Attached Link: The Night Garden

You see I'm using erosiaart's laser flowers idea with the Adamite xray mats.  Well... I started with those mats and then adjusted them somewhat to produce a greater range of colours.

The dragonfly is a freebie from boroda (in Rendo's freestuff) and comes UV Mapped - I took it into wings, tidied the model up a bit, and then separated some areas from the UV Maps so I could try out this trick...

the one I'm not sure of...

I left the uv map on the underside of the wings and put an x-ray mat on the top surface, in this way I hoped to keep some of the wing tracery from the uv's and yet still get the glowingness of the x-ray mats.

It's sort of worked, I can still see the wing tracery and I have got a different colour to the wings, but the 'glowingness' is not really there.

I felt it still suited the ambience (feel) of the scene but just wondered if there might be a way to get more glow... what do you think?

(Oh, I also put x-ray mats on most of the rest of the dragonfly - all I left are the underside of the wings and the legs)

Beautiful but maybe you ought to just tone down those blues? Give it a lighter or darker shade of blues and greens, perhaps? Otherwise it is very bluuuutiful!

TS

what about having a shimmering water or something as the background?

Agree with both the above comments...beautiful experiment tho...keep on tweakin.. ...

A bit busy I think.
Liked the first one. Be great as a black light poster!

Quote - A bit busy I think.
Liked the first one. Be great as a black light poster!

I was thinking printed on a Clear Plastic placed inside a Box with a  Low Light in the background. :)

Might work with just a few of those sparkles on just the dragonfly... Otherwise I agree with Wildman2, a bit busy.

low light.... box.... hmmm.

I've got a lightbox.  No means of printing it onto clear plastic though.

Thunderstone, I don't think it's possible to get the blue mats any darker in Bryce, there might be by doing it your way though, through photoshop, not really sure I'd want to, as I took a long time adjusting the camera angle to get the tone of blue I wanted...

The greens you can get a little darker, but not much, a more olive green shows up darker though, but I don't like that hue so much.

I did wonder about water, not sure it'll show up in this dark scene, worth a try though... I'll see what happens.

Analog-X,

I'm afraid I still don't like that much.   I feel that the lack of most of the black background has taken away a lot of the initial impact that I liked, the contrast between the glowing blue and the simplicity of the black.

I have tried a render with a river terrain, but I kept the terrain dead black and just added caribbean to the water, it gave me some nice subdued reflections.
Let's see if it's small enough for the forum...

Analog-X,

I'm afraid I still don't like that much.   I feel that the lack of most of the black background has taken away a lot of the initial impact that I liked, the contrast between the glowing blue and the simplicity of the black.

I have tried a render with a river terrain, but I kept the terrain dead black and just added caribbean to the water, it gave me some nice subdued reflections.
Let's see if it's small enough for the forum...

I'm afraid I still don't like that much.   I feel that the lack of most of the black background has taken away a lot of the initial impact that I liked, the contrast between the glowing blue and the simplicity of the black.

I have tried a render with a river terrain, but I kept the terrain dead black and just added caribbean to the water, it gave me some nice subdued reflections.

Let's see if it's small enough for the forum...
There we go.

I suppose I could try adding some tiny fireflies in the black space above the flowers... but not too many.

Um, now where would I find a firefly model?

Tried reducing the dragonfly as a stand in for a firefly, which worked okay, but I'm having problems getting the glow to look right... any ideas?

rendering now...

Can you do a quick modeling of a firefly using 2 spheres and some lattices as legs and antennas and something else for wings????

Well I've been using the dragonfly but actually I'm not sure a model is necessary, wouldn't you just see the glow?

Which is why the glow is so important, and probably why I'm having trouble with it...

Does anyone have or know where to find or how to make a 'glow' material.

The x-ray mats are too.... solid for this.

Yeah... use any color or object and pump up the ambiance ???

Any ideas?

(Oh, and the ambience is already at 100%)

Make it smaller? Is that a sphere?

I just realised one of my posts went into cyberspace somewhere. :)

I love the latest version!!!

Which is an adjustment of an adjustment of Clay's volumetric fire.

I've pumped the radial light up to 999 radiance, trying to get it brighter, with the falloff on 'ranged' and set to 40.

Upping the range to 90 makes no difference whatsoever.

Maybe if I try using a group of spheres...?

But I think I need a different mat for this to start with.

Analog-X, which bit?  The water or the firefly?

How about turning off the fall off and playing around with the intensity and the color ? using gradients? and or gel?

Thunderstone, tried that - makes not difference whatever. 

By the way I'm not rendering the entire image, since I don't want to bleach out the flowers etc - which these settings do, or would if I rendered everything, so I'm just rendering the firefly and the glow...

Thats a brilliant piece of work Fran. With regard to the wings of the dragonfly, why not apply an x-ray mat to the upper and lower sides, but keep the bump channel of the texture on the upper side? Wouldn't that show up the veins whilst getting the 'glow' you're after?

Well I didn't have one but I'm making one from the original texture.

hi fran,
sorry..late reply... i hate packing.
ok..don't like the dragon fly because the finer bits on the wings don't show up. it out to be more see thru.. more xrayish..like xrayclark says.
i love what you did with the garden though..brilliant work! keept he pure black background..it is what maks the pix stand out.
cheers...
btw..will work on it once i start brycng after my travels!

How's this looking? it's just the dragonfly and one flower - takes too long to render the whole thing.

Perfect!

much better... know what you mean about the render times..i did theblue flower yesterday evening.... render time kills..
cheers..i'll create one when me back.. on my list of projects to get done..
take care...