Do you guys think I need the reflection then? The only way to get the reflection to make sense is to put a pretty good distance between the man and the head stone. I also want a bit of DOF to blur the name and words on the head stone. It will probably say like Jane Doe or something.
Also I do intend for the rose to be the focal point so if it blocks the head stone a bit I think thats ok but I do need for the viewer to understand the story of the image.
I my mind the death of a close loved one like a wife would be unimaginable and sureal and fog like state. Thats what I’m ultimately going for. Like there is no one else in the world. That would explain the lack of other grave stones.
I will always take C&C into consideration though…thanks:)
I really do think other gravestones would make much more sense, and give it a feel of a grave site. Also What if you had the stone in the ground laying flat, not standing up? Then you could do reflection and still have it be closer. And yes the DOF is WAY too strong and in my opinion, the guy should be a little closer to the stone. I had to really search the scene to see it. I hope that helps!
Some progress:) I worked on the man and his jacket. Also worked on the hand and added additional details with sculpt tool. I’m finding a limit to the number of particle instanced objects for the grass so I’m using a image texture for the plan and have 60k grass blades with the highest density right in the focal area. Also reduced the DOF. I added additional head stones as advised (thanks guys) and will texture them properly after I finalize the environment (trees, flowers, weed, flying leaves) In the end this is going to be a fall cold scene so the grass will be more dead than green as will the trees. The focal will be the vibrant red and green rose representing the goodbye:) Way too much gloss on the rose at the moment which can be fixed easily. I got a new GTX560 video card with 2GB and its amazing. This is a pretty complex scene and it took 30min to do 2000 samples at 1300x1100. For working on individual objects and seeing their render in the viewport is so much faster than CPU!
Thanks DDD, your right I have not yet put any effort into the background and very little on the grass:( Thats next on the list:) I think the reflection behind the man on the headstone is from the environmental HDR image texture, the color of which is way off and too bright. In the end I dont think you’ll be able to see any background image, I will fully vegitate the surrounding with trees and underbrush, most of all the hill behind the headstones.
I really like the idea of the dew-drop and had planned on doing the scene in the rain but I’m not sure I can pull it off. My experience with translucent water on a surface just didnt look right…but you better delieve I’ll give it a shot!
Oh and there will definetly be some compositing:) Thanks for the quick comment please keep them commin!
Here is an update…I’ve been struggling with the perspective and camera angle of the scene. I want the rose to be the focus but I think in the previous renders its not…and that confusing. So I have thought about it and came up with a great solution…I think anyway:)
I plan to add:
water droplets on the rose
Rain simulation effect overall
Trees in background
possibly change the head stones to crosses, more like a military cemetary
higher resolution background HDR image
I feel like the character should be gripping the rose with the intensity as if they actually just lost someone and the headstones you have now are military headstones at least they are the same as if in Arlington or a little bit bigger. The rose is beautiful by the way, very realistic and eye catching, it will be even better with rain blurring some of the background out, just make sure you don’t go overboard to the point where the image is obscured
Thanks GJAnders:) Good thoughts, I will try my best to not go overboard. There will be a combination of rain and fog to kinda fade the background away. I think to balance out the image I’m going to do one high detail tree in the left third of the image behind the first row of headstones. It will mostly be the trunk with some branches hanging down and then further into the distance there will be another row of trees. I’ll also be adding grass of course in the foreground.
Question for you guys…with cycles I’m getting some pretty jagged edges even more so where the edges are along areas where the background is blurred, is there a setting with cycles to improve that like antialiasing? Or do I have to just do higher resolution and more smaples? The last render above was 2000 samples and the resolution was 2800x1440.
It would be really useful if you could adjust the AA but unfortunately you can’t. I would have needed it quite badly for my guitar as well and it still has jagged edges on the strings. Just render big and downscale it.
Thats what I figured Ben_Lind Thanks! I’ll try doubling the size, I’m worried that I’ll exceed my GTX560 video card memory. I’m assuming the size of the render effects the card memory usage?? I know with grass particles, trees, the high detail on the glove and jacket in the final scene its gonna be close. I can always use my CPU but its soooooo much slower:) My card has 2GB and my computer has 8GB. Oh well:)
Small update, This is a more finalized headstone with texturing and bump. Tried to give it a weathered and worn look. The headstones are marble from what I can tell so there is a slight reflection but pretty soft. I tried to blur the name a bit and make it somewhat unreadable out of respect. I will have several variations and then duplicate. I’m going to try a particle system in a grid, I think it will work. And then just create a group of headstones:)
So I was having issues this morning with the water dropplets on the rose and was about to post a request for a solution but I figured out what the issue was. I was getting dark dropplets no matter what I did. So I tried adding a transparency shader but that didnt really work. So I started playing with a simple test scene and figured out that the sun does not cast caustics duh:) so when I got rid of the sun lamp and added a emission plane voila!
Still a bit noisy after 500 samples but it looks pretty good. I think this is going to blow up my render times fo sho:) But I like it so I guess thats that. I’ll post a rose render later today with the water dropplets in all there glory haha!
It’s looking good so far, but why would there be water on the rose? Also, I agree that the hand should be gripping the rose more tightly; right now it looks like it might fall out of his hand!
Thanks Goldenfrog…the plan is to do a rain scene which would explain the water drops on the flower. If I cant get the drops to work I’ll just go with a foggy overcast scene. Gotta leave open options:) As far as the hand goes I’ll try to tighten up the fingers, but ultimately it is a rose not to be crushed.
I’m still having problems with the water in the main scene…it looks good in a test render above but thats a very simple example. Maybe it just needs to cook for more samples like 5000 to get the caustics. I dont know but I’ll post something tonight.
OK so here is the scene re rendered with the water dropplets and some grass…a little bit of post editing. I’m still having issues with the water material and the caustics. I dont know if its the scale of the scene vs the size of the dropplets and the render resolution or what. To get something decent I had to add in a transparency shader and mix with the glass shader:( Let me know what you guys think.
There will be blurred rain falling (which will help slightly hide imprefections in the flower and man) and fog still and the grass will be thicker with more variation in height and color. I’m thinking once I add the fog the need for trees in the distance may not be necessary but it feels a little bare on the left side. I could maybe do a bare tree with little or no leaves which fits the season of the scene. Of course the grass color will be modified to match but thats pretty easy to do:)
You are going to hate me for saying this, but I liked the perspective better when it was not a side view. I would suggest a compensation between the two. Also it would help a lot if it was specified which gravestone is the one he is going to. In the most recent one, you can tell that the nearest one is not in front of him, so it is kinda awkward when part of the focus of the scene is not even in the picture.
So my main blendering computer crashed last night and now wont turn on and I’m not sure what happend so we’ll see where this all goes depending whats wrong with the computer:( I recently installed a new video card GTX560 and power supply 700watt and I’m worried it over heated or something. I’m at a loss right now…I got an IT buddy comming over to check it out. Cross your finger for me!!!
Well my computer is not dead woohoo! The F’n power supply went out so I had to order another one:( So I wont be able to make much progress at home for a few days. However at work I’m able to work on test scenes such as this one.
This will be something like the fog effect I’m going for in the rose scene. Using the compositor and the Z map value node I’m able to do a fog like haze (pretty typical)…but…I dont like the way the fog has no limit vertically so I worked on a solution and I think it works pretty good. I used the Z map value, split it, inverted the color on one and blurred it by x=80y=80 and the color mixed the two back together with mulitply and voila her ya go. Would also work great over water and such:) Let me know what ya think!
