Crater lake Final Page 2

[Tangled-Universe]

Ì'm setting up the upload now Frank, so you should have the most recent project soon...

If you decide to dive into this again, my advice would be to add a little (more) population variation into the trees. Did you render the water with full transparency? It might not be needed, which saves render time as well. Or only a short close-by distance with transparency, the rest without.

ps. I'd love to see some reeds in this 

Thanks Ulco
As Frank pointed out after you we indeed did not use transparency.
We may do so in the next iteration and likely will resolve to crop rendering the transparent part.

Good point about the population variation. The left foreground and future (secret;)) plans will provide nice spots for some reeds

I'm not sure yet whether Martin had used a true alpine for the left side mountain and the background mountains, or replaced them with heightfields. I have rendered a crop of the left hill with a) Alpine in 30 minutes and b) Heightfield in 8 minutes.
So I would defo replace the left foreground mountain with a heigtfield, and the background with a normal fractal terrain.
I think we had transparency turned off completely, as there wouldn't be anything visible under the water anyway, particularly from this view angle.
Secondly I agree that the image would benefit from more variation in the trees, and maybe some "hero trees" here and there.
BTW, I couldn't render that image this large. I think Martin reported some "steady memory consumption of around 14 Gig" or so, in any case more than the 8 GB I have in my machine.
But I guess a 4000 px wide render would probably still be awesome.

All that stuff I'm dreaming out loud here is a lot of work to set up and get right. So don't expect too much too soon

The base of the terrain was created by Frank.
I exported it to a .ter file and eroded it in WM2.
The erosion filter allows for export of various masks which some of them I used for the snow layer.
Besides that I also used the snow filter in WM2 and used the texture output, but NOT the heightfield.
These masks combined give the results you see now.
Later the left-foreground was also replaced by a heightfield.
This all rendered a lot faster, because there was no procedural base terrain anymore.

Yeah the highest memory consumption I noticed for a while was 14.5GB and most of the time it was 14GB

[Dune]

We may do so in the next iteration and likely will resolve to crop rendering the transparent part.

No need to do that, just add a water node with transparency, but no waves (or they would come on top of the first water node), and blend by distance shader. But you'd probably know that.

[Redwolf]

thats a crackin render, but that bare patch of terrain on the left niggles me a bit, perhaps bushes or other to cover that green surface layer, the huge mountain is most definitly realistic, top marks ))

[Tangled-Universe]

We may do so in the next iteration and likely will resolve to crop rendering the transparent part.

No need to do that, just add a water node with transparency, but no waves (or they would come on top of the first water node), and blend by distance shader. But you'd probably know that.

True. I'm not sure if it will be faster than doing it in a separate crop, since you still have 2 watershaders which constantly need to be 'tested' in texturespace for mixing. It may not make much of a difference. I'll try

[TheBadger]

Thanks for the answers guys.