact spots correct.

[robcat2075]

Ok I see what you mean now. Though it looks like that would be easier to do in post. I find it a pain to keep going btween photoshop and A:M trying to get exact spots correct.

 

true.

 

But a gradient combiner would be the A:M way to darken the waterline.

[robcat2075]

A long time ago I did this clip which shows a wet edge appearance to the sand

 

http://www.brilliantisland.com/am/saveme20.mov

[photoman]

Ok, I know I haven't updated in a while so here is what has happened. I did do a bit more work on it. Just some misc things that needed tweeking nothing much. I needed to render it at 12x8" for the final print. To do that I need a resolution of about 3600x2400 (w/ letterbox so its a little less), anyway, my computer does not have enough memory for a render that large with a scene as complex as this one. So.... I did some back tracking through my previous renders of the scene and I managed to snag one that was large enough to look good upscaled in photoshop. So thats what I did, I used that one (Which was an OpenEXR file).

 

My workflow with OpenEXR files goes like this:

1. Render OpenEXR with all the buffers I can

2. Open it in After Effects

3. Use eXtractor plugin to get each channel as a layer

4. Export composition as a multi layer .psd file

5. Open in photoshop and edit

 

In doing this I can edit things such as the intensity of each light, its shadows, and its specularity. As well as the amount of reflections and intensity of the AO.

 

So I managed to get a pretty flexible workflow going and I got a lot out of that older render than I thought possible.

 

And here it is:

 

I just want to give a big thanks to all that commented, critiqued, and or just browsed by

 

I have entered this in a Art contest at my school as well.

 

Photoman

 

PS mpix.com is GREAT, the print (12"x8") looks incredibly sharp and saturated. It is such a great experiance to be able to handle a rendering

[Darkwing]

holy crap, that is amazing, very well done!!!

[HomeSlice]

VERY nice image!

[MJL]

You've really fine tuned that shot, Josh. All of your work is impressive.