Last one, I swear I've about had it with this scene... It's not even that complex, I'm just struggling with the water issue before I put in the dragons...

Here's the old contours using the terrain + water plane method... I stripped off the textures to see what was going on with the actual geometry, and as you can see, there's not much there. Not worth the billions of polys spent on 2048x2048 sized terrains...

Message edited on: 12/28/2004 07:32

Then I just decided to scrap the planar water altogether... Terrains are about the only way I can think of to even come close to modeling water, NURBS would be cool but I'm just not that good with Rhino yet, as you can see... So I made some fractals with KPT Fraxx Explorer... Here's the first one. Not very waterlike, yet.

Ran some KPT Blurrr on it, after trying regular Photoshop blurs, and came up with this...

Those textures were at 2048, and looked much nicer at that size... I filled the scene with terrain-based waters, all the second Frax texture, but only the close ones at that resolution. Tweaked, pulled, pushed, rotated, to come up with this contour setup.

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And it brings me to this mess... An unrendered screenshot, but does anyone (who cares) think this new water looks better, or worse, or anthing like that? I'm kinda stuck on this image, haven't done anything else in Bryce except my Cereal picture for awhile... Any feedback would totally rock. The link goes back to my last WIP #3, which also wasn't the first WIP #3 for this bastard scene... Thanks for looking, of course!

LSD, if i may suggest something that may help you with the waves you are having trouble with. If this fails it the old undo button:) try using some erosion on them, around 512 or less.

I have opinions of my own -- strong opinions -- but I don't always agree with them.

 

LSD: This might help, and will cut way down on render time and file size. This is a single infinite plane. The texture started with the water default "nice water" and I brought in a substitute bump map through the DTE using the "Stormy" cloud preset. I enabled all 3 bump elements in the DTE. Then I tweaked some of the other settings in the Texture editor as I'll show in the next pic. I think this might work well in your scene as the camera angle is similar. Please excuse the low res render. :^)

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy

Here are the Texture Editor settings. Hope this helps. John

This is not my "second childhood". I'm not finished with the first one yet.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

"I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather....not screaming in terror like the passengers on his bus." - Jack Handy

I like the new water plane, but it doesn't seem realistic. If that's not what you're going for, then you should use it, because it looks really nice.

The new water is much better, just need to cut back on the bump noise a bit IMO.

Pass no temptation lightly by, for one never knows when it may pass again!

Aye, thanks for the awesome material Tjohn, but alas, I just don't think a water plane will cut it for this scene. The water is comprised only of terains, now. But I'll save that water for another day...! I really need the geometry adjustments this time that a plane can't give...

DVD, I'm kinda going for a fantastical quality to it all... Similar to some of my older images, but with a darker, more angry (read : orange) feel.

Incarnadine, tell me if the AA render is still too crusty for ya? I was going for turbulence, really...

This render took about 5 hours, which is fully HALF of what it took before, so I think that my optimization process is working well... I forgot to take the actual SPRAY terrains (separate from the water terrains, and different mats) in the previous renders.

Is this any better? (Also, I changed the POV and increased the render size slightly, so a half-as-much-as-before render time is more like 4/10ths or so, some ratio like that...)

Message edited on: 12/28/2004 14:29

I would try a just a little more cut back. looking good.

Pass no temptation lightly by, for one never knows when it may pass again!

The big waves work great around the stone cliffs but I would brush them away on your heightmap in more open area's like in the 1st render. Then maybe for the bumpmap, lower the scale of the texture a little and lower the bump height a little too?

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Thanks for all of your help and ideas... Incarnadine, did you mean by cut back the same thing that Rayraz means? I admit, upon looking at it, that the big wave look a little TOO big compared to the splash waves and spray... Thanks again for your critiques, everyone. I keep looking at Hobbit's painted waves and banging my head against the wall.

Very cool I love it so far!

My main goal is to get the waves to look as smooth as the sky, not so easy... Perhaps I will take an hour out tonight and try to model the waves using NURBS (Rhino, for me), it might be cool..

I think the terrain you're using now gives the water a much better sense of flow and direction. I wonder if doing gaussian edges might smooth down the outside ridges while keeping some better height in around the pillar. I'd say you're definately moving in the right direction.

Aye, I used Gaussian edges, also I clipped the square so that they aren't square on the bottoms... Thanks for the support, Claymor.

try using bryce's terrain editors fractals for waves, it can work quite well.

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Aye, I've tried many techniques and just spent three hours attempting to create physical waves in Rhino (with the actual rock spire models in their correct places and whatnot), but to no avail... I'm just gonna have to let this one go and focus on materials and scaling... There's really no way to make the water "hit" the rockwork. In Bryce, it has to be faked. I may revert to some amount of postwork on this one, yet...

Actually upon looking at it somemore I would lower the height of the wave terrain a bit as well. What I had meant was to cut back on the noise/bump texture on the water.
As a suggestion, duplicate the water terrain, adjust its height to greater than that of the initial one and lower it relative to the initial one. Put a frothy material on the new one and a smoother water on the older one. (This is an excellent technique for getting more mat zones into a terrain but it should work for water too.)
Richard

Message edited on: 12/29/2004 07:48

Pass no temptation lightly by, for one never knows when it may pass again!

And here's the latest contour map I've done, recreating the main water terrain entirely from scratch in Photoshop. I used KPT Ink Dropper, Flaming Pear India Ink, KPT6 Equalizer, and Flaming Pear Glitterator... but the real deal breaker which I should've just tried in the beginning? KPT Fluid. Who would have guessed?

Interesting, I'll have to take a look at this.

Pass no temptation lightly by, for one never knows when it may pass again!

Looks interesting! how does it look with a textured render?

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Not any better, alas it's still rendering but my tests suck. I think I'll put this one down, Ole' Yeller style, for a while and focus on something else until I figure out NURBS water... These terrains just aren't looking how I wanted...

Do you think you could send me the displacement map of this new wave texture? I'd like to fiddle around with it a bit :)

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Sure, but it's at 2048x2048. Give me your email, I'll send it over... OR I could just post it here? It's only like 10MB or whatever...

Message edited on: 12/29/2004 09:34

Compressed it down to 192 or so with Riptide. Still, you'll want the .bmp version, this one is so dithered out...

Message edited on: 12/29/2004 09:38

Thanx, I'll see if I can do something nice with this :)

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here's my wavemap

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And a render using this map for the waves :)

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