For Frank

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi All,

Made this for Frank
Stepped out of my comfort zone and made a contrasty image hope you like it dude

The basic scene layout is made by Ulco, like masks for roads and farmland and he also made the hills.
Cheers for that Ulco!
Vegetation, some surfacing, field rows and clouds were done by me.

Cheers,
Martin

[Dune]

Where's the tank?  Really nice, Martin.

[TheBadger]

This has some great details! I really like the way the crop field is separated, but the best part of this image is the tree line on the hill, and all of it under those clouds. I swear it looks like home. But I am a little put off by the plants in the very foreground, not by the nature of them, but the render, I think everything is so real that it should look more like a photograph but it is a clearly a render. Is it because of lower settings, or a low light level? It seems TG2 does much much better in brightly lit shots. Anyway, this image is clearly well thought out Martin, and your attention to detail is impressive!

[red_planet]

I really like this !!

Excellent work

[Tangled-Universe]

Thank you everyone.

This has some great details! I really like the way the crop field is separated, but the best part of this image is the tree line on the hill, and all of it under those clouds. I swear it looks like home. But I am a little put off by the plants in the very foreground, not by the nature of them, but the render, I think everything is so real that it should look more like a photograph but it is a clearly a render. Is it because of lower settings, or a low light level? It seems TG2 does much much better in brightly lit shots. Anyway, this image is clearly well thought out Martin, and your attention to detail is impressive!

Thanks again, especially for the constructive comment.

Actually I'm not very keen on the distant trees, as they appear a bit flat because the texture settings aren't working very well for this type of lighting.
I think it depends on how you perceive the image and compare areas of the image with eachother.
Considering you like the background trees you'd expect less contrast and/or harsh lighting in the foreground.
I guess that's a bit how you look at it and I agree that either way you look at it there's something not entirely right with this image yet.

I agree with you that TG2 does better in more brightly lit environments. Increasing GI doesn't help and adding AO improves it a little bit.
For instance, this image is rendered with detail 0.8, GI 3/6/6 and AA32 set to 1/16 first samples and threshold to 0.15.
It rendered in 7 hours on my 2600K (stock).
What TG2 lacks in difficult lighting situation is more recursions of light-bounces so that the filling effect of the light improves.
I believe it is set to 3 bounces max hardcoded in the renderer.

Anyway, I'll see what I can improve and I admit I also added some postwork to satisfy Frank
Perhaps the raw output of the render will show you better how I designed the scene initially.

I say "I designed", but actually a fair amount of work on this image is done by Ulco, which I forgot to mention
Ulco made the masks for roads and farmland and also made the hills. Basically the complete scene layout.
I added surface details, field rows, vegetation and clouds.
So credits definitely should go to Ulco, I'll update my first post.

Cheers,
Martin

[Dune]

Thanks, Martin. 

[TheBadger]

I agree with you that TG2 does better in more brightly lit environments. Increasing GI doesn't help and adding AO improves it a little bit.
For instance, this image is rendered with detail 0.8, GI 3/6/6 and AA32 set to 1/16 first samples and threshold to 0.15.
It rendered in 7 hours on my 2600K (stock).
What TG2 lacks in difficult lighting situation is more recursions of light-bounces so that the filling effect of the light improves.
I believe it is set to 3 bounces max hardcoded in the renderer.

I actually understood everything you said here. I must be getting better!!!
In terms of the background trees I meant to praise there placement on the hill, especially the way the tree line is set higher up the hill. This looks very real. And I was also commenting on the overall compartmentalization of the different aspects of the landscape, in this regard the image is PERFECT! Just like what I see everyday in my little part of the world.

As to the technical issues in terragen2, sadly, I still can be of no help to anyone

Good job TU and Dune!

[Kadri]

Very nice image  
I doubt that people other then in 3D would easily know that this is a 3d render.
The comments here are interesting.
I looked a long time at the image and i think for me there is some sort of HDRI to standart 8 bit converting feel .

[Tangled-Universe]

Very nice image  
I doubt that people other then in 3D would easily know that this is a 3d render.
The comments here are interesting.
I looked a long time at the image and i think for me there is some sort of HDRI to standart 8 bit converting feel .

Good observation Kadri

Here's the raw output, except for a little gamma adjustment...

[Dune]

Interesting. You managed to control that difficult light very well.

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks Ulco,

What I did was actually bloody simple and amateurish...I duplicated the raw layer. The bottom layer was for foreground and top layer for sky.
For the bottom layer I increased exposure and reduced gamma.
For the top layer I reduced the exposure and increased the gamma a tad bit.
Then I created a simple gradient mask for the top layer so that it would blend and with a soft big brush I touched it up a bit so that it would better follow the horizon.
Merged the lot and used the shadow/highlight tool a little bit for final touch up.

That's it, actually.

I quite like the result and the overall look, as it can give very atmospheric shots, so I think I'll try more of this in my next works.

Martin

[Seth]

That is defintely a great render Martin and very different from your usual ones ^^
My only critic would be that the bushes and trees in the foreground look a bit crispy to me, but that might just be my screen or my taste
And I prefer the raw output
good job dude

[Dune]

I wouldn't call it amateurish, as long as you get what you want. Actually I use the same method for a lot of my work (not necessarily TG2), duplicating layers and working them up, wiping out and blending them then. But not the raw image, but the bmp or tiff.
When I work the curves (on automatic sometimes) it's always on a duplicate, which I often blend by 50% or so into the original. I'm now rendering a larger version of the coastal railway, which I will save as a exr, and work the same way.

[Hetzen]

Good efforts Martin. I agree with Seth unfortunately, I prefer the original, I think there's too much saturation in the processed version.

In the end, we went with blue sky and GI on the NE plate, it just looked better, and I had absolutely no time to finess due to the client changing the Cad data 1 1/2 weeks before delivery. Even so, I wasn't really happy with it.

We want to go back and do a few selected shots to show the client what they could have had if they had pulled a bloody finger out and gave us more than a few weeks to turn around the project. I've had a tentative go at doing an overcast version, but it's a nightmare to balance getting any light into the scene through overcast skies. It would be incredibly helpfull to have a "cast shadow opacity" in the cloud node that didn't rely on cloud density or effect the shadow in the cloud itself. The only other way to get around this would be to render the scene twice and create a horizon mask. This is also a good example where the alpha channel which didn't include clouds in the atmosphere or the atmosphere itself would be more useful than what we have at the moment. Anyway. Rant over.

[Hetzen]

Sorry to hijack, but you maybe interested in this, which is what we used in the end before processing or grading...