[Asmithey]

Hello,

I have a project that is being superimposed into an aerial photo. I am trying to get my trees to look like the trees in the photo. It is an early evening render. I can not get my trees to have the dark shadows and the bright high lights that the trees in the photo show.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Here is a view of part of the rendering...The tress with the dots around them is what I am trying to achieve




Here is my SSS set up for the pine tress with the question mark....

[clemens_at]

i would not use sss for the pines.

[Asmithey]

I just can not achieve the strong dark contrast and bright highlights on the leaf materials to replicate the look of the real trees leaves in the photo. Does anyone know how to set up a material to achieve this?

[AlexP]

It's because Maxwell sun/sky proportion is somewhat broken. To replicate almost natural sun intensity I set sky to about 0.15 and usually don't change sun or set it to 2. I've reported that 2 years ago but NL team didn't care.
Just take a look how shallow M-R shadows are compared to photo
Then you have to apply some contrast/brightness to replicate camera response curve.

[Asmithey]

I tried with out SSS. It still did not look any better. I will try messing with the sky illumination.

[ababak]

I'd also try without SSS. The shadows from the cars look sharp enough, I think this illumination should work. Could you show the non-SSS material you tried?

[jc4d]

I would dare to say that it´s because the pines are not dense enough so there is not so much room to create contrast between the needles and empty space, try with one tree first to see.

Cheers,
JC

[seghier]

what is the density of the leaves ? can you show the tree ?
this is from a render i did it ; the density of the leaves is important

[Asmithey]

Andrey,

I am using a shadow pass to enhance the contrast and color of the shadows to match the photo. The shadows on the ground from the cars and such were very light and yellowish from the raw rendering.

It could be a density issue that I am not getting the contrast and highlights.

Here is my Photoshop hack with the trees...

[tokiop]

Nice result, the light and colors are quite believable !

The shadow angle could match better the photo's, they seem more perpendicular to the road.

[Asmithey]

Yeah...The shadows are off. I have to re-render it anyway. This is not the completed render. Only progress. But the strange thing is that I used the file info from the camera data, proper lat. and long. and GMT and time of day. So I am not sure why the sun angle is off. I will have to play with it some more.

Thanks for the feed back.

Aaron

[seghier]

what is the radius of the sun ?

[Asmithey]

default settings on the sun....

I just found out the camera data was wrong due incorrect daylight savings time setting...So now the shadows align with the photo.

Thanks

[seghier]

it's better if you increase the sun radius

[AlexP]

I will try messing with the sky illumination.

Try it with multilight (just set 0.15 there), most probably even white balance will match a lot better. Change photo WB to 6500 (if you have RAW of course), and Maxwell to 6500 too.