Ice Age

[Dune]

Thanks for your comments and pictures, guys. The pictures are amazing, especially the second one. Must have been a great trip!
I might try another sort of lighting, after I've conquered my wall of ice. This latest iteration quite pleases me, so I made it in B&W. I always liked Black&White photography more than color (I still have boxes full of negatives dusting away). Gives more drama.

[Dune]

And in color, no postwork.

[inkydigit]

perfect!
love the foreground snow details too!

[Henry Blewer]

You were right to include the trees. As always your work is very impressive. I think you have nailed this one now.

[Oshyan]

The latest one is very nice indeed. That glacier surfacing is pretty much photorealistic, particularly in black and white. Very impressive. I like the new camera perspective too, with the grass and whatnot. I do however wish for a little greater sense of size from the glacier, maybe a closer perspective looking a bit upward, with a vertical frame instead of horizontal ("widescreen")? I know, big changes to what you've been doing, but I think it could make for a more "epic" shot. You have all of the scenery worked out at the least, now IMO it's just a matter of finding the right perspective and getting the lighting dialed in.

- Oshyan

[Zairyn Arsyn]

i'm nearly speechless Dune, 
they look perfect,the last two, they look really good, realistic.

[choronr]

This last image Ulco is what I think most all of us have waiting for. It delivers a close render of realism. Our individual tastes can wish for different things; but as is, I believe you have achieved your goal. 

[Dune]

I'm not finished yet. Here's a totally different approach, now the distance shader masks have been replaced by a perlin 'blob' blended by high contrast immense ridges + a simple shape for the basic shape. Added some high contrast ridges (unclamped) as vertical displacements in a redirect shader + some more small perlin for detailed blobs. And some things I cannot remember. The light is not as good as in another discarded render I did yesterday, and the ground is still totally raw, but I like the icy glacier so far.

I'll try a vertical render in the last one, Oshyan.

[Naoo]

Hi

It's nice to see how you get better and better.


ciao
Naoo

[otakar]

Both of the last two renders are great, but quite different. I like the Nov9 one - no I love it, but looking at the foreground makes me a bit dizzy because of the blur. The glacier and lighting is simply fantastic.

[Dune]

Here's some more renders from the last setup.

[Oshyan]

You have really nailed the "ice" shader setup Dune. You might consider selling it on the NWDA community store!

- Oshyan

[Dune]

Thanks, Oshyan, but I can't really do that. It wasn't entirely mine. Actually, Ryan gave us his tgc for old ice. I modified things and added snow, but the idea to use a default shader with its translucency and such was his. It's quite simple in fact, just add the snow over the old ice tgc with a surface layer with restricted angle. The terrain is just a large displacement, blended by another and a simple shape to get a huge blob. Then add some redirect with unclamped fractals (much contrast, shove it towards black) until you got some cracks, oh yes, and I did indeed add some voronoi cracks.

Something else I had forgotten:

So if I have a surface shader with some displacements after the last compute terrain, it will not be considered by a distri shader? I don't attach anything to the distri input, by the way, it's 'hanging loose at the blend end'.
Perhaps you could show a part of your network to show what you mean? I think I don't understand?

Here's a screendump of my 'loose hanging' distribution shader setup. It's not supposed to get any input, does it? It just reads it from the last (?) surface shader?

[Oshyan]

Then share it for free, even better.

- Oshyan

[mhaze]

stunning work