Garden Illustration - Onyx to the max. (new images)

[re:FORM]

Here's my latest piece using onyx and vray. The client wanted a painterly style so some images have been filtered in PS. Toon version rendered using vray toon with matt objects so I could overlay the lines on a PS filtered render in post. I've included a crop of the base render for reference (high levels of noise due to time constraints and the knowledge it was going to get blurred out anyway) . I'm most pleased with how the ground map turned out; painted in photoshop at 8000px high.




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[nvanherpt]

hey cool! v nice style.

[tct70]

Very nice indeed................particularly like the material under the seating/table.

[Jean-Brad]

waoo quite nice
very stylish

[Candelero]

I don't know what's in there ... but it has some very nice feeling.
Like a colour page of a fairy-tale. Bravos !

Best regards,
nikki Candelero

[alexthg]

it's sooooo refreshing!

[Dynedain]

Very nice, I love the style!

Would you mind posting (in the cropped closeup format) the different passes you got out of max and the final image? I'm having a hard time determinig which is the final, and what was comped to get to it.

[re:FORM]

Thanks for all your compliments!

Its actually a fairly simple setup. The different crops above are:-

1: Final image
2: Crop of Final Image
3: Experimental - standard RGB into photoshop. Layer 1 = RGB render, Layer 2 = RGB - Filtered (blur or some artistic effect; watercolour, sponge, etc) as screen or overlay or some other blend type. Vray toon rendered from the same model, but all materials changed to matt, so the output is black lines on white. Placed over the layers mentioned previously.
4: The RGB render before any post work.

The final render was, if memory serves me, 2 or 3 copies of the base render layered up in photoshop using different filters, and blending modes.
I also selected by colour to select the highlights (ie the sun on the stone scultpure) and did some blurs on the highlights. (ie select by colour, isolate the highlights, copy, paste into two new layers, blur 1pixel with the first copy, blur 20px with the second. Set both highlight layers to screen mode and adjust opacity to suit.)

If you can understand any of that babble, I salute you!

One thing I really like about the way the toon version came out, is that it began to look like those 1980's horticulture book illustrations..... the problem was that in areas of dense leaves or grass, the toon shader ended up rendering solid black, so I had to go into photoshop and make a scatter brush to loosely delete parts of the black blocks.

[DaForce]

Thats really cool.

And definitly a refreshing change.

Well done!!

[jow]

Im liking this Nice work dude.
I think im now sold on the Onyx idea. Are these models all standard ones that come in the package or have you modelled them yourself?

[re:FORM]

Onyx comes as a package of different plant generators; conifer, flat-leaf, bamboo, flower. Each one comes with a pack of presets based on real plants, with the correct latin names.

The parameters to adjust the modelling of the tree are, how can I put it, hardcore! There must be over 100 things that you can tweak to get the tree looking the way you want. So.... it does have a steep learning curve if you need to build trees that dont match any of the presets. Having said that, its not to hard to start of with something similar, and then adjust the parameters to suit. The presets are all pretty good too.

This scene required quite alot of custom models that I based on photos provided by the client, and from images on the web that I found after looking up the latin names specified in the plant-schedule. Most were converted to vraymesh.... so I'm not sure what the total polycount was.

[jow]

Thank for the info.
Ya I know what you mean by hardcore, im a Xfrog 3.5 user. Same sort of thing, 100's parameters to get your head round!!!
The one thing i like about Onyx is the ease to randomize a plant, this is something xfrog lacks.
With Xfrog you have to go thru all of the param's to change the look of a plant, but i believe with Onyx it's just a case of a click of a button.

[Dynedain]

Thanks for posting the explanation... I actually did understand it


I'd love to be able to do something like this for our landscape design studio... they'd go nuts over it I think.

Again, great job!

[Adam H. Stewart]

Weaveworld

Very Very nice - I particularly like the first image - have you ever heard of Clive Barker book called Weaveworld ? - it's the story of an entire World woven into a carpet for it's own protection - well the first image reminds me of that - a stylized woven landscape coming to life - very nice indeed.

[re:FORM]

Thanks again guys.

Dynedain : If you ever need me to do anything like that for your landscape studio.... you know where to come My rates are reasonable and I am willing to travel. hehe

Adam : It rings a bell somewhere.... but what you wrote really reminded me of a tune on a coldcut vs Krush mix album all about a 'bug in a rug' that was totally unaware of how beautiful the rug was that it lived in.... a nice alegory of our view of the world, and a brilliant tune