The field

Started by helentr, March 19, 2007, 01:11:29 AM

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helentr

I thought I would post this image. I don't like the snow, but I think I would need a World Machine terrain with snow in the flow map. I also thought of adding a variation of trees, but this poplar is the only one of the Arbaro trees so far, that I have added leaf and trunk image maps. Need to get a camera and take some tree photos.
No postwork.

Helen

dhavalmistry

The texturing in the background appears to be dull...nice image overall
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old_blaggard

Your foreground looks really nice, but I think your background could have been a bit more interesting.
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rcallicotte

I like the foreground detail and beauty.  The trees are okay, but I would expect them to be bunched in a few groves rather than separated like that.  This is how they usually (not always) grow - bunched together.  The background is beautiful and I expect the clouds to be less spongy with more fluff...lighter.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

sonshine777

Great starter scene! Your POV is great and the general layout of the scene is solid.

First of all which type of slope are you using for your snow layer? It looks like you
used "Limit maximum slope" you might try using "Limit minimum slope" slope angle=15
fuzzy zone=15, leave your altitude setting as they are.

I agree about more tree and when you get some more trees mapped and ready to use
it will help also.

The only thing I would change about the foreground would be some fake stones and don't make the
ground green, let the grass do that for you. You may need to increase the density of your grass a little.

This is definitely a scene to continue working on. :)

nvseal

I completely agree with sonshine, there is a lot of potential in this image. A little fine tuning and you should have a really great render.

helentr

Wow, I came back and found all your comments. Thank you.
Let's see if I can answer them all.

The background - the mountains mainly: I agree, it could be made more interesting, as I didn't do much for it, except for making the ground much darker, as it was too light - plus a "snow" and "grass" layer.

The snow: Limiting minimum slope is an interesting idea. I had a fractal, but it gave the snow a salt-and-pepper-look, so I gave it a coverage of 1, but still have maximum slope. The snow I have seen (and it's not a lot) was covering the "flow" routes much more than level ground - that's why I thought of World Machine. Except that this is a power fractal which is good for fields and planes. I did read somewhere in these forums that there is a way to save a TER from a power fractal, but it looked too involved. I will probably try that, just to import the flow map.

Fake stones: I had them and removed them, as all my texturing attempts resulted in their looking like almonds in the shell. Plus, I couldn't find a way to stop the "grass clumps" (the inbuilt ones) from growing on the stones. I have managed to "tame" other objects' distribution with masks, but the grass clump eludes me. The scene still has the very small fake stones - if you take away some of the grass, they can be seen.

Clouds: I like the cirrus and low level clouds better, as they are easier to look good. I found the mid level ones too noisy with lots of small wisps and did not use them much at first, so it is probably lack of practice. These use two density fractals merged in multiply mode (I tried subtracting, but it seemed to increase the cloud cover). The large scale one to control their general shape and the small one to give them details. I think the main problem lies with the large fractal, as it does not give them the shape I had in mind. The clip file I attach is another attempt with the same general idea. It needs more work.

Trees: I have no idea how to make the trees grow in bunches, except by using even more image masks or fractals and distribution shaders. As it is, my shader area of the nodes looks a mess (and should get worse, when I add more trees). Of course, that is not to say I have any objection to that, just that I am afraid I will reach a point, where the scene will crash Terragen, as I have 1 Gb of memory and the present scene (together with Windows), brings the total memory use to 1.2 Gb.

Also, in this image I used an old Terragen trick to increase the contrast and saturation: decreasing gamma and increasing sun strength, plus decreasing the bluesky saturation, because it becomes too intense.

Helen

rcallicotte

#7
helentr, about the trees - I was thinking of just making smaller groups of tree populations, so you have the same or smaller number of trees but in more populations and perhaps closer together.  Nothing fancy, but I don't know what that might do to RAM requirements.  I really like the scene and you've put thought into it.  Sometimes I like setting something aside for awhile and coming back.   It looks clearer and sometimes much more clearer than I remembered.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Dark Fire

The vegetation in that render is possibly the best vegetation I've ever seen come out of T2TP. It's a shame I can't render desktop-sized images like that... :'(

bigben

Hi Helen

If your RAM is tight, given the nature of your scene you could use an image mask to restrict your objects to just your camera view. Trees out of frame still count in the polygon count for your render. I'm not sure what quality setting you're using in your population, but if you're using the highest quality you could possibly drop that back one level as well to free up some more memory.

...and unless you're close enough to actualy see the leaf texture, I wouldn't worry about not having an image for leaf or bark textures. Surface shaders providing variations across leaves actually look more realistic from a distance than a cloned image.  Different tree shapes may be more helpful than just more trees.

The Arbaro trees do look nice and it's certainly one of the easiest tree generators to use, but it can have a high poly count (just exported the willow at 38Mb... 500,000 faces) I'll be playing with Arbaro later to see if I can get a decent eucalypt, all of the one's I've seen are too neat.