Little house at the seaside...

[Michael_RUS]

Little house at the seaside.

[Pat Collins]

Hello Michael,

Excellent shadow work. I felt the coolness of the trees at the shore.

Pat

[Jack Zimmer]

Hi Michael,

That is an impressive rendering! You have certainly added a nice variety of details that the program provides, not just with the model but other aspects. Great job !

One drawback with the program is many of the plants are low quality and render quite 'bright'.... I think that is happening in your render. You may know this but if not, you can add your own plants as Photo Boards.

Find a plant you like and in a photo editing program, set it's 'background' to magenta (255-0-255) and save it as a .bmp
1, In materials, right click > add new group > in the upper Groups area.
2 In materials > below the Groups > right click > Add  Material and locate the new plant .bmp you made.
3. Now you can open Photo Boards > assign and give a new name to this new 'plant' and it is ready to add to your models.

It is a lenghty process but well worth the effort.
I think new plants is just about the only thing you need to change in your fantastic rendering...

I've attached a sample bmp image already containing the magenta background for you to test.

Good job ,

Jack

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Michael,

Excellent work!!  As Jack said, the extra attention to surrounding detail makes the render outstanding and very realistic.

Keep up the good work! 

Allan

[Michael_RUS]

Pat, Jack, Allan - thank you very much.

Jack, your attention likes me well. Six months earlier I made an effort to embrace this method, but ... (see pic. 1) It stand out a mile. The effect was a great disappointment.

Currently I try to use OnyxGARDEN Suite 2. I shall see how things turn out.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Michael,

If you get a pink fringe, as in your examples, it means that those pixels are not a true magenta (255, 0, 255). If you sample them in a photo editor, you will find they are one or two numbers off this number. This can happen two ways: (1)  Either the photoboard was saved as a JPG not BMP or (2)  the image was resized AFTER the Magenta was applied to the background.

(1)  A JPG file will not maintain the true magenta, as it pixelates particularly near other colours and some pixels are then not 255, 0 , 255.

(2)  When an image is resized the edges between colours tend to blend with each other and the true magenta colour is mixed ever so slightly with the adjacent colours. If you need to change the size of the image, do that first and then apply the Magenta.

Allan

[Michael_RUS]

Uhu, Allan, many thanks. I'll bet it in my mind. In the nearest future I will experiment once again with magenta background and BMP-saving.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Michael,

The trees in the image below were from photos I took, added magenta and saved as BMP files - no pink borders. It does work well.
I have posted a BIM file with these particular trees in this post: http://forums.turbofloorplan.com/index.php/topic,2311.0.html if you want to try them.

Allan

[Michael_RUS]

Hey, Allan, Jack! I did it, stiffen the snakes. Two riders on the street.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Michael,

Looks great!    -   All adds to the realism!

Allan

[Doug.S]

Hey, Allan, Jack! I did it, stiffen the snakes. Two riders on the street.

For your image called "work" (and your first image of this thread) you may have noticed that billboard trees often show shadows on the ground as very pixelated.

There are a few "tricks" to avoid/eliminate the problem or at least make less obvious:
- try an advanced render
- add another tree(s); as best out of camera view but so the shadows from that tree overlay with the other tree shadows...thus filling in more of the sunlight pixel shapes
- rotate the tree and/or camera position  and/or sun time of day to reduce the shade issues
- after render, post process the image and blur the area and/or darken/add more shade to the light areas to blend edge shapes so they look more like soft blotches....look at real tree shade for a good idea of what to aim for.

[Doug.S]

The trees in the image below were from photos I took, added magenta and saved as BMP files - no pink borders. It does work well.  Allan

Allan, I noticed that palm trees had shadows like sun from behind-left while other trees have shadows like from sun behind-right.
Any explanation? bug? any workaround?  I've found they usually have a reasonable shape and direction from a medium sun (late AM or early PM) angle (never as good as a .3ds or .obj tree, of course).

Do we have any control (other than sun time) of the shadow from a tree? Or does it come from the .bmp image shape? (guess we could do a "study" of billboard shapes and shadows). Or do the TFP supplied billboard objects also have a "shadow" file for the 3D shadow shape? I'm thinking not because all billboard shapes, even self produced, seem to make their own shadows.

For better (less pixelated) shadows from leaves/branches, does the billboard image source file size/resolution make much difference? (example a 256x256 pixel image vs. a 1012x1012). I've never investigated as I don't use often; but maybe you have done more than most.

[the cad man]

Great work Michael.

Gaz

[Allan Chesney]

Hi Doug,

Sun shadow direction is a problem but I have not had time to investigate it yet. It appears that the sun is too close - as if it was where the camera is positioned, or at least only the same distance away so the shadows radiate out from that point. It is exacerbate in this case as the terrain is sloping away but there does seem to be an issue here somewhere that I will investigate when I get some time.

The shadow does come from the photoboard shape so the better the resolution the better the shadow. The low resolution image is what results in the square, pixilated shadow that you noticed in Michaels image.

Shadows can be improved it you have the sun from the side, hence a narrow shadow, by inserting another tree, not set to billboard, with it's 'back' to the sun. This gives a wide shadow but you have to place carefully so that it doesn't throw a shadow on the first tree. I have also used a 3DS tree in the same way to improve a shadow.

Allan

[Jack Zimmer]

I think the pixelazation of tree shadows comes from 'oversizing' a tree image that is not high quality to start with.

You can downloade 3D trees from Google Warehouse and add one or two , sometimes off camera. They may not slow down rendering too much and give better tree shadows on ground and surfaces. They have to be placed properly and sometimes elevated to get the shadows where you want them but they do add a lot to foreground details and realism.

3D Tree can be seen on the right in the attached, a second , which was elevated, is also off camera and actually casting most of the shadows seen on the driveway and building.

Jack