@islara1 - let me know what kind of tips I can give and I WILL TRY.
@empirearts - 1. I am not an artist, I am a hack. Therefore not bound to keeping my secrets. Seriously, we are all bound to helping each other out here. That’s what these forums are about, right?
I used leaf images from these trees but you could use any leaf image or even copy one from your back yard as I have before. The only reason I mention this is that my node setup has a seperate image for the alpha map (it came with the original file), which normally would be stored as info in the single image of a png file. I hope this makes sense.
aside from that, I created normal and specular maps with the crazy bump app, which one could also do with insane bump plugin for gimp.
Tomorrow when I have some time I’ll plug this into some of my existing trees and see how it looks, and then I will post the results here. Thx again, this has been bugging the hell out of me for quite some time.
thnks for all helps!!
i would only to know how does you get the bumb in the trees? have you generated with crazy bumb or what?
and can you tell me how mutch particulien system you have use to get this buetibul grass?
finaly if you know free software like crazybump?
and a lot of thanks !!
@islara1 - I made normal and spec maps with crazybump, but there is an free addon for gimp which I believe is called insanebump. At this distance from the trees I don’t think it made that much difference.
I used 5 different particle systems for the grass…grass, weeds, dandelion base and then the flowers and fuzzballs. I hope this helps a little!
Could you share with us, how you set up the ground scene? I mean it’s looks like this plane(ground) is quite large. What particle setting you’ve used? You mentioned that you’ve used 5 different particle systems, what about the grass one?
Also what scale is this?
I have general question to all Blender society.
How can I use hair particle system to create realy huge amount of space, for realtime simulation. Should I use prosedural texturing, or? Does someone have tried in cycles? I’m trying to complete a scene with high amount of particles - grass. But it’s not look like I want it. … lot of empty space between the particles.
For Example I used 20 000 particles for high subdivided plane(terrain). At same time I want it to looks like It’s been already cuttet. I’ve used different techniques to achieve this effect, but for now - is unsuccessful. And this is my isssue now?
I will appreciate any comment, suggestion etc.
Wish you wonderful day all!
By the way, one more time this is realy nice Render!
Sorry I didn’t get back to you, I have been hit with a sudden side project that is taking up all of my time. As for your shader, it is very impressive. There is little point posting the comparison that I had intended because the one that you have created so much better then my adapted “human skin” version.
Your node set up is very unusual. I never would have thought of blending diff and specular directly with transparency. What is particularly impressive about your shader is how the leaves capture the light. The SSS shader I was experimenting with ended up looking like dead and dried out (although still green) leaves. Your leaves look like they have fluid in them and are dispersing the light in such a realistic way.
Thanks allot, you have saved me potentially months of experimentation and failure.
The only major rendering hurdle I have left now is human hair. Oddly enough, I can do long hair but not short hair. This is similar to the problem I had with trees, being able to do render them close up but not far away. Weird I know :spin: If you do human hair as well I would love to see your work.
Congratulations on the top row. You deserve it. The ability to render Vue-like scenery in a fee and open source program is priceless.
@ivaydesighn - I don’t think I can tell everything about the particles without creating an entire tutorial. What I can say is that there were actually 9 different particle sysems used and two vertex groups weighted to show the different particles where to be. the tree and leaf particles were using one vertex group and then the others - grass, fluffballs, weeds, dandelion base, seed grass, dandelion flowers, more bases for the flowers. The big thing is to make sure that you weight paint so that almost none of the vegetation is off camera. If it is, that’s a waste of cpu/gpu. Scale is up to you and how you think it should look. I’d also warn that in really large scenes, there’s a chance that parts in the distance could get clipped so check camera clipping and 3D display clipping. Hope that helps!
@empire arts - The only reason that I’m using transparency is to cut out the parts of the leaf image that aren’t actually part of the leaf. That’s why there’s an alpha mask plugged into the factor input of those nodes. The main nodes for leaves should be a blend of diffuse and specular nodes - then mix in the translucent using a mix node. I’ve tried an add node but for some reason the “transparent” part of the leaves starts to show up. I usually try to force the image texture brighter and towards the yellow for the color input of the translucent node. This time I just went with a yellowish color because everything is in the distance. I hope that makes sense. Many thanks for the compliment!
I see… my mistake. So you don’t actually have any translucency effect in your shader at all? Maybe that is where I have been going wrong. Every leaf shader that I have seen includes some level of translucency, and that is what was creating the loss in detail when the trees were smaller and farther away. Even when I set up proper translucency masks I just could not seem to rectify this problem.
Transmission also happens to be the problem that I am having with short human hair. I guess I should try generating a hair shader without it and see what happens.
@empire arts - No transparent on the main part of the leaves. Yes translucent That part you are correct about! Your post had said something about mixing transparency with diff and spec textures. I was just trying to make things clearer and instead think I made them more confusing! Sorry!! You are correct that most leaf materials use translucency.
Thanks, all! This one had a nice run on top…I REALLY never thought it would be up there.
@Amr Kamel - Thanks…my next grass will be better. I learned a lot from this one.
@the muslim - I would like to do that actually - maybe in the near future I’ll start doing tuts. For now though, there’s lots of good tuts out there. Look around! (Also if you have any questions, you can ask here or message me…)
@edrift - I’ve seen your work! It’s great so coming from you that’s a real compliment… the cropped version was loosely based on some of the old Ansel Adams pics I’ve seen. Yeah it looks a little tight. Especially when one looks at it on a small screen surrounded by black, but I sort of like it too.
I REALLY appreciate the constructive critique I got on this one and learned a lot! The big take home with this is that sometimes when you think you’re done, you’re not!
This is very nice and very realistic. I think the depth is great as others sometimes go too far with it and the scene just does not look right as the eye or camera would see it. Bravo man!
@van190 and btcruiser: Thanks! Maybe surreal is a good way to put it. I loved (and still do) this thing when I first made it. Now I -and others- think I could do better. Time to let it go and move on to other things. I love Blender and I love learning how to make incredible pics. The artists here are (most times) the best people around. I wouldn’t have learned anything if not for BlenderArtists.org, but I’m not an artist, I’m a hack. Take a look around and see the greatness that’s here and learn.
P.S. If there’s anything anyone would like to know about how I do things, just ask. PM me.
Could you share with us, how you set up the ground scene? I mean it’s looks like this plane(ground) is quite large. What particle setting you’ve used? You mentioned that you’ve used 5 different particle systems, what about the grass one?