Hi, I’m trying to make a whole bunch of Truffula Trees for my next render and I can’t seem to get the right look in both the hair style and the lighting for it.
I’m trying to get them to look like this.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]282564[/ATTACH]
And here’s what mine look like (sickly haha)
[ATTACH=CONFIG]282565[/ATTACH]
I’ve already spent a few hours messing around with it to no avail.
Any help on how to get the hair particles to look better/softer and shaped more accurately as well as maybe some lighting/texturing help, that would be awesome!! Cheers!
Hmmm…the attachments are just pictures, I don’t know why they didn’t come up. They were showing just fine when I was writing the thread.
Let’s try again.
How do I set them to have a high clump on the tips? I didn’t notice an option for that.
I was very intrigued by the title of the post.
Especially as the pictures did not come through until today.
So I googled for Truffula and really liked the image.
This might help you a little, but the hair still needs work.
I used a shader that fades the hair to transparent at the end to make it a little more furry.
And a vortex as Modron suggested to get the swirl.
Yes, I did look at it, and I like how it looks. If I could combine what you did with what the the others say about vortex force field, that would be awesome. I don’t know how to do that though, both those options are something that I didn’t know existed x.x
I really like the way this looks, but I can’t seem to replicate the effect. I’m also not using cycles…hmmm, maybe I should try that…I think I may have to redo most of my scene if I do that though.
What do you have the empty in there for?
Hi Ken,
Not sure if you are replying to me!
But, if you are …
Thank you for the compliment.
I switched to using cycles because it seems to be the way Blender is going, and I find the node system easy to understand.
I used the empty for the vortex so I could move it around and see how it looked.
In the end I decided it was better centered and rotated to be vertical, but the effect when it is off-vertical is good too.
I was replying to you, but I guess when I click reply under your comment it doesn’t do any sort of gypsy magic to let you know xD
Hmm, well maybe I should try it in cycles then.
Also, how do you get the force field to only act on one thing? When I try to make multiple trees, the force field from the original is affecting the others.
Also, on another note, I tried switching to cycles and now when I try and render in GPU nothing comes up. If I switch to CPU it will show me a render, any ideas why?
Yes, the force fields apply to all the objects with them enabled.
I can think of two ways to avoid this.
Objects and force fields do not interact if they are on different layers, so if you do not have too many trees, you can try a 1 tree per layer approach!
Alternatively, you can convert each hair/particle system so once a tree has been grown it is fixed.
I am totally not a cycles expert, but it sounds to me as though your GPU is not supported.
I have an NVIDIA card and they have good Blender cycles support using CUDA.
Seeing as I had no idea how to convert the particle system to be fixed, I just move it to their own layers. It seems that I had too much going on though as Blender kept crashing on me when I tried to render my whole scene. I took away a few of the trees and was able to get a render done, took about an hour though lol
I still have some things I need to do, like make the tree bark not so bright of a white, it looks ridiculous haha
I also need to put some grass in front of them because for some reason it looks like nothing is showing in front of them at the bottom.
Also I’m pretty sure my graphics card should work. I have an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX, and it says that it should be supported by CUDA. I also tried updating and installing the latest versions of CUDA as well.
Thank you for your help, and I hope you have had a good weekend!! :]
They look really good!
You have completely nailed the texture of the fluff of the trees.
The tips neatly fade away.
To make the particles into geometry there is a ‘convert’ button on the particle modifier panel
The advantage of this is that you can then make more trees, the disadvantage is that it creates a lot of geometry, so your computer might struggle!
The images I saw for Truffula trees from the printed The Lorax book had a kind of yellow bark with black stripes.
Maybe that is what you should aim for.
The grass would look better if there was more variation in length
That might fix the ‘in front’ problem
For CUDA I have no idea, as you say it should work soundly.
Thank you for all your help! I’ve learned a ton! :]
My next question though, is how do I get a larger scene to render? For the amount of trees I want to render, it keeps crashing Blender and/or my computer whenever I try whether I convert them or leave them as particles.
I think the way to do this is to create a ‘pre-rendered’ tree - which is an image that includes an alpha channel.
This can then be used as a texture to apply to the trees that are far from the camera.
These trees can be just a plane - with the pre-rendered tree texture.
If you create a grey scale picture to use as a texture then you can always jiggle the hue in the material.
Alright, after quite a bit of messing around and research, this is my final piece. It took like 8 hours to render. (rough guess, I let it render while I was a sleep)
I might come a little late, but here are my thoughts:
First of all your final render looks quite good, although things can be improved, especially the grass and the barks.
Now, my two cents:
For the hair: there is a great addon called HairNet which allows you to use a mesh as a guide for the strands, it is really helpful, you should take a look at it. IMHO, it could improved the look of your trees and make it closer to the reference image.
Rendering: Cycles supports instancing (only on CPU, if I’m right), you can do that by either duplicating your object using ALT-D, or by using DupliVerts. That should reduce rendering time quite a bit. And you can then have much more trees in the scene. I’m not sure if it works for strands as well, so you might still need to convert the particles to meshes.
Finally, do you still have CUDA issues ? If yes, what does the terminal outputs ?
