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Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 1:09 pm
by ak-sam
OnoSendai wrote:
ak-sam wrote: A preview render would be a nice touch, too :)
A preview would be cool indeed, it's quite a bit of work though, so I might come back to that.
Cheers for the extra 0.000s!

Yeah previews are definitely no biggie....being able to save presets will be enough.

I've attached a scene I'm working on...crappy subject and (road medians) but this one has 3 types of scattering..shrubs, grasses and long wavy grasses, plus lots of other instancing. I think the grass really gives it another level of realism! In the past this diagram would have been done as a 2D plan or maybe a basic 3d sketch, but having Skindigo set up for quick rendering means that even simple diagrams can be done in this fashion for virtually no extra time-cost.

Environment maps and glass are two aspects I'm still struggling with :( (no more thin glass?)

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 11:33 pm
by Juju
ak-sam wrote:Nice work Bubs!..looks quite tropical to me.

I worked around the UVW errors by using the same grass material on all blades, maybe not ideal. I thought that might also speed up render times? *shrug* I'll work on getting my poly count down a bit, too.

I've added a reduced poly dandelion with simple PNGs.
I'm still having issues with my clover leaves being too bright - is there an issue with component or material caching - maybe I need to clear mine again?

Tip: make the ground surface into a dead grass texture so that the brown bits will show through the gaps in your scattered grass. Dont be tempted to make it look like 'green grass'.

My density is at around 4500 per m2, but that's necessary when you're looking down on it from a higher angle.

Ono - couple of requests if you don't mind:
Can the scatters extend slightly outside the camera's view when "only in view" is ticked?
Can we have the option to select scattering by Percentage instead of 'weight' (sliders?) and the ability to select smaller increments, eg 0.1%. Even 1% dandelions is too many!

A preview render would be a nice touch, too :)
I like the scale of the grass in "sams_grass5" but prefer the colour of the grass in "sams_grass4".

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 1:12 am
by Pibuz
ak-sam wrote:(no more thin glass?)
There is actually no more thin glass..BUT we have the architectural glass option check now!
Useful for thick but plain glass, suitable mostly for windows..

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2014 9:11 am
by ak-sam
I scattered over 60 million objects...it worked...I didn't time it as I was out of the office but it rendered OK and used virtually all of my 32GB RAM.

Having "Only in camera view" checked by default would be handy :D

Pibuz wrote:
ak-sam wrote:(no more thin glass?)
There is actually no more thin glass..BUT we have the architectural glass option check now!
Useful for thick but plain glass, suitable mostly for windows..
Cool - Would you mind sharing the ideal settings for a window in a building and a car, when viewed from the outside?
I'm using sketchup glass so it has no thickness. All of my components use this technique...do I need to change that?
Cheers!

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2014 9:24 am
by OnoSendai
ak-sam wrote: I'm using sketchup glass so it has no thickness. All of my components use this technique...do I need to change that?
Cheers!
Currently arch-glass (like normal glass) requires thickness. Can you send me on your components that have no thickness?

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2014 2:29 pm
by ak-sam
Don't laugh, my lawn really does look like this :(

Sams Lawn222.jpg

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 9:38 am
by ak-sam
I'm still experimenting with the presets...this is a rougher style.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 12:09 pm
by OnoSendai
Thanks Sam, will look at these soon!

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 12:35 pm
by ak-sam
I've made a lawn daisy and added that. Also some bark mulch (not easy... need lots of variation otherwise it looks terrible.. maybe easier to do with a bump/displacement map etc?)

I'm still struggling with the distribution. Are the seed numbers repeatable, eg, if we find a seed that gives a nice natural (clumped) distribution, could we use the same number in different scenes for a similar effect?

The attached scene has all my components.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 5:48 pm
by Zom-B
Looking good Sam!

My only suggestions would be to have the grass maybe not only that streight pointing up, but a little more to the sides too, generally speaking, the longer the grass the more it bends to the sides.

Also your material look quite... solid. What do you use here?

keep it up!

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 9:15 pm
by Pibuz
Wonderful work Sam!! really!!!!
I feel guilty not being doing anything about this :( Hope I'll spare some time soon to spend in this!

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 8:29 am
by ak-sam
Thanks guys, happy to help.
Zom-B wrote:Looking good Sam!

My only suggestions would be to have the grass maybe not only that streight pointing up, but a little more to the sides too, generally speaking, the longer the grass the more it bends to the sides.

Also your material look quite... solid. What do you use here?

keep it up!
Good idea about the bendy grass! I need to review.... What happened is that I started with very short grass, but I increased the length once I started adding weeds, because it's more difficult to keep everything in scale. Also the scatter length variation modifier can make grass look longer than intended.

"Solid" meaning not opaque?
I'm using phong materials to keep rendering times down, but I expect Ono will modify the materials to be more optimised when he creates the presets. Double-sided thin would be nice. Translucent materials would be perfect but I think might take too long to render.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 9:30 am
by ak-sam
This is getting fairly complex...
4500 instances per square metre.
I'm getting 890 samples/second using bidirectional path tracing (single PC).

I'm happy with this result though, I'll be using this in my scenes from now on.
It certainly looks better (to me) than any other 3D rendering software's default grass.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2014 10:50 am
by Zom-B
ak-sam wrote:"Solid" meaning not opaque?
I'm using phong materials to keep rendering times down, but I expect Ono will modify the materials to be more optimised when he creates the presets. Double-sided thin would be nice. Translucent materials would be perfect but I think might take too long to render.
Yes I was referring to the missing translucency. Don't bother about the rendertimes, they are better then you think and the result is usually worth it!

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2014 9:08 am
by ak-sam
I see.. it's worth a try.
What settings should I use to get glossy translucent materials?