First attempts

[voodoodad]

Okay, after much tweaking and cursing I managed to get the colors back to where I want them. It was a lighting issue totally unrelated to the filters. Magical "use material curves" button, oh how I love thee! And I think I've got the falloff to look pretty good for the fog effect (new settings posted). I still need to go and fix the texture on that sign, it looks like its been through a sandstorm. Let me know what you think!

[voodoodad]

Fixed the issue with the sign. It wasn't a texture issue as I first thought. I just needed to click "double" in the display properties pallet for the plane3d it was applied to. Also recolored some of the grass toward the bottom of the image to blend it in better. I think maybe I can stop spamming uploads of this model now.

[SwampGhost]

That's looking really nice, voodoodad! Very inviting and homey, and you've got a much nicer sense of depth with the fog now.

If I may humbly offer a couple of suggestions, I would recommend that you make the ivy on the house itself closer in color to the grass around it. The color you have now looks a bit plastic-y and stands out a bit too sharply, I think.

Also, the sign needs a bit more of a hand-painted look to it, I would say (the script itself is quite nice, but it looks like a typed font). At the moment, it looks a bit like something you might see in Second Life or something (just the sign, I mean).

Just a couple of minor suggestions, though--I like this piece very much. I'd love to retire there!

Terry

[voodoodad]

Thanks for the suggestions, Swampghost! The ivy was something I worked on this afternoon, it had a different mat applied to it and I didn't realize that until I was looking at it here again. So that's already fixed but I didn't want to post another render that soon lol. The sign looks like a typed font because... well, its a typed font lol. I'll take the texture back to ps and try to put a little wear and tear on it. You're absolutely right. It really sticks out being right in the middle of the image like that so it needs to look more home made. Thanks again and stay tuned.

[voodoodad]

One last shot before I move on. Corrected the specular that the ivy was picking up and beat up on the sign a little to make it fit a little bit better with its surroundings. Hope you guys like it!

[SwampGhost]

Fantastic! A real improvement on the sign! I think it just really needed to be dialed down brightness-wise, but adding wear and tear is much more interesting, of course, and disguises the uniformity of the script a bit without you having to go in there and mess around too much with it.

The Ivy is really coming along, and I hope it isn't presumptuous of me (and that I'm not dragging things out when you just want to move on) to include a quick, sloppy little desaturation job I did, which is meant to illustrate what I was picturing when I made my suggestion. I think sorting out the specularity was a huge step in the right direction, but also still feel that the green may be too punchy.

I literally just desaturated it in PS, of course, and played with a few other settings, but you may also want to play with the color settings a bit more or whatever. Or perhaps you disagree with what I've done here, which I can completely respect. It's fun to play a bit when I see something I might do differently, but--again--I hope you don't take exception to my humble suggestions and tinkering.

And just to clarify, While I do a lot of 2D artwork, I am--so far--no more than a zbrush novice and most definitely know far less about it than you. I am simply making suggestions that I hope might make a more harmonious image, without necessarily knowing how you would execute that in ZB.

Anyway, thanks for sharing, voodoodad!

Terry

[voodoodad]

Hey Terry, thanks so much for your suggestions! Listen, don't ever think you're being presumptuous by giving me suggestions, especially when it regards issues of colors. As I've said many times in this thread and elsewhere, I have red/green color blindness and that makes it really difficult for me to judge different tones of color in the red/green spectrum. So when someone suggests color changes I take them really seriously. One thing I would love to see in Zbrush is the ability to apply filters per subtool as opposed to applying them to the whole render. I'm making a huge effort to keep this one and the river scene completely in Zbrush, which means I can't take it to PS no matter how much I want to. Ill fix the ivy color issue by just picking a (hopefully) grayer shade of green and filling the ivy subtools with that. It's not a completely ideal solution, but it'll work lol.

Again, never worry about giving me suggestions even though you're new to Zbrush. I'm coming up on using it for 6 months and I still consider myself a noob lol.

[truubluu]

Great job on this scene Voodoo. Convey's a very peaceful felling, again fantastic job

[voodoodad]

Thanks, Truubluu! After Mealeaying and I worked out how to do fog in bpr and finding that great hdr forest image for the background it all seemed to come together really well.

[SpiritDreamer]

Looking Great Gary......That atmosphere really did the trick...took it to a whole new level of realism...Outstanding..

Glenn

[truubluu]

Thanks, Truubluu! After Mealeaying and I worked out how to do fog in bpr and finding that great hdr forest image for the background it all seemed to come together really well.

Hey Voodoo, I was wondering if you explain your seetings for the fog. It seems everytime i try to use fog with BPR it never works, but when I use the "Best" render it sometimes works. I'm not sure what im doing wrong, any advice wuld be so helpfull, thanks.

[voodoodad]

Hey Voodoo, I was wondering if you explain your seetings for the fog. It seems everytime i try to use fog with BPR it never works, but when I use the "Best" render it sometimes works. I'm not sure what im doing wrong, any advice wuld be so helpfull, thanks.

I'd be glad to, Truubluu! The first thing you need to realize is that the actual "fog" button in the render palette only applies to "best" render mode. That fog setting will work only if you press the best button on that palette. Apparently this has been true since 4.0 came out and it took me a few months to realize why it wasn't showing up when I did a bpr. To actually achieve a fog effect with bpr (or depth cue, for that matter), you need to go to the bpr filters after doing a bpr render. I'll do a mini tutorial with the filter settings I used for the last render I did of Bag End below.

1. Render your image using bpr and whatever settings you prefer. You will not need to activate fog or depth cue to get the effect.

2. Once your image is done rendering, go to your bpr filter subpalette and change one of the default filters type to "paint".

3. The main settings you'll want to use will be all of the depth sliders. I'll post my settings alongside my latest render at the end of this post. Keep the strength slider at 1 until you start getting the kind of depth effect you want. You can also tweak some of the other sliders as well, but I haven't messed with most of those yet because I'm pleased with what I've got now.

4. The main depth slider will control how far "forward" or "back" your fog effect starts in the image. I try to set it up initially to where it looks like it's too far forward and play with the other settiings as detailed in the next few steps. It's an overall slider for the rest of the settings so it's best to set and forget it till the end as it will make drastic changes to the effect and it's best to fine tune with the other settings.

5. Use the "depth a" and "depth b" siders to fine tune the gradient effect from the front of your image to the rear. These slider will work as "pickers" so you can click on the slider and drag to your image to pick where you want the gradient to start and end. I've been setting "depth a" to something very close to the front of the image and "depth b" to about 2/3s of the way back, this seems to give a softer gradient than anything closer together. If you place them farther apart, you might end up obscuring parts of your image you want to keep clean.

6. Use "depth exp" to control the falloff of the fog effect. This is the setting that probably gave me the biggest headache. Too much, and you'll have your fog abruptly starting right in the middle of the image, too little and you might not be able to tell there's fog there at all. So keep tweaking this one. I didn't use the slider at all on this setting. I just kept narrowing it down by decimal points until I felt it looked right.

7. Profit!

Everything above can be applied to get a depth cue effect, also. The only difference is that the filter type needs to be "blur" instead of paint.

The finalized settings are pictured with the final render below. I hope this helps a few people. I know it helped my by typing it all out!

[monstermaker]

Thanks for the info. Nice of you to share. I think I asked you in a reply in my thread that took me so long to type that it logged me out , are you the same voodoo dad from CHFB?

[voodoodad]

Thanks for the info. Nice of you to share. I think I asked you in a reply in my thread that took me so long to type that it logged me out , are you the same voodoo dad from CHFB?

Hey Rick, not a problem at all. I'm happy to share what little knowledge I have regarding Zbrush any time! Regarding CHFB, unfortunately that's not me considering I had to google it just to find out what it was, but it looks like a site that was designed with my interests at heart, so I'll have to look into it! Thanks for your comments.

Gary (aka voodoodad)

[truubluu]

Hey Rick, not a problem at all. I'm happy to share what little knowledge I have regarding Zbrush any time! Regarding CHFB, unfortunately that's not me considering I had to google it just to find out what it was, but it looks like a site that was designed with my interests at heart, so I'll have to look into it! Thanks for your comments.

Gary (aka voodoodad)

Hey Gary, just wanted to say thanks a bunch for the info. It is absolutely greatly appreciated. Keep up the great work.