Leaf WIP

[bigben]

There's a lot to fix up, but I thought I'd post it anyway.  The angle of the sun is mainly to test the reflectivity and translucency of my grass and tree leaves. The grass is too reflective/smooth and the leaves on the tree could have both increased. The bark also needs something, but this is the first render where I've seen the tree base up close.

This my first render with non-default lighting... needs work    I may have to fix the lighting first before judging the silhouetted grass in the foreground, or at least put in a rock sticking above the grass so I can compare the shadows on a surface.

[fmtoffolo]

Hey! nice pic! I really like the grass, it has a windy movement to it.
The tree looks ok. Maybe the leaves can be more transparent and the trunk can have a nicer texture(mainly because the camera is quite close).

The atmo is ok for me.

But overallvery nice work! keep it up!

[old_blaggard]

I agree that the grass's patterns look great.  I feel that the grass's specularity is too high, personally.

[bigben]

It's way too high. I stuck my head out the window while driving into the sun yesterday to check out the grass reflections    It's a toss up between increasing the roughness/decreasing intensity or unchecking specular highlights.

Not sure what happened to the bark texture. I'll have to check that one tonight.

I stuck the tree deliberately higher to expose the roots, so I have a little more room left to make the grass a touch longer. Render time was 21 hours, of which about 1/2 was the tree (actually 2 trees rotated at 180° to each other)

[rcallicotte]

Wow.  I like it.  The tree bark isn't showing its true texture, is it?

[ramblerette]

 well,the image is nice but   the tree does't seem a real tree.it seems  not growing ......not...stuck in the earth......

[bigben]

I checked the link to the bark texture and it was OK... checked its size and it should have been OK.  I replaced it with a few surface layers with a bit of displacement to make it less smooth, but these still need a little tweaking.

Killed GI and added Oshyan's fill lights, although I found the extra leaf shadows a little odd.
[attachthumb=#1]

Played around with the reflection settings a little more for the leaves. (via a reflective shader, extra options to default shader)

Specular highlights - required (changed to use Legacy)
Ray-traced reflections - required
Reflection softness... definitely 0 (adds a lot of render time if >0, 11 minutes for 1 blade of grass)
Intensity and roughness left to tweak...

A little hard to judge without a background, but here's a partial render of the tree (40 minutes).
[attachthumb=#2]

The bark displacement needs to be somewhere between these two. I may also have toned down the colour function (provides shading on the leaves including a shadow between overlapping leaves) but I'll have to get in closer to check this later. The combination of reflectivity and translucency seem to be the biggest factors in getting the leaves right.

[Dark Fire]

Hey! nice pic! I really like the grass, it has a windy movement to it.
The tree looks ok. Maybe the leaves can be more transparent and the trunk can have a nicer texture(mainly because the camera is quite close).

The atmo is ok for me.

But overallvery nice work! keep it up!

I agree that the grass's patterns look great.  I feel that the grass's specularity is too high, personally.

I think that if the problems discussed above are solved, this would be a really great image!

[bigben]

I was working on my leaf tests last night as well and I'm getting close to finally being happy with my replacement surfaces. I'm also working on yet another fake grass shader based on the same surfacing I use for my grass objects. The render was still going when I got off the train, but it's looking promising (and simple)

[attachimg=#1]

I tried using lambert and reflective shaders but I must have been doing things in the wrong order so I went back to using the settings in the default shader for now.  The only part of the tree that shows the original image map are the leaf stems. The leaves have been completely resurfaced with shaders, with some shading being applied by using a modified greayscale image of the leaf as a colour function.  I just have a bit of tweaking of the fractal breakups left before heading off to try and produce a shader that will apply colour to leaves at a tree level rather than just individual leaves. I'll get the scaling from some of my previous tests where I paid more attention to them first.

The bark could also probably use some tweaking but I haven't looked that closely at it yet. From this distance the displacements and shading look a lot better than the flat surfaces I had before.

[rcallicotte]

I don't think it's you.  The lambert shader needs work by the Planetside programmers yet, though I like the perspective.

[bigben]

Thanks for that. I might try just the reflective shader on its own then. There are some additional controls in this compared to the default shader which may be helpful in certain lighting situations.

[DiscoBall]

Man you are one awesome Terragen modeller

[Dark Fire]

Great perspective!

[bigben]

My problems with the lambert and reflective shaders were largely due to my lack of understanding. I stopped to think about it for a while and I think I've made sense of the settings.

Struggled for a little with my colour map adjustment node before giving up on doing all of the adjustments to the image in TG and producing an initial modified image that can be tweaked later in TG. In most of the images that I didn't like, there were parts of the leaves that were too dark and too desaturated. To avoid this I calculated the minimum "apply colour" value for the leaf colour using a surface shader (set base colour, play with apply colour slider, read number at the darkest colour), and multiplied that by 255 to give a minimum pixel value for the greyscale image used (12). 

I'm pretty happy with the result (larger render attached or full render here ). My main concerns now are just related to the leaf surface being flat, but there's nothing I can do about that with this model. You'll notice that some of the leaves at the bottom of the canopy are reflecting the sky (which is good) and the whole leaf has a uniform reflection applied across it (which looks odd).

The leaves in the top right best show the result of the shading from using the grayscale leaf image as a colour function.

Here's a screengrab of my basic leaf node setup.
[attachthumb=#1]

Now all I have to do is add in an autumn leaf shader for animation purposes (just a duplicate of the Base colour node and child surfaces with different colours and fractal seeds)... and then tweak the displacement on the bark.

[Oshyan]

Very nice work. Sounds like you're aiming for a "Four Seasons in One Day Part 2" here.

- Oshyan