Hang glide
By Draguu.
Author
Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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First time I saw this I was convinced it was a photo :) really great work once again Pratik :)
That’s because it is a photo … right?
Exactly, I thought it was a photo initially with just the hang glider composed in 3d until I took a closer look. BI is still a decent renderer and I’ll probably use it for current projects due to speed and being comfortable with it to get good solid results. Next year I’ll probably jump to Cycles or perhaps another renderer. Kudos to the artist – nicely done!
Is this blender interial or Cycles?
He said it’s Blender Internal.
You could convince me it was a miniature, but not a regular scene. I read somewhere that this can be caused by using a focal length more like one which you would use for taking pictures of miniatures. I would try different focal lengths to try to make it look realistic. (of course it looks like a REAL picture of a miniature)
Same here. Although I think it’s not just the focal length. Is it something about the trees? I have honestly no idea. I’m looking at it and find nothing that’s wrong, but it’s still just a model.
Maybe the water? The sharpness? The grass material? Can’t say.
What I find stunning, though, are the small landslides at the water’s edge. I’d never think of modelling that type of thing. very cool. If I ever manage anything like this, I’ll brag about it for a long time :)
Well done. I think it is quite amazing considering it was mad in Blender internal. I would love to see it animated, flying along the river.
It definitely has that miniature feel too it. Usually it is a very shallow depth of field that gives that miniature feel. I have fallen victim to it before.
I think it will work better if the foreground glider is out of focus and the rest pretty much in focus.
I think it is the mid-ground tree’s consistent and uniform detail noise(no I don’t mean a noise map). Also the scale of the leaves in the foreground seems a bit off.
It seems to be the size of the ripples of the water that ruined the realism of the scene. It could be easily fixed. I look forward to a fixed version. :)
That too. It is also too uniform.
I will agree with Dewald. It’s the very out of focus BG. Big ripples too. But what trees! I wonder which software you used to create them.
Overall, a very nice scene!
It’s the focal length, trees and water.
The lack of a landing spot doesn’t help the realism.
I’m sure that if you go hang gliding you fly for more than just a hundred yards, so the landing spot’s probably still out of sight. :)
That’s a very nice picture, man. It’s a very nice usage of the Blender Internal renderer, too.
I also thought it was a photo at first. Expanding it, it looks like a miniature. But unless I’d been told, I’d never guess it was modeled. It looks really cool!
Wow.
First, I wonder why a photograph was posted here… Oh, I see, Draguu modeled a hang glider and put it into a photo… [[open larger version]]… OHHHH… Wholy smokes!…
[[jaw drops]] This was all done in Blender!
Scene looks great, love the water and trees, the lighting seems right for the cloudy sky, the shadows in some areas seem to compete for lighting direction .. not sure if that intentional.
Well done!
Looks really cool!
The fact is: who needs CYCLES? More render time? At the end what we need is to produce animations, series, and money ! Who cares if the shadow is not perfect? My vote goes for FASTER RENDER TIME ! This is a proof of Render INTERNAL is great !
We all have a clock in our life ! What we need is to produce faster…make money faster and enjoy our money before we pass away ! So WE NEED FASTER RENDER ENGINES ! Audience likes the content ! The Script….the idea the fun ! A good plotted animation worth millions in comparison with one weak but with good shading ! NO CYCLES !!!!! NO CYCLES !!!!!!
Some people opt for quality through the whole pipeline. I personally love the instant feedback from cycles. Making the whole precess way more intuitive. Of course you need a decent GPU.
You can’t expect to get professional results by rendering animations on a singe outdated Pentium 4.
You can’t have a render farm with an old dying goat.
You have blender internal if it fits the bill. What are you complaining about? Perhaps you should petition on an Opengl renderer if Blender Internal is too slow for you. Why are you hating on Cycles? If you don’t like it don’t use it.
Processing power are becoming cheaper and cheaper also faster and faster. And Cycles are coming more and more into its own.
According to me – and if such a comparison would be relevant – there is for example and at least something Cycles have internal blender renderer doesn’t have, this is the (true) indirect illumination capabilities. For an outdoor scene, I personally found internal renderer easier to use in most of the cases, but for realistic indoor scenes I think that an accurate lightning computation is handy and internal renderer will have pain to make the kind of image cycle is able to do.
Actually, I would say that the 2 render engines are more complementary than concurrent. Moreover, the fact that the 2 render engines can be combined adds freedom in choice: no need to choose exclusively one renderer.
Maybe you made the choice not to use cycles, which might be relevant regarding the context in which you work, but trying to push the idea cycles is useless and must be removed from blender is quite narrow minded from you…
Well the problem is I have heard many times that Cycles will replace Blender Internal eventually. That simple idea makes me hate Cycles, because I would never trade a Fast and Decent Render Engine (as BI) by one more detailed but time consuming ! For some of us speed is our main worry to deliver results right away, for others may be photo-realistic renderings? This would be like eliminating Buffer Shadows and keep Ray Shadows ! I think both should always be available for different creators, same as Cycles and Blender Internal
agree, they shouldn’t stop development of BI, actually right now exactly that is happening, but I don’t think they will delete BI (at least I hope that :) )
Cycles AND Blender Internal make a really good duo!
It’s abivious he uses the davd ward’s tutroial from cg cookie but with more compositing. btw nice work. :)
Stunning. Awesome
My 2cents, which mainly recap several comments:
1. Awesome work.
2. BI is a great tool, though still not on a par with Vray/Mray (at least according to archviz top standards, art is quite another matter).
3. Water is the weakest point in the image (though still impressive by itself).
As an exHangGlider pilot the glider is too clean and he needs to find a place to land real quick, lol.
But great work, awesome to look at.
Awesome work! The minature look is due to the mismatch between the scale of the trees/leaves to the ripples on the water. The trees look too far away or tiny compared to the “creek” sized ripples in the water. If you made the ripples smaller in scale detail, the river would look bigger and would match the trees better I think. Also the rocks could either use more detail to look bigger (without changing their size) or make them physically smaller to match the tree size. Very impressive work! Goes to show that it doesn’t matter what render engine you use, it’s still really all about the artist.
I was more confused by the observers glider which i for some seconds missmatched with a glas/steel structure of a building. And i also was irritated by the upcoming thought “Where will he will land if his glider stalls in a sudden?”. And what i first recognized was the fence as it was the only man made structure in that landscape besides the glider/s of course.
Nice pic.
In rebuttal to many of the comments above, realism is not very interesting visually. There are a lot of things in realism that end up existing solely to achieve the affect of making the viewer believe the image is a photograph. This means adding *arbitrary* visual elements, like random dust, intentionally putting objects in visually boring locations, allowing terrible reflections, and so on.
If you are trying to achieve realism, water on rivers is not constant; there are current areas, rapids, calm pools and other water-depth effects. Also, there is a difference between current waves and wind waves. The plants get smaller as they get closer to the water, and plants in the water are not the same plants. As is, it looks like a flood — specifically a dam burst or non-natural disaster. And the lighting is incorrect on the person hang-gliding. You can have any depth of field you want . . . cameras are not limited any more, so viewers no longer have the expectations that narrow focus ranges mean miniatures.
You are doing some interesting work. I would recommend finding and exploring the ideas and visual elements that you like. What else can become art?
Excellent breakdown of water surface of rivers.
If you add variation on the water surface it will make a big difference. You can achieve this by having a noise with a very big scale and then 2 small scale(one bigger than the other) noises in each channel of the big noise.
I disagree on the depth of field. It is off.
Exactly! While the drive for realism has been the push in 3d rendering for decades, some of the best 3d artwork, like any other artwork, comes down to “I really like what my eyes are seeing”
Oh, and the soil gets sandier towards water, and big rocks end up having softer soil and sand washed away, and sink to sit on other rocks. Boulders near the water have distinct patterns.
Great image, but as others have pointed out, looks like a miniature. That is because of:
– a level of depth of field which would never happen at a real landscape scale (especially the sudden contrast between the closer hills and the further hills, which is totally unnatural)
– the unusually big rocks on the right, which you wouldn’t normally expect in this context – unless someone put them there on purpose, which additionally have too little detail, so they look like huge pebbles
– probably also the large waves, as others have pointed out
Which doesn’t change the fact that the vegetation is amazing, and the overall lighting and composition are great.
Another increadible render, Draguu. There are a few places that could be slightly adjusted (the water materials and the detail on the rocks) but it’s overall another stunner. Thanks for sharing it!