The spot settings.

The mat.

Same lights, other mat.

Wow mat, gotta check the atmosphere on that one to see whats going on. Also, I think that maybe the IBL settings are too low to yield sufficient lighting. Alot of times that happens to me, and Ill just crank up those settings and thatll help. Thats not to say, that the hdr file youre using maybe not the right one for this scene...

Or is it that the scene is not right for the hdr :P

Ive heard of people "rotating the scene", but I havent done that as yet.

As far as my server garry, I do alpologize. It gets hit pretty hard at times, I know :(

Thanks to you to dave, help is much appreciated :)

Well, actually I didnt bother about the IBL. I looked at the experiment as an overall lighting experiment and wanted first of all to use a couple of low lights and one higher to "sculpt" the models, keeping the room rather dark.

Allright here's my entry for ur lighting challenge! I made use of the window hole u made in the wall, hope u dont mind

I used 3 diff exposure levels rendered in seperate passes. The whole thing relies heavily on TA. No IBL was used çuz it rendered hella slow and still left ugly shadows plus the lighting wasnt satisfactory.
Compositing, window glow and curves done in photoshop.

Lemme know what u think

oh btw, total rendertime was around about 6 or 7 hours for all passes and masks in total on a system with 2 dualcore opteron 270's and 4gb's of ram.

I follow mat, didnt realize... I too have done some of them that do not use the ibl feature, wouldnt really be an experiment w/o the "control" specimen (hope I called it right, thats going back to my high school lab days, most of which is just a big, smokey cloud :P)...

Ray, I would hate so see how long that would take to render on my 2400 sempron :P I actually put the window there on purpose just to give people another "window" of creativity :) The contrast of shadow and light is pretty deep.

How did you close off the rest of the environment from the lighting?!? Id think that some of that light would peek thru the side of the room.

I aimed one square spotlight at the window. Gave it a little gradient to tweak the light's color. No fill lights have been used, no sun either. I've turned the scene ambience to full black (very important to TA) I didnt have any problems with light peeking through the open sides of the room, the walls that were there obstructed any of the spots light that did not go through the window (If needed it's simply a question of controlling the angle of the spot by adjusting the x,y and z sizes of the spot object).

I did notice the dark area's turn out rather very dark on monitors that arent all that bright... It looked great on my sony tv screen though... I'll try 'n keep things more in check next time

Oh, btw I really really hope bryce7 will come with some exposure controls (lineair, and logarithmic exposure control at the very least.) and 16bit per channel render output! If we could have those it'd be possible to create such truely wonderful TA images. Currently you either lose brightness of indirect light or darkness of shadows.
16bits per channel would be purely for postwork purposes. 8bit leaves so very little room for tweaking levels, curves, brightness, contrast and that kind of things.

ok, ya got me...

TA?!?!?!?!?

TA = True Ambience. It's under the premium settings :-) It's bryce's solution to indirect light.

Basically the most controllable way to use it is by turning scene ambience to black, and using the ambient channel on your materials to control the amount of bouncing light. Also, less saturated ambient channel will reduce colorbleeding.

The raydepth is the controller that controlls the amount of bounces of indirect light.
1 bounce (raydepth1) gives darker shadows, and more general contrast but less color bleeding.
6 bounces (raydepth 6) gives a smoother less contrasted solution, more overall indirect light, brighter scene, and more color bleeding, but at increased rendertime.

Unfortunately the raydepth not only affects the amount of bounces of indirect light but also the amount of reflection and refractions made which kind of limits it's use.

All new to me hearing this. I have not as yet explored the "other" render settings/features of Bryce. I remember when I 1st got Bryce 5 I tried doing something -in there- for some kind of distance blur effect, and after 4 plus days I had a render that looked like I stopped it after the 1st pass of an "on screen" render...

I suppose I am over-paranoid of increasing render times, Ive been using Bryce all this time (ever since 4, early 1999-ish?!?) and am just now venturing into renders that even use lights :P

I know what ya mean, the rendertimes are a pain! But there's still an art to it. It's a case of trying to find the fastest rendering solution to fit your needs. In this case TA worked faster for me then IBL and with better looking results!

Generaly I preview premium effects at 4rpp. Then I render only little parts of the scene to tweak specific things. Then finally pick out the noisiest parts of your 4rpp render, and check out how much rpp they need to look smooth enough to satisfy your needs and use the resulting settings for your final render.

ok left ibl settings as they were set set the main two walls to 6.7% transparency to allow ibl effect through. did this on a closed cube and it worked some so its don,t affect mat quality and should let light through. small square set ti 4% transparency.

all mats use same bumpmap and material settings

useing 1 default radial light inside large sphere.

On this IBL render, I purposely did NOT use any outside lightsource. ALL lightings is generated between the hdri map and the atmospheric settings. The hdri map is again, Agent smiths. Admittedly, it has become one of my favorites, in that the lightings is VERY powerful, is not directional, and casts NO color. I used a setting of 20, 20, 32, and as you can see, yielded bold, bright light. My error totally for the washout, I "neglected" the sun/moon portion of the skylab, and had my shadows at 30% intensity, soft shadows on, but used white for the sun color instead of black (as you know, you can use something of an abstracted sky setting to have shadows cast from/by the sun"light", this method is commonly used in GI set-ups).

Having waited the 5 days, 5 hours and 7 plus minutes for the render to complete (at a mere 1200x900 at 72 dpi mind you!!!), in seeing the results and comparing/combining others experiences and results, for a better render I would definitely change the sun color, and decrease the intensity in the ibl room.

I think it was VERY close, but the lack of convincing shadow and the wash out pretty much kills it :(

Still, its what you learn from the experience, and how you carry that into the "lab"...

Peace :)

long render. like that cement wall mat!!

The cement mats really need a fitting bumpmap to make them come out best. Also, dpi has no influence on rendertimes, it's a setting for printing, its got nothing to do with the actual pixels calculated.
Apart from that it looks rather nice! but ouch 5 days rendertime! I admire your patience.. haha I've not had such patience for a long time anymore

DPI has no influence on render times?!? You mean a 72 dpi image and a 300 dpi image would render at the same time? All this time, I was under the "assumption" that my 30x40 stuff took so long because of the dpi, in combination w/ them being so large. Im somewhat upset to find that a 72 dpi image would render just as fast as a 300 dpi image, I feel like Im being jipped, LOL!!!

I like the cement texture as is, never had any problems against it :)

dpi=dot per inch
so that would be saying 300mm is as long as 70mm

300 dpi will give a finer picture more suitble for printing. 
 thread in commons at daz on dpi some good indo was given. i,m sure there is lots more in google.

and i like your cement mat the way it is.

Well it's basically like this:

• Screen resolution is defined in pixels. Images are rendered in pixels also.
• Print resolution is defined in DPI, printers print out at certain DPI's.

So.. basically what the DPI does is tell your printer how smal your rendered pixels will be printed on paper. Which is why a higher dpi gives u a smaller print at the same pixel resolution then a lower dpi would do. For instance a magazine will require about 2500pixels wide or high for a print on one full page, but if you put the magazine page next to say, a 19 inch monitor the 1024 or more px on the monitors give roughly the same size image as the print in the magazine even though its less pixels.

DPI on computerscreens is a stupid invention once made by someone, i believe it was introduced somewhere in adobe photoshop once... and it's been confusing people ever since! I dunno who came up with the nosense really, a pixel is a pixel.

All I've done here is add one light, everything else (apart from the mats of course) is as the original file.

I'd have tried another Light Probe, but I don't have any - or didn't when I did this render.

nice one fran!

here is ibltest2 br6
i used 4 radial lights at default except for color.
one mat is by matcreator the rest are hobbled together by me with help from matcreator.

Nice one Fran, Is the light embedded inside the large sphere? If you used the "default" settings of the scene/ibl, thats the same thats included w/ the "robot in ibl room 9" scene, part of the Bryce 6 content. At 1st i didnt understand why the atmosphere was set as so, but its making more and more sense now...

On yours Dave, I cant tell where you placed the lights... And at 25% intensity, thats a bit high, so Im wondering what hdri map and settings you used, just from having 4 default lights, Id think that would cause wash out, but yours ISNT, and thats very interesting...

I dont think through all of these tests, no one has mentioned "negative lights"... I suppose no point adding salt on the open wound, LOL!!! One step at a time :)

what the heck is negative light.
all the lights are inside spheres and the cylinder.
how ever you had hdri set i used it. adding color to lights brings out colors and conteracts wash out. or haveing lights inside colored obj,s in this case both but not nesasarly the same color light in the same color obj.
the first radial light i ever used inside something is in daz bryce  gallery. think 3-4th light i ever used.

Interesting Dave... Did you "puposely" add color to the lights and embed them w/i objects to avoid wash out?

no just seeing how colored light inside colored obj compare to real world color palette blending.

 if it had of looked like wash out i would have changed ibl.

no just messing with lighting to try it out. i can count the number of times i have used lights on two hands or less.

had noticed before in reg render useing colored lights enhanced certain colors more then others. and going by this useing diferrent colors has more effects yet.

also the mats have real bumpmaps now as well!!!

i have a feeling ibl enhances things because of colors in the photo used. useing colored lights enhances that again.

Trying negative lights now, 52% antialiasing....

I pretty much always avoided using lights. I should have been doing this experiment when I 1st got my hands on Bryce 4 in 1998, but I was too busy arranging spheres over reflective water, LOL!!!

Seriously, its because of render times. Thats it in a nutshell, and its really sad that my imagery and work suffers due to my impatience. To defend myself however, Im sure you guys understand how much longer a render w/ lights will take (dare I say lights AND shadows :P), and when trying to get large format output (my largest size is 40x30 now, but what if I wanted to produce larger prints?!?) it just takes too damned long. Imagine a GI set up, and trying to get a 40x30 image using GI or IBL... I consider myself patient enough, Ive let a few renders take 3+ weeks to render... Ive done benchmarks, and while I may not have a super powerhouse, my PC is "ok"...

I took a serious dive into lighting as its such a crucial component to art, because for far too long Ive neglected it. My gallery now is full of lighting experiments, when it should be full of pipes coming out of peoples asses :P

Now, Im finding that I like to use them, but cannot wait the required time for large output renders. That last experiment took 5 plus days to render... Only 1200x900. I tried some of the newer stuff Ive done, and after days, the render not even the double digits... Theres no way in hell my pc can run that long. PC's need to power down every now and then, and refresh themselves... Utility bill up the wazoo, lol, I think not :P

I even considered linking several pc's together to make use of the Bryce Lightning feature, but I dont think you can render to disk (and increase size and resolution) in order to make printable renders. I used to think the amount of memory in your system would help boost render times, nope... A better video card, not gonna happen. The PC itself will make a dramatic difference (cpu being used rather), but this (an AMD Sempron 2400 :P) is what I got, so thats that, LOL!!!

This render, took over 3 weeks, and uses NO lights... I liked the image so much, I didnt care, but I dont understand why so long.

Nothing to do w/ nuffin w/ regards to the experiemnt, lol, just  to show how Bryce can be "inconsistent"...

That probably took a long time because of the haze, haze does increase render times too.

3 weeks!  i've never been able to let a render run more than overnight, and in fact I haven't been able to do that as the light and sound of the laptop keeps me awake.  I managed it once at home - cos then it could run downstairs, but I had to set the screen to power down or my brother would have seen it and raised a riot.

He pays the electric you see.

At college it doesn't matter so much except I only have the one tiny room there and as I said the noise and light keep me awake...

Oh and I didn't like the one 'render to disk' I did as I couldn't do anything else while it was running, I couldn't minimise the bryce screen and go back to say... wings.  I was stuck.

Not nice.

The haze was my 1st choice for the culprit, as it has no lights, but Ive used that very same atmosphere on DOZENS of images, and they never took as long...

i found if computers been on a long time and you start a render it takes longer. if more ray traceing was set that snails it to a stand still. longest render for me was 7-8 days and did not work out how i wanted.
but that picture you did was worth a wait!!!

or if bryce had been open for days and starting a new render slows down for me. now i exit bryce before starting a new one.

Sometimes I used to find that if I'd stopped a render and saved the file - when I pressed 'resume render' it would work okay and finish rendering and sometimes it would go all odd and look as if it's rendering - the render line moves - but nothing in the image changes...

Do you have a lot of bump in those materials?  Sometimes that can increase render times...

Oh by the way, I managed to get some of those things you had on your Geocities site, but some come up as - 'Sorry, this file is no longer available. It may have been deleted by the uploader, or has expired.'. that was the Gazebo textures.

matcreator are you still with us???  not seen or heard of you in weeks?