Artlantis 3 problems with views and postcards.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I want to render a plan view of my site which is 70% grass and trees. It will be a parallel view so shading is needed to add depth to the trees etc.

I've added a postcard (default) onto the lawn but nothing appears to change when I render it. Also, when I select the parallel view, my render/view window is completely blank. I don't see anything in the camera view dialog nor when I pan around.

I'm very new to Artlantis and any help is greatly appreciated... deadline tomorrow

Thank You

Not that the attached is for reference, I hope to use a parallel view when I find out why it's not working for me.

[Karl Ottenstein]

NStocks wrote:
I got it working! I think the parallels didn't show anything because none of the layers were turned on...

I've rendered, again the grass looks very poor, I've used the dafault lawn postcards...

Glad you got it! (I was typing while you were posting.)

Even the best grass texture cannot look like grass at that altitude.

For normal scene grass, you can blend textures using opacity to hide the tiling lines, and there are some fantastic free 3D grass objects from ArchiRadar.

But at that distance, you might be better off creating your own "grass" concept by creating something abstract in Photoshop - subtly blurring large patches of green and yellow/brown/whatever , blurring them, and then adding noise as if you were paining the illustration. Apply that texture to your terrain.

Cheers,
Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

Here is an image showing the Archiradar grass objects. This is just a fake scene I made during beta testing of Artlantis 3 using standard objects and shaders, such as the water shader, dynamic clouds (shown in window reflections), etc.

The pond itself is a sundial, with pavers on the outside marking time. 😉

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

Ok here's what the result is... The grass isn't very good but overall I'm fairly happy with it. The main part I like about artlantis is that everything is 'live' like you see changed immediately i.e sun light, material texture. Also the sky always looks realistic to me. (but sometimes I get a black line between the ground and the sky which I has to edit in Phostshop... how do I move the sky 'down' to meet the ground without moving the perspective camera?)

Thank you very much for your help, next project is urban based (near a train station in a busy city) there there should be plenty of options for rendering there!

Feedback is very welcome, I know it's not perfect but its my first attempt.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Off to a good start for your crash course beginning with Artlantis. Ignoring composition and the story being told, you've no doubt noticed a few things right away about your image, I'm sure:

1. Bad tiling pattern/repeat for the gravel (?) in the foreground

2. Light color / uninteresting pattern for the grass in the background

3. Strange dark line at the horizon

4. Washed out, and uninteresting texture on the wood framing in the foreground

The over-exposure of the sunlit surfaces is due to your settings for the power of the sun and sky. It looks like you set your sky illumination high to avoid dark shadows (and good to see blue-ish shadows). If you want hard edges as shown, then bring down the sun power/etc. Or, change your sun shadow casting to a softer setting and adjust sun/sky power as needed.

There is a setting that lets the auto-generated clouds affect sun power/shadows. That can result in an improvement some times. Try it.

For (1) and (2), I saw that you posted a question on the Artlantis forums and the folks there gave you the correct solution - just looks like you did not implement it? You need to adjust the material response to light, but most important is a combination of multiple quality textures with differing opacity settings so that each is visible as a blend, but with one rotated differently from the other so that the tiling/repeat is in different directions. Also, as suggested on the Artlantis forums, you may need to adjust your bump settings (which will slow down the render though).

For (3), the dark line at the horizon is no doubt because you did not insert the infinite ground plane in the scene inspector. Press cmd-I (ctrl-I) and add the ground plane, clicking on your lawn to set the height and then applying your grass teture to it.

Even with that, it will look odd going off infinitely to the distance, a quick fix is to insert fog way in the distance and low to the ground, and using either a grass green or sky blue color. This creates a band of diffuse color which makes the sky and the ground blend together like a gradient fill. It will still not look natural, but it is a quick fix for prelims. If the real image needs this viewpoint, then you need to place curved wall in the distance upon which you place an alpha mapped (transparent to sky) image that creates the illusion of what is really in the distance. Dwight Atkinson gives many examples of this on these forums (cyclorama) and in his books.

For (4) you need either a different texture if you want the woodgrain to show, or you just need to add some noise so that the surface does not look so clean. (Ditto the very cool leaf structures above.)

HTH,
Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

A cyclorama, as presented by Dwight, is a circular wall with an alpha-mapped texture applied which creates the 'stage' for your model, which sits in the center of the space created by the wall.

For the same beta test model in the last screenshot I posted, I stood on a sports field on campus where I was going to model my imaginary beta set of buildings and made a 360 degree panorama photo by stitching together individual frames. It turns out that applying such a large texture does not work. Instead of mapping to an Artlantis cylinder, I had to model two separate walls, each 180 degrees of a circle, and map half of the pano image to each.

Here's the image I took representing the south 180 degrees of my 'site'. Shrunk for posting of course. I hand brushed an alpha channel that erases all of the sky in the image in Artlantis - so that the Artlantis sky will show through, leaving just the profiles of the mountains, trees, buidlings and signage...

[Karl Ottenstein]

And here it is seen in a scene. Again, this was just a beta testing model, and I wasn't concerned about making the grass or anything look particularly great here - just needed a populated scene for feature/bug testing. Presenting it here just as a demonstration of a technique.

Notice that the clouds in the sky are Artlantis-generated by the slider controls - and they merge nicely down to the mountain ridges in the distance.

Cheers,
Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

Here is an example of the distant-fog trick to mask where the infinite ground plane meets the sky.

This image was from a workshop design charette, so again was not supposed to be great.

I brought in the site and mountains that were in the viewshed via Google Earth as part of the 3D model to accurately geo-locate things, but had an ugly gap between the start of the Google mountains and the infinite ground plane. I used the Artlantis fog settings to create a green haze in the distance to hide that so it wouldn't be distracting. (The only goal of the model was to be able to play with the house and viewsheds vs sun angles for solar energy. The darker grass represents the buildable area of the lot.)

Karl

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your feedback Karl,

Yes I realise that the gravel is tiled, this is because I didn't change much in Artlantis (I was against time, aren't we all!) I applied texture to the grass, but perhaps I didn't increase the bump enough or I didn't layer enough images, as suggested in the Artnatis forum. Also the grass area is huge and Ididn't use a image that filled the complete area whch meant it was stretched which then increased the blade size, which then meant it looked unrealistic

The black line was a photoshop result, as I had to photoshop sky because I didn't select the infinite ground plane


Regarding your latest post, I have already taken a panorama of the site, perhaps I should post it as well... the site itself is an empty field, of which is to become a 'natural burial' with an area for the local commonity and farmland. Is this why the composition looks poor? Should I have chose a different angle or something?

I have another day or two until the next project starts, so I should improve my artlantis skills in readyness for the next deadline (8 weeks)

Thank you for your feedback, I apologise if it looks like I'm ignoring other adivce, this is not the case... technical dificulties at Uni meant my time was even more limited so it was a somewhat 'rush job'.

I look forward to correcting and learning artlantis and I can see great possibilities in this and I forsee that my preference for rendering will be artlantis...

[Karl Ottenstein]

You're welcome. And, I sympathize with the demands on student's time!

It would be interesting to see your site panorama. Others here are better qualified than me to suggest better views of the project. But, I always go with Dwight's advice to think about what story you are trying to tell, and to 'think like a photographer'...

Cheers,
Karl

[Anonymous]

Here's the Panorama, as you can see there is virtually no context and the sky is blank.

Not sure there can be much done with this Photograph though, and any work carried out on this project won't matter as results cannot be changed/improved but I tend to re-do things to learn more... Plus it's essential for my next project to have good visuals.


Thank You