Why is it that the hardest thing for me to do with Bryce is the very thing that it was created to do, mimic the natural world with landscapes? Most of the best nature images produced seem to be a combination of Bryce and a lot of postwork in a paint program (Hobbit's work is a good example of what I mean - it's unbeatable but it looks postworked to me), Dryfly is the only Bryce artist I'm aware of who doesn't appear to postwork his nature images - how does he do that? I'm not adverse to postwork to improve an image, but some are. So the subject title is a question I'd like to put to the members: Nature Images are Hard! Why?!!

:) One reason I can think of is that Nature isn't "symmetrical". Even leaves aren't quite symmetrical, and what we get in 3D is a lot of symmetry. That makes for a too "tidy" looking nature. And that's one thing nature isn't. Also; I've worked a lot with plants in different 3D apps. And it seems difficult to get the right amount of transparency and bump. Most leaves are a bit transparent, - and the different transparencies on the different species are different. I think that's part of what makes photography out there so interesting.. the play with the lights and shadows.. ..just my early morning rambles with too little coffee...

My opinion, is that to recreate (especially in Bryce, being a hobbiests app) the finest creation that man knows, can be a hard job. I dont think that anyone can truly do a render and then say, "well that looks like my palm plant in the lounge." its just not possible. Also, another factor which would contribute to (plausable) nature scenes being hard to recreate, is that Bryce has a very unrealistic "environmental atmosphere" if i can call it that, which makes it lack that crispness of say, 3ds max. But dont stress too much about it, coz i for one, have been working with Bryce for about 3 years now, and in my personal opinion, it takes a lot more skill to create a good interior scene, than a outdoors one.

I'm looking out the window at trees. I see hundreds of shaded of green, not just on different trees. The apple has about a dozen brown leaves and a dozen that are yellow. One leaf is yellow on one half and green on the other. Bryce only allows you to apply the same color to all leaves. The tree splits about 6 feet off the ground. The left hand branch is 1/3 the diameter of the right. The right makes a bend about 2/3 up without branching. If Bryce would allow you to generate single leaves to color differently, control branching, or turn roots off so you could stick two trees together as one you could fake the messiness of nature.

The other thing with a natural look is lighting, without getting bogged down in ambience renders, you need to fake light correctly, not an easy thing, the bryce alone won't cut the mustard.

I agree with what all the others have said. In the apparent order of things there is no order. There is symmetry in nature but it's in random order. Trees don't grow straight up out of the ground, some turn and swerve and many fall. There is generally many species of vegetation confined in the same area. Every different type of leaf has varying shades of green even within the same plant. Some leaves are more specular than others reflecting more light. This is why you cannot expect one software to handle the whole spectrum of differences and why most artists post-process. Andy Simmons (Hobbit) is a mixed media artist who does extensive 2D painting over his 3D art to help bring them to life. Have you tried following his 2D and 3D tree tutorial? You will also find that Dryfly relies a lot on Xfrog particularly for his underbrush and some trees and even admits to using a little post-processing from time to time. After a while of trying to attempt to get that "natural" feeling just using Bryce, you tend to start looking for other means by which to make your creation attain that look. As an artist, its your job to find the best way for you to achieve the look youre looking for even if it means looking to other software packages to achieve it.

This is a good question. Nature art is something I've been doing a long time and I have felt all these same frustrations. Nature is chaos and beauty all rolled into one. Trying to capture that chaos takes time and unless you do it right it will always have the look that human hands placed those trees and leaves. And yes, to get the true curvature of a tree and all its subtle details would be a model measured in gigabytes - something our current computers and software aren't going to play with. Sure the lighting is difficult to create but with the right lighting set up, the bounced colors and key lighting can be done with well placed lights. Most of the best 3d nature work uses actual models for all the clutter on the forest floor and that takes time - maps really don't cut it - even bump maps on bark can't replace the true light and shadow you get with real details. Some day our processors will be so fast we'll be able to just dump all that ground clutter into a scene at once and then arrange it in real time, but until then you need the fastest machine and the most RAM. Or you can be creatvie and model in layers and then composite it all in photoshop. And this definitely takes time. Colors - that is the real kicker. The varieties of subtle shades are astounding and the 16 million that our high-tech graphics cards allows us doesn't even come close to what the human eye can see - I did a web search and came up with an astounding 300 trillion. And yes the range of colors on just one group of leaves is something that 'random continuous green' just will never get right. You really can't recreate it so what do you do? Turn to the artists and photographers that got us here and look at what they did. Do a web search on these guys and look at what they did with nature. Or if you are fortunate enough to have one - go to an art museum - there is nothing like seeing a real masters work right there in front of you. The Hudson school of painters focused on the drama of light and shadow. Albert Bierstadt was the ultimate painter of light and he painted volumetric mists and towering peaks on paintings that were sometimes measured in 10s of feet across. We will NEVER have a processor fast enough to capture volumetric light the way he did. And then there are the impressionists. I recently saw an original Monet (of the waterlillies series) and the depth of paint was amazing. The light and details of the painting actually changed depending upon your angle of view in the room - I looked at it for hours. And what about Ansel Adams? Can you say post-production? His dodging and burning techniques recreated the drama of light that we see in nature but a raw photograph can never truly capture. Fall is coming - we should all go for a hike and just appreciate the natural world for what it is. Don't worry about the things you can't recreate. Just spend the whole hike SEEING. Let your eyes and mind take it all in. Don't think or analyze the world around you - just BE present in the moment. Even leave your camera at home so there are no distractions. I think we will all come back with a new perspective. I think we will all see that it is all out there among the chaos: all the basics of art - form, color, light, and shadow. Not to be recreated - but to be interpreted. THAT interpretation is what makes us artists. Scott ps - sorry for the length of this post - but nature is my favorite topic ; )

By all means take your camera! I use photo reference alot, there are times only the camera can capture a nuiance of light and the best nature images all have some form of chiaroscuro lighting, and it takes practice, practice, practice...and do get out this fall, it's always good to take a breather in our natural environment....just my 2 bits

Good advice everyone! Take a hike eh?

I think nature images are hard because we have a very good idea of what nature looks like. We see it all around us and our brain notices immediately when things don't look right. Even if we can't put our finger on what's wrong exactly. The biggest problem with landscapes is that most people want to make it much more romantic then most landscapes are in real life. You have to find a balance between realism and very strong emotional aspects of the landscape. This is easiest to achieve by making a mainly realistic scene in bryce to begin with and then using postwork to add details and increase the aspects of the image that make it look so nice and romantic.

Exactly and this is the same reason why synthetic humans (ala Poser and even amazing hand modelers) will NEVER look like real humans. We are surrounded by people the way we're surrounded by nature and we can always spot a counterfeit of these - it is in OUR nature - LOL! Postwork is not a sin - that is why I mentioned Ansel Adams. Without it his images would not have the impact they do. Also nature does not have hard angles and even the damn treelab generates them at every crook of a branch. The computer is getting us much closer but post work is what humanizes the image and makes it believeable and enjoyable. I do too - but leave it home just this one time - let your mind and spirit be the camera - this is not about photo reference - do that on another hike. Just allow yourself ONE hike where all you do is walk and SEE. The images that stay with you will far surpass anything photo reference could give you. Try it and you'll see. Scott : )

I inserted quotes with the greater and less than sign and they show up as invisible and it also made everyhing in italics... the first statement is in reponse to: I think nature images are hard because we have a very good idea of what nature looks like. the last statement is in response to zhann's about bringing the camera with for reference. Scott

Like others have said, it's in the lighting. Relying only on the "sun" in Bryce for outdoor scenes doesn't do a whole lot for a render. Throwing a couple of light sources around here and there helps give a better effect of light reflecting off of things. Also there should be some play of shadow and light going on. Not all shadows are hard or soft. Just something to think about when setting up a render.

I'm trying I'm trying.My input is about the tree.I will sometimes duplicate the trees or triple them in the same spot with slight moves to each.Texture each set of leaves with digital camera images I have.This is how I can replicate a leaf with more than one colour.I have tried many times to do a Bryce only,but think postwork is the only way to recreate nature,with cloning tuffs of underbrush around treebases and the rocks.Creating a slight perspective shadow of my own on all the foilage.Last is the smoothing of the jagged edges Bryce can give to the shapes.Now I am not saying I have pefected all of this as I am still new to Bryce, but landscapes are my passion in this program.As I say I am trying."tjohn,you have a fantastic style all of your own and I have seen your art way back in a site called Prodraw."Follower since.

You are right on target amethyss - cloing and postwork is a good way to go to add all that subsconcious detail that would otherwise look crappy as a texture map or take forever to render and place in the scene as polygons. If you haven't seen it and you have either painter or paint shop pro go to www.gardenhose.com and look at jungle3d and the gardenhose. They are really nice image hoses that let you paint with grass, underbrush, pine needles. leaves, and even rocks and twigs. There are free samples there as well. These things add amazing finishing touches to nature images and like a brush you can still control the color and subtle things that make them look like they are in the scene. Even with your digital photos you can still only get the same photo on every leaf of each tree - that is the flaw of the treelab at version 1.0. Having a unique leaf photo for each tree is a good idea, but it still ends up being the same leaf repeated for the whole tree. This is why I end up using simple DTE bryce textures for leaves instead - they have a more organic look to them and you don't have the render hit for tranparency that you do with alpha channel picture leaves. Scott

Yes, I agree Scott, Digarts (Gardon Hose) has two CD's that provide great hoses for doing this kind of work, I have both. One is for leaves, trees, grasses and shadows (Jungle3D) and the other allows you to draw in your own trees, branches and trunks (Tree Forestry), work very well with a tablet and I recommend them both. I've used them sparingly. The only concern with them is that you need to be in careful control of lighting and shadow placement since they're not 3D objects. Nozzles in Painter are a lot like tubes in Photo Paint except they have more randomness to them. You can also create your own nozzles.

Hehe - yep I have all of them too. Forestry is really cool for painting bark maps. It's really nice to use the features in painter to let some subltle color bleed into the hoses too this automatically adds just the variation we've been talking about. Actually the cool thing about jungle3d is they are shadowless nozzles bulit for making 3d transparency maps and garden hose has the shadows which make them nice for painting when you need some depth. I'm gonna revisit an old image or two and paint in some details to see how it goes. Glad to see you like them too : ) Scott

I think that the key to creating the best nature scenes, is like what Zahnn said: Take a photo. I rely heavily on photos when model building in Bryce. Going from a photo results in MUCH better results, than from working from an image that you might have in your mind. I find its frustrating, when i have an idea in my head, and i cant recreate it in Bryce. Take my word for it. Using photos is the word to go.

When a nature scene is put together by an artist, it will be done differently than it is in nature. The artist will arrange things as they thing is most artistic, or most realistic, or whatever, but since it is unlikely that you will know all the rules of the universe, you are likely to end up violating a number of them without realizing it. You might scatter leaves about the forest floor, but in reality with wind working on them they're more likely to stay in low spots and blow clear of high spots, or all bunch up on the east side of objects. Sandbars will often form on the inside of a curve in a stream, and the streambank will get carved away on the outside of a curve. Tree branches will tend to not cross becuase they're growing towards the light, which is usually blocked by all the other branches in the tree. Perpetually shady spots will have less water evaporate, and will thus tend to support different types of plantlife than sunny spots nearby. There are a zillion things like this that we don't know or don't think of when we put together a scene, but (as was mentioned above), still might stand out as looking out of the ordinary becuase we've seen the ordinary a lot before. If we wanted to get everything right, we couldn't stop at just creating objects that exactly match reality in appearance; we would need an entire exact physics simulation of the universe to get it right, and an incredibly complex simulator even to handle a scene a few feet across that handled light distribution affecting plant growth, temperature, wind, aging of various materials over time, water erosion, effects of browsing by various animals, etc.; a nearly impossible task at the moment. We will have to make do by just sticking to a fraction of the more obvious ones, although one can refine ones work over time as things are noticed. (and of course one can simply ignore the rules anyway, since it is art after all.)

Attached Link: Palms

Oddly, 3D handles palms fairly well, at least the high-end programs do. It has to do with their relative symmetry I suspect, the math is easier to work out. That same symmetry is what makes them so difficult to do as 2D media (nozzles/tubes).

The other advantage with 3D is the ease with which you can change POV. So it's easy to look up through fronds canopies, etc. With 2D, you often need a new set of tools for that. The difference is in detail, texture and realism IMO. It would be very difficult even for advanced programs to achieve the level of detail possible with 2D palms, and the render hit could be huge.

Unless you're making a game or movie where the camera tilts up and around while moving through the scene, I'm not sure 3D is the better alternative. It can be easier, but often people prefer realism, particularly if the final result is a 2D image. Where the final is 2D, "post-processing is no sin," although it does have it's own set of problems (hi Scott, and thanks).

The real challenge, other than addressing California Palms and some very neat wild grasses not attempted yet :), is distant tree foliage like the kind you see covering a mountainsides or coastal hills (http://www.gardenhose.com/farshore.hts or http://www.gardenhose.com/tropics.htm).

These are only half-finished first attempts discovered by accident while testing new tools. It's clear (to me), however, that there's a real, fast and effective solution hiding somewhere nearby, whether for pines, oaks, rain forests, etc. Achieving it will take longer and prove harder than a person might reasonably expect, unfortunately.

My 2 cents worth anyway. Interesting topic.

Dennis@DigArts
http://www.gardenhose.com