A Woodland Meeting

[cyphyr]

Just finished this one whilst avoiding all the other projects I've gotten embroiled in! LOL
Took over 24 hours to render (+ half an hour on the depth pass!)
Models from XFrog and myself (the grasses)
Render settings at 1600x900: 0.7, 6, 3, 2

I'm "mmm ok" with the result, a bit of "whimsy" really Its all a bit symmetrical especially with the buck in the centre (maybe I should add some cross hairs!)

I was of course trying to get the rays of light beaming through the trees but that's so hit and miss. Its not too hard with the sun in view (in front of the camera) but with the sun to the side or behind the camera its seems much more problematic. I even tried taking "detail in camera" up to 2 to no effect. Any suggestions?

C&C very welcome

Richard

[RArcher]

The foreground is some of the most realistic I have seen done, great work!  The rocks and the buck I'm not loving though.  The rocks scaled down a bit and maybe shuffled a little further back into the scene in a more natural looking way might help.  Only other suggestion would be to put a new bark texture on the xfrog tree models, particularly the one on the left hand side seems pretty smooth.

[domdib]

Mmm, I agree partly with Ryan - those rocks are very "characterful", and as such draw attention away from the buck. If you still want the buck to be emerging from behind a rock, I'd suggest a smoother one, perhaps a bit further back. The vegetation is excellent.

[inkydigit]

I echo the above, excellent work all the same, awesome vegetation!

[Henry Blewer]

The plants are really well worked. I kind of like the fact that the rock obscures the buck. Deer tend to shy away if you get too close. I am not so sure about the rocks texture. Seems like coral. I would smooth it out.

[cyphyr]

Thanks guys
The rocks are the real problem with this image. I made them up as uv mapped obj's a while back but the images never really worked, never quite "rock" enough.
I have some ideas and a few hours b4 I'm off for the weekend, maybe I can come up with a solution and have another render
Richard

[Kadri]

Nice image , Richard 
Good suggestions here! Can i ask why you didn't try a fake stone( with masks etc. if needed)?

[Oshyan]

I actually like the rocks a lot, although I guess we can see a texture seam, and agreed they might not be totally appropriate for this environment (great on a beach though). The populations are also wonderfully complex and well executed. The lighting as well is quite nice. In reality rays are not that frequent either, but if you duplicate real-life ray scenarios in TG2, it should react much the same. You probably didn't need the Detail Region Padding so high, though it may have helped a little in your goal (hopefully you didn't end up actually rendering with it at 2, though that would explain the very long render time).

The DoF also seems a bit unrealistic, though that may be down to the mask.

- Oshyan

[MGebhart]

Nice work, Richard.

[Dune]

I totally agree with the suggestions made; change the rocks (they're awfull, sorry), or leave them out altogether. Is the buck a model or a plane+image? The grass is fantastic, as is the backdrop.

[cyphyr]

Thanks guys
I do agree about the rocks but I've never managed to satisfactory results with the rock object (even with the no. of sides up in the thousands), for some reason it will not displace, it only reacts as a bump map
The deer is an old model from Daz, could do with a little more work but its ok I think.
The DoF is too much, too little, too deep not deep enough?? I usually see DoF way too exagerated and have tried to keep it to a minimum here. When I do the next one I'll try one with less radius and depth.
The issue with rays in an image like this seems to be that whereas in reality unilluminated particals are almost completely invisable in terragen they are visiable. Just using the atmosphere is unlikely to give enough density so a cloud layer is used at camera level (20-30m thick). It would be great to figure out a way for the "particals" in the cloud layer to show up when illuminated and be completely invisable when in a cast shadow.

Richard

[Henry Blewer]

If you want to displace the rocks, turn off the raytrace for objects. The raytrace  for objects deos a bump mapping. The displacements have to be done using the old version method.

[Hetzen]

Love the population Richard, dense, varied and very natural. Your deer model if it wasn't centre frame actually looks quite natural. And I don't mind the walnut shell stones, they're interesting. Thing with DOF, is toning it right, so that it doesn't look as if you're looking at a model railway. I don't think you're far off. I'd like to see this with a little less blur.

[cyphyr]

Ah I think I remember now why I had abandoned an earlier version of this scene.

If you want to displace the rocks, turn off the raytrace for objects.

Yep this works a charm and I'm able to create much more interesting and "realistic" rocks this way (using tg's procedurals) ...
BUT ...
now I have to set all the object populations set to "Very High Quality", and with 18 populations (so far) this is begining to slow down the render times ...
I guess I can't have ray trace objects turned off for just the rocks then ... 
Its just a static image so I could render a "rock pass" and comp that in post.
cheers
Richard

[Henry Blewer]

This would be a great time to have multilayer rendering.