Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1923384

I need help with vue, please tell me what i need to improve on...phew!!

Regards

Hello.

You could start by populating the island with actual trees and rocks. Give it some life and a focal point of interest. Maybe even big castle right at the top.

Rather than wondering how to do things first, let your imagination run wild and think for a moment what you would love to see on the island. ONce you have an idea then try make it happen. It's the best way to learn.

Kind Regards
James.

another way to learn - and rather quickly - is check out the tutorials at geekatplay.com

they rock =D

Thanks James, i was looking at it from how to get it right first then go creative

yeah have fun! ;) read the manual of course to get basics down of course, but geekatplay and my site has tones of tutorials to help! :)

you don't learn everything over night, so prepare for a long, but very enjoyable haul! ;)

Welcome to Vue, we are the friendliest bunch in the Internet........got a question, just ask it!!

Thanks all

I'm in the middle of another render as I type, should be up in......wait.. 1hr 18mins :-)

GAP site, what a  great site for tuts, forum seems a bit quiet though

Anyway, i have six week holiday to get some serious vue work in..  school hols here in the UK

BTW I'm a teacher not a student, just in case anyone was wondering  lol

another thing is Vue has" mixed materials" if you double click on the material icon (round ball top right of screen)
use Material Edtior, you can make a material "mixed" so it is made of two different materials
for your island, you may want some kind of rock, and soem kind of sand.

you cna then adjust them so that the rock appears on steep slopes, where you'd' expect it to be
by setting the affinity to slope

Great stuff, yea know about the mixed mats

thanks

I will do another island once this render has finished, this time with mixed mats and some interesting features...I hope  :-)

Render still going...54mins left!!!

Here's a question:

How do you know when to re-scale the material that you apply to the terrain. I understand about the 'mapping type' but not sure about the material scaling. So if you scale up/down the terrain do you have to rescale the material that has been applyed to it???

Hope thats clear

Regards

ok, PARAMETRIC mapping keeps the scale exaclty the same on the model, no matter how big or small the model changes size :)

render settings: try this

USER SETTINGS

Blurred reflections, and transparency to OFF

Optimize Volumetrics to OFF

Compute Physcially Accurate Caustics to OFF (only need for super quality stuff and with lot of up close water, glass gems etc)

Depth of Field and Motion blurring to OFF (unless you are using them)

Advanced Effects Quality 50%

Object Antialiasing on but Texture antialising to OFF (texture antialising can help with rough troublesome textures but not needed that often, usually for animations)

EDIT antialising box

Subrays per pixels minimum 8 maximum 24
Quality threshold 60%

:)

Silver,

great stuff, got it. I will try those settings. Render has finished, but can't upload until tomorrow as I only have free account, drat!!!!

Oh well will upload in the morning, see what you think.

regards

Parametric, Ok understand that if you scale the trerrain the mat will keep the same ratio.

Still confused, about the material 'scale'.  If i apply a mat to the terrain and the mat is scaled at 0.7, how do i know that is the correct scale for the terrain that it is applied to?. If then i change the mapping to 'Pararmetric', yes i think i understand that the mat will scale at the same ratio as the resized terrain, BUT the mat could have been at the wrong size, before that So if i have a terrain that is say, 5km by 5km i then apply a grass mat who's scale is say 1.0. IF i then creae a terrain that is 50m by 50m and apply the same grass mat who's scale is 1.0, somewhere the grass is at the wrong scale for one of those terrains, I assume???

Regards

I dunno how others do it... but i do a lot of test renders and "eyeball" it

Haha, the technical approach that i have been using to , i thought there might be a more scientific approach to this.....let wait and see

Regards

Maybe we'll be lucky, huh?  I'd like to have a more scientific/technical approach to appropriate material scales, too... but so far, eyeballing it seems to work ok... the human eye, thankfully, knows when something is "off" or out of proportion.

nods at Melikia :)
oh yeah, it's eyeball time for such things I'm afraid ;)

Scales aren't set by the item size, just by the mat itself's settings.
there's no exact way you can predict how a mat will fit an item, EXCEPT if you "UVMap" and texture it, which is a complex damn thing only done for important models, say, a plane etc.

So it's down to the "Mark 1 eyeball" (tm) ! ;)

world mapping, by the way, is good for mats you want to vary a lot, say, rocks on a river bak, you don't want them ALL to be the same, so use World mapping

you can, by the way, use greyscale images, to drive where materials will exactly be placed on a terrain (scale etc of the mat is another issue completely)
using a black and white image to drive a mixed material

Hey, I've got something right then. Might need to get eyes tested then lol

Thanks Silver

Silver,

Using your render setting now, looking very good. I'm using 300DPI is that correct??

never ever bother with DPI in digital renderings :)
it's...complicated but just don't bother with it, it does't really mean or do anything useful in practicla terms in the digital realm.
leave it at 72 DPI.

there's a thread about this last week or two.
basically, all that matters is PIXEL size. if you want a high quality, large render, you need a lot of pixels.

the rule of thumb is you want 300 pixels, for every inch of print IF you want high quality print.
And you can always enlarge an image up to that  size, if the original one is large enough, and you have good enlarging software.

I render at 1680 x 1050 pixels most of the time (for my own desktops hehe) that's sufficent, when enalrged in Photoshop for 30 by 20 inch prints. There is some loss of quality but not much that ordinary folks will notice.

pixels it is then

 Wow, I like it.  Sharen

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1923726

Well second attempt is in my gallery, please advise

Regards

Hi alpha and welcome to your new addiction. I've been using Vue for years and still have problems getting my head around some things LOL!! i.e. the function editor used to give me nightmares but slowly beginning to experiment with it. I love the POV of your lone tree. Don't forget Cornucopia 3d as most of us belong to both communities.
Regards :thumbupboth:
   

Hi Lindans

Thanks for the comment, yea looks like this is going to be a long learning curve, longer than Poser

Already joined Cornucopia community

Regards

Yup that's better :)

did you increase the polygons on your tree? looks ok though
when a non-ecosystem plant/tree is up close ot camera, it's good idea to edit it, and increase it's polygon count so it looks smooth.

the Dry Weeds as you can see have one failing a sa plant..up close to camera they look flat as that's what they are..flat ;)

some blurw woudl help disguise that, now I have never perosnally tried this next bit, to add blur, but...

add wind strength and affect plants, direction horizontal to camera
set up animation, but only render ONE frame out as your image, so hopefully youll get some motion blurf from wind?

Hi silver,

No didn't increase poly count on tree, hmm don't know how to??

BLurr idea is a good one will have to try it.

Hi Alpha117!  Welcome to Vue.  Now say goodby to free time and spare cash...  :biggrin:

Ok select tree, edit it, as you woudl any object (bottom righthand corner of screen, object list, select item, right click, edit) :)

now hit the x2 button, to double polygon count ;)

another thing you can do is import trees from XFROG or the like which are super high quality and nice for close ups, but, unliek Vue's native plants, won't always be different
XFOG plants are meshes so never change, thus not so good for large numbers of plants, which is where Vue plants really shine.
XFROG has a few freebie plants on their site, which is very handy :D

Peggy...Hi and thanks

Silver........Great stuff, yet another great tip to remember.........gets out pen and paper to write all these tips down....:biggrin:

Just done a test render for the x2 polys for the trees, looks even better, thanks for that.

must remember that one though. Perhaps a check list to do before the final render...just a thought, pilots have them, why not us 'vue,ers'

BTW, been looking at the 'quadspinner' site. Looks very professional. Has anyone purchased the tutorials from them? If so are they worth it?

I've got both tutorials and they are well worth the money - the one about fractal terrains is ace.  Gave me loads of ideas - you can make seriously weird looking landscapes without any problem at all :)

cheers Frank

Looks like here comes the first expense :scared:

have you tried the free one first ?
take a look at "Twisted", "Sickness" and "Strange Attractor" in my gallery - they were done after following his terrain tutorial (amongst others in there)

Free one???.....its not there anymore, there's a line through the link :crying:

oh rats, that was quite a good intro too.  I doubt you'll be disappointed with the pay one though.  I certainly wasn't

Silver, talking about wind :tongue2:  I've noticed a blue circle with an arrow when you bring in a tree and the arrow you can drag around and it effect the 'wind' direction. Could you use that and would it effect ALL trees/plants??

Regards

Aye it affects all plants :)

you can also use a VENTILATOR to move plants,I found using a ventilator is a great way to make blast-liek effcts, ie plants flattened by a bomb

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/35.html

also, since plants can also be special effects...you can drive an explosion with that!

ok, plants are textures with transparency, so Wabe hit on the idea of using the plants with an invisible stalk, and a fire, smoke etc texture as "leaves"...frikkin brilliant! :)
so you can have them messed around by a ventilator ;)

On Deviant art, there's stil one of his Quadspinner tutorials, just part of it though..gimmie a sec...
ah here we go!
http://fc03.deviantart.com/fs44/f/2009/068/1/7/Creating_HyperTerrains_by_nukeation.pdf

got it thanks.

So that i understand only .veg can be affected by wind etc and not objects (.obj)

Hi, welcome to Vue
Your Lone Tree image has a nice touch to it, good color use and composition. For the clouds there are things you can try to give them more depth. In the Atmosphere editor there is a Clouds tab that will give you controls to play with. Try increasing the clouds density. You can also alter the actual material the cloud is made from in the materials editor. Go to that clouds tab and then edit the material in the lower left. The type of atmosphere you have will effect the controls that are available in the atmo editor. There are loads of  subtle and not so subtle things you can do in there to create lighting and atmospheric effects for your images.

Hi Tim

Well, I thought that was just a picture so you could see what the clouds looked like :blushing:

...now where did I put that pen and paper.......

Many thanks

Clouds have a dial for wind for animation, that wind though, alas is NOT the same as the one for global wind for plants
however, say you have a nice amtosphere, but the clouds are in wrong place.
You can use that wind dial, turn it up and set angle, make the scene into an animation and move frame count along to you see clouds in a better spot and render that frame.

OR

You can edit the cloud material, change the clouds materials "Origin Of Material" on the X or Y axis so you basiclaly push the clouds along to a new spot ;)

generally in Vue, you'll find several ways to achieve the same ends :)