I was going through the tutorial from 3dworld with the cool picture that Eran Dinur made. When I opened the final picture from the cd, the final render doesn't look anywhere near as detailed as the picture in the magazine. The colors are really bright, the tree trunks are all jagged, and a lot of detail with shadows are missing. Any suggestions? Thanks....

Calibrate your monitor, or do you use a LCD monitor...

I have an lcd monitor, 30 inch.

Is 32 bits colour depth enabled on your monitor? Did you check the picture on the Cd quality? Jpeg? Gif? Maybe they used gif if they were tight in available space on the cd. Maybe it's a screenshot of the Vue preview? I think you should post it so we can see. Plenty of possible explanations.

The image on the cd is in .vue format. How can I post it so you can see it? Save it as a jpeg or gif in photoshop? I do have 32 bit enabled.

Message edited on: 09/14/2005 17:13

If it's in Vue format, then it's not an image, it's a Vue scene. So, load this scene on your computer, and check the render settings, I think they are very low, like "preview", if you render it at a higher quality, say "final", you'll notice the difference.

Whew, that took a while, over 3 billion polygons. The image does look better but it's still kind of grainy. The colors are still a little bright. I guess what i'm wondering is how the picture in the tutorial looks like an actual photograph. Was it post-processed in photoshop? How can you get rid of the grainyness? My last question, is it possible after creating a scene in vue to blow it up to poster size through a printer? Will the details be lost? Thanks for all your help...

You can get rid of the grain by killing the ambient light in the atmosphere tab. Set the light balance to around 60% sunlight, and ambient light from sky to around 60% too. You'll need a good measure of AA too, like min 9, max 12, set to optimized, quality 60% minimum, in the render tab. With these settings, you'll need to choose "user settings", no presets. I find all presets below "ultra" to be unsufficient, whereas ultra is too much. To print your render you'll need to render at 300 dpi, and choose the size yourself, depending on the size you want to print to. Expect very long render times!

I got a little lost with the measure of AA. Is it in the render options window?

Yes, check "object anti aliasing", and click edit.

The last render came out little colorwashed. I guess i'll have to play aroung with the atmosphere editor. Thanks for all the help, any more suggestions?

Too much fog maybe? Yes, you need to play with settings so you can see what it does when you check a box or push a slider! Have fun!

Hi nastycanasta, The scene file on the 3DW CD is the one I used to render the final image, so if you render at broadcast or higher, you should get pretty much the same result. As I had expected, it came out a bit different in print. The shadows are darker (too dark I'm afraid), and there's some color shift. Note also that when you recreate the image, you'll always get slightly different results, because of the random factor in EcoSystem population. I hope this helped :) Eran