Silas (Yafray)

[RobertT]

Meet Silas

What began yesterday as a Yafray lighting test inevitably and quickly turned into a real project in this piece This I think is my first real Yafray post in FP.

As most of you know, I get great joy out of pushing the internal renderer to do new and interesting things and still believe to this day we have yet to get the most out of that native Blender power.

Yet I recognize and respect the advances Yafray has experienced and will experiment more with it. I’ve held off on using it mainly because of the long render times on my system. The internal renderer will always be my preference, not only for its speed but for its unique quality and flexibility.

This piece was post-processed in terms of levels editing, desaturation, slight glow flare on the coin, and border/title. DOF was through Yafray.

Technical details: 50 AA samples, 5 AA passes, no GI, no AO, aperture at .025, five lamps. Less than 20k verts, over 1 hour to render.

The initial goal was to experiment with Yafray lights, but in the end it turned into piece inspired by a famous literary character

I should point out: there was no desire or attempt at any degree of realism here. I just wanted to make an interesting looking cg character.

Truthfully, I have no plans to alter this image, but I do welcome all feedback as always!

Thanks for looking!

RobertT

[blend1988]

Can’t believe no one has responded to this, it is very awsome, I like the style and feel. Very nice.

[Shegzy]

:o wow
that’s beautiful.
Keep up the excellent work.

[LohnS]

you know, back in my early days of blender, i had all the time in the world to learn and use blender, and i created many, many things, maybe a couple to a few things a week, and i found that this constant determination helped me gain experience and pushed me to want to do cg as a career.

you, my friend, are more productive then i could ever hope to be with blender, everytime one creates something new in belnder one tries at least 10000 new minor techniques and decisions with working flow. very soon, Mr Robert T. im going to see you working for the large company of your choice, maybe your own

Fantastic looking in 3 forums and finding your work, i am amazed and this peice is really cool! dont stop! =D

Lee

[sornen]

Very nice, One thing though, the hand does not look quite right. It looks to me as if the base of the finger is going to join the base of the thumb. Either that or the next finger along should be higher. Also the thumb should be rotated so that the nail is pointing more towards Silas.
Or perhaps I’m just constructed funny.

[Aaltje]

very, very nice (tried CGTalk? maybe)
/Alex

[Sago]

WTF? Robertt Yaffing? Are you kidding me dolphinboy?

Looks good for your first Yaftest, but I’m sure the next one will be better.

1 hour rendering? …ha, that’s nothing! Now you can make an animation. %|

[acrim]

Great work, very dreamy.

This reminds me of a comedian in the UK called “Jasper Carott”

[HellBok]

POC… :-? . u maded another fantastic work. congrats

[_Kothe]

Isn’t Silas albino? Good work!

[BgDM]

I like the character and the DOF really brings it to life for me.

However, I don’t think that Yafray was required to acheive the same effect. Blender’s internal raytracer could have pulled this off and just as good. Not trying to put it donw in any way, just my thoughts on it.

Did you try rendering with internal?

BgDM

[lemmy]

Wow, I like this one a lot!

The character seems very pleasant, almost in a fantasy sort of way, and the lighting is very warm, almost comforting. I especially like the eyes, very full of character.

Your works continue to amaze me.

[eeshlo]

Very nice Robertt! Didn’t ever expect you to do any yafray renderings… There seems to be a sort of a ‘taboo’ on that topic among quite a few wellknown Blender artists, some comments I read sometimes almost seem to imply a strong dislike (…) with a passion for even just mentioning or suggesting yafray sometimes.
But we desperatly (well, I do ) need somebody like you to do something more not your average featuretest/architectural type renders, not that there is anything wrong with that of course!
I’m sure he really hates to be reminded of that, but as far as I know, from the revered Blender artist ‘league’ only basse in the past gave yafray a try, and I guess decided it is not for him. As did quite a few others, BgDM too…
Quite understandable of course, because of the lack of support for 1:1 renders, to be able to use Blender as preview, rendertimes, etc, all contribute to quickly frustrate the real artist who doesn’t want to concern him/herself with the details just to get things right for yafray.

I said this many times before, personally, I find it a pity that so many people seem to get ‘trapped’ by the photorealism concept, I wish there would be more imagination then just trying to imitate the real world. Just because of GI or photons or whatever render abacadabra there is available, doesn’t mean you can’t do anything else with it. It seems to be hard to ‘think out of the box’.
But I can see the usefulness at least for architecture work and product visualisation and that sort of thing, the typical yafray usage sofar, but both just as well possible with Blender if you know what to look out for as far as lighting is concerned.

Personally, I always liked renders that showed more than just a pretty picture, something that you can imagine a story behind, doesn’t have to be anything ‘realistic’, can be totally abstract. And of course, Blender is very suitable for that, very easy to experiment with, quick renders, etc. Yafray simply is not (might never be) in the same league, though possible to do other stuff with it, it really would take someone who knows yafray inside out to get the most from it.
(No, that one is not me! I’m not an artist, haven’t done any rendering in almost four years, no imagination whatsoever, and never quite learned to model, I simple lose track of it all very fast, can’t see the mesh for the vertices anymore so to speak…)

Again, I don’t want to imply that I’m not impressed with all the renders done with yafray currently, just that, for my tastes, they leave something to be desired sometimes, that little bit something ‘extra’… Then again, same thing happens with Blender too of course.

Oh well, in any case, all that said, I have to agree with BgDM here, as far as render specifics is concerned, there doesn’t really seem to be anything that would require yafray for this case. (btw, zblur can be used with yafray too, another option lots of people don’t seem to know about).
Still nice to know that you gave it a try at least…

[PlantPerson]

It’s not bad, but the fingers struck me as being kind of strange-looking.

[SmaTheGreek]

Simply awsome , impressive,outsanding,excellent, …

[_ndy (Andy Goralczyk)]

nice!
as for me, i would really like to use yafray more. but the yaf plugin always crashes blender here when it’s not set to xml export… and i’m one of those people who like to watch the render process

anyway, keep up the good work robert!
.andy

[HellBok]

@ndi, do u like to see the image appearing on the render window’’’’ :o
thats weird. u don´t feel the pain of waiting, is awsome

[Gwendolan]

very well done indeed! top image!

[Cerberus]

KInd of looks like the opposite of golem from lord of the rings. Anyway, One again another great work.

[RobertT]

Thank you very very much everyone for the awesome feedback. My computer is typing super slowly right now as I’m rendering a new project which is in the neighborhood of 2.2 million verts

blend1988 and Shegzy: Thanks!

LohnC: Wow, I really appreciate what you’ve said Lee. I deeply admire your work and know there is no question you will rock the 3d world with your incredible work!

sornen: Thanks! Yes, the hand’s a little weird, not only due to the angular/weird proportions for this dude but also the proximity to the camera. We’re probably all constructed funny in some way

Sago: LMAO! With so many projects averaging over 1 million verts, I’ve grown accustomed to long renders with the internal renderer. Yafray requires more patience yet though

acrim: Cool! Never heard of him but still cool

HellBok: Thanks!

BgDM: Thanks so much BgDM. Yes it was the DOF in this piece that decided it for me for Yafray. I like the way it’s handled with the crosshairs and aperture value and all. Internal DOF support would be so great. I have used zblur and other DOF techniques in the past, but this one really seemed a step in the right direction. Yes, this definitely could have been done in the internal renderer. In fact, I think I said something like that to Sago concerning one of his renders at some point. External renderers in general may have their various advantages and applications, but nothing really beats the speed and flexibility of the internal renderer I think. As much as the internal renderer may advance, I hope that advantage of speed always remains. The quality is already amazing, but we know it will get even better

lemmy: Thanks lemmy! As this was initially a Yafray lighting exercise, I spent quite a bit of time working on getting the illumination just right, and then in post to adjust levels some more to make it complete and comfortable to look at – literally warm and fuzzy with the lighting and DOF and all

eeshlo: Wow it’s great to hear from you eeshlo You can certainly expect more Yafray renders from me – I love to experiment, and the latest Yafray is such a great new toy with all the new options and stuff! Speed is a major issue, as you know. I blend constantly and truthfully would not be able to create and refine so much if I had to wait so long for the internal renderer. The waits are ultimately worth it though, as I was saying to nehpets in the Focused Critique forum, but as @ndy pointed out we like to stay real close to render time results – which of course is partly possible due to the non-XML Yafray integration (unchecking XML), but beyond the pronounced waits it is the disparity between the internal and external renderers that has been a massive point of frustration, especially with basic things like lighting. The increased procedural support is a great step. If I could select Yafray and press F12 and get parallel results with Blender at least in terms of light power and material mapping (but with a notably superior and physically correct render product in Yafray), that would be great. Then I could go on more comfortably messing with caustics and all the other cool things Yafray has to offer. My only other concern is that Yafray seems to crash often on high poly works, like anything over 500k verts. Maybe it’s an OS or RAM issue (I have 1GB RAM). But things like that cause me to stick with the tried and true internal renderer, and that may be the case with others. I’m sure as Blender and Yafray mature there will be increased consistencies between output as I’ve described, and that would be critical and compelling evolution that will get even more people excited about potential advantages of either renderer. As for why to use one or the other, some people may use Yafray for photorealism, but I choose my tools and methods according to their artistic potential, and Yafray certainly has that. My main goal is to create art, sometimes even photorealistic stuff, and having more render options means more possibilities. This particular project seemed to succeed because I went into it as a “Yafray project,” something I had never quite done before I definitely plan to produce more works in Yafray as time permits, strange and uncommon stuff too, and if anything looks good it will likely get posted here or at my website

PlantPerson: Thanks! Some intentional strangeness about them yes

SmaTheGreek: Thank you!

@ndy: Hey @ndy! Thanks so much my friend! If you’re using the optimized build, it will crash with Yafray if you uncheck XML. If that is the case, what I do is keep the BF-blender exe file and then rename it like blenderOriginal.exe and then set up an alternative icon to that. Otherwise, yeah, that long dark wondering wait for a three hour long potentially crappy render will totally suck Speed should not be an issue on your system though mr. dual opteron I would love to see some Blender benchmarks of the new AMD X2 4800 procesor. Now with the dual thread support that must make for some sweet render times! I hope to upgrade in the relative near future to a dual core system. Then I can really be productive!

Gwendolan: Thank you very much Gwendolan

Cerberus: Ah, maybe the coin is his preciousss Thanks!

RobertT