Overcast Weather -> V2 (16-08-2010)

[FrankB]

Great image Martin, very good!

[Kadri]

Realy? Hmm...interesting . I obviously didn't know this
I will look further in what way and quality they do this.
I didn't looked at the vue renders from this perspective until now .
Thanks for the tip, Martin

[Henry Blewer]

 The sky being white distracts me. I think I would have made it a little more gray. It's my only complaint. Everything else is brilliant!

[RArcher]

Hmmm.. Interesting, I think it is far more realistic that with this type of lighting the sky would be a completely blown out white unless there were some very dark storm clouds. This is looking at it from a non-hdr photographic perspective anyway.

[Walli]

well, but many Vue trees are ugly ;-).
There are great ones and indeed it helps if you get some automatic variations - but for examples the leaves all look the same too. Usually they don´t have single leaves, only the really highres Vue trees have those. The others have complete clusters which look exactly the same from tree to tree. And some of the automatic variations look really bad. Still I like that idea and I would love to see something like that in TG.

But one thing is indeed much easier in Vue - if I have a set of lets say 5 or six oak trees, in TG i have to setup 6 populations - In Vue it an be done with one. I would love to have such a feature in TG.

[Henry Blewer]

In Vista Pro 3 and 4 they had L-system based trees. They looked okay from a distance. If image maps and textures could be added to them they would have looked much better.
The version of World Construction Set I had also had L-system based trees. These were better than Vista Pro's, but had the same problem.
Anyway, I am still curious what the new release of T2 will have. Btween that and the new Civilization 5, I am quite possibly very excited.    I do appreciate that Planetside works so hard to iron out the bugs before releasing software. It shows craftmanship in programing (not to mention class).

[Dune]

If the XFrog artists would use 5 or so different leaves instead of 1, and spread them unevenly, it would benefit a tree greatly. It wouldn't cost much more memory I guess. I have to keep this in mind myself. Perhaps, and I'm thinking aloud, by using an image map projection onto the pop (in the way of color varying a pop), attached to the opacity there is a way to 'partly delete' certain leaves.....

By the way, Martin, great image, but especially so close to the foliage it is hard to conceal the repetitititiveness.

[Walli]

Some Xfrog artists do this ;-)

What is much more important: it would be great if you could procedurally alter a bitmap. In Cinema I can use all kind of procedural noises or other effects to change for example the color of a bitmap.

[Hetzen]

Getting fractals into object textures would be pretty bloody awesome.

Martin, I love the flat lighting. Overcast diffuse lighting is a very hard thing to get right. Well done.

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks Jon

Here's a slightly different version, say V2:

[Tangled-Universe]

And the link to a higher-res version:
http://tangled-universe.deviantart.com/#/d2wk4ml (click on the image to see it full-size)

[dandelO]

The light is dancing!

A stunner, Martin!

[Dune]

Another great image, Martin. But I still think the leaves of the big oak are too identical. And that's a pity of an otherwise very fine image. I especially love the grass. Another thing I just noticed and came to think about is the specularity of the leaves. If a leaf has a certain specularity, the whole leaf reflects the same (if it's on the same angle), and adds to the repetitiveness. It would be good (and probably possible) to break up the specularity of those leaves into fractalized parts, by adding some small scale (+larger scale) PF into the object. In the specularity function perhaps, I have to see what can be done.

[Tangled-Universe]

Another great image, Martin. But I still think the leaves of the big oak are too identical. And that's a pity of an otherwise very fine image. I especially love the grass. Another thing I just noticed and came to think about is the specularity of the leaves. If a leaf has a certain specularity, the whole leaf reflects the same (if it's on the same angle), and adds to the repetitiveness. It would be good (and probably possible) to break up the specularity of those leaves into fractalized parts, by adding some small scale (+larger scale) PF into the object. In the specularity function perhaps, I have to see what can be done.

*sigh* I know about those leafs and their identical-ness Again, I'm not a modeller so I can't help this.

This version only has improved render-settings in regard to AA. I decreased the populations'  size to reduce memory and most important, I changed the composition a bit like Ryan suggested. It looks better now. I also like the fact that there's more transition of light throughout the tree.

I'm very confused by the fact that TG2 still isn't able to read opacity maps with greyscales and as far as I know also no greyscale maps for the reflectivity/specular function. So I wonder why a greyscale fractal would work.
It must work of course, otherwise it would be extremely stupid to implement without fixing the greyscale mapping issue.

Anyhow, I think you have a good point there and will investigate what I can do about it.
If you're already on to it and progressing with this then please let me know. Perhaps we can figure this both out in the best way

Martin

[Dune]

I've done a little testing and will post now in another thread (specular stuff) , not wanting to hijack your thread.