Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1309652

After we started talking about beloved pets, I decided to start doing a series of pictures with my dear departed Buster in them.  The first lead to my avatar, but here is the first in my series of images that I hope to do with Buster "acting" in them.  I got a lucky break on the fur texture, and it's pretty darn close to his fur.

I hope you like them.

Would you mind sharing how you did the amazingly good smoke in that image?

It is very well done.  I have recently been unable to make decent smoke / clouds.  I looked at several of my older images and can not duplicate the effects I once made.  I lost the BR5 files to a disk failure.  So I can't load those back up.

I remembered vaguely reading the Brycetech tutorial, and tried to follow it... but I hit what seems to be a bug in 5.5c with volumetrics.  The spheres are not touching each other but are still erasing bits if each other.

I posted on the Bryce forums at Daz and got two helpful replies,  but neither seem to produce the results I once got which were similar to yours.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=45700

 

Sure!  Glad to share the trick to help people out. :c)

I didn't use any volumetrics in the entire image these are all surface based materials with transparency set at various levels..  On top of that, I violated one of my own rules and used primatives instead of rock terrains, since I was getting good results.

Trick 1: Multireplicate.  Getting a realistic smoke track, where it grows, fades and gets wider is very important.  I do this before I texture the smoke, just so I can see in scene where it will be drifting to.  For this one, Not only did I use the multireplication of 10 spheres, which I backed down to 9 (10 was too many)  I set it to move the spheres down the track, twist and get larger with the controls provided for you under "Alt+Shift+D".  Once I knew that this would not blot out a significant portion of the sky, but would be a prominent feature, I went on to the second step.

Trick 2:  Proceedural Textures.  This is the ultimate hard part IMHO.  You can't stick with the same material throughout, and you sometimes have to tune them ever so sleightly to give the illusion of "billows" that catch the sun differently.  For smoke in this image, I used the Basic material for "Cotton Ball Storm 2"  I turned on all the buttons on the top half of the texture control, and then turned off "Diffusion", "Ambiance" and "Metallacity"  Next I made sure that I didn't have the smoke too dark or bright.  Even though it's black, you want to see the billows a little, so I set "Diffusion", "Specularity", and "Bump Height" to around 35ish.  Lastly I set Transparency to about 20-25% as well.  This gave me my "base smoke" appearance, and that was STILL too dark, but a lot closer.

Trick 3: Texture Variations:  I then picked the 3rd to last sphere or so, and tweaked it.  I turned on it's "Ambience".  I left the slider at 0, but it was now on.  When did a spray render, it showed me it gave me most of what I was aiming for with a sleightly lighter billow above it all.  I tuned the billow by moving it a touch, so the smoke would track properly in scene, and then picked only one other sphere nearer the foreground to do that too.  Now my smoke had a feeling that it wasn't monochromatic and flat.

Trick 4:  Extra Lighting:  Courtesy of something Mario said in our "Favorite Techniques" thread we've been talking about and also by following Lightpen's work.  I already had issues for where I wanted to place the sun and get the colors and lighting I wanted, so I settled on putting it behind the camera at approx 5 o' clock directionally.  Mario wrote about adding an extra spotlight to get a better reflection and make things pop, and Lightpen loves bouncing spots off of clouds for extra accents.  I added a small spot at about 25 brightness behind the tree on the far left, and used it to light the smoke and a little bit of the train.  With the Ambience turned way up, and specularity left on, the light caused all the smoke to really pop.

That's how I achieved the smoke in my image "Local Job".

The steam, pure base cloud textures.  No volumetrics as well.  I avoided "cloud" textures" and went for "whole sky textures"  I tweaked their "Transparency"  a little till I got the density I wanted, and to prevent streaking, set it for "Random" application.  The steam from the valves on top are 2 Bryce Eggs, but spheres would do.  And I got lucky with the steam out of the pistons on the side.  One egg turned out fantastic, giving multiple steam jets without me even trying.  Again, I played with the settings of a basic cloud material.

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RE a few issues brought up.  I agree the rails don't look right...  I don't have a good model of rails, and I'm not a good enough modeller to make it look properly.  I probably need to go back in and fix my "Rusty Rail" Texture to boot, but at this stage, the image is now only going to be fixed as a "Re-post".

Thanks for all the kind words and encouragement on this image.  Now I can focus on my challenge image.  I just had to get this one out of my system.

MDB

Oh yeah... I do use that same Brycetech tutorial for the clouds.  Hey BT, maybe if I re cut this image it would work for your next disc, since that tutorial started me down the path working with smoke and clouds like this.

MDB

Thanks for the reply and the tips.

well, if I find the time I might try and make you those rails.  Should be dirt simple to make something simple and moderately close.  May not your final rail, but something to tide you over.  Have a prefered format? OBJ?

obj and 3ds are great for me.  Realistic rails are not as common as I thought.  These work well for a distance, but close up, you're toast.

MDB

How is this?

 

Sweeeeeeeet!  Yeah, that'd work great.  All I'd have to do is use a slope based texture, shiny on top, rusty metal on the way down, and it'd be perfect.  You've got an eye.

:cD

MDB

Here is the file (3ds format)

http://www.verzend.be/v/2443774/Rail.zip.html