Bierstadt experiment

[Dune]

It isn't as ominous as the title suggests; just an attempt to replicate the painting that was put on the forum some time ago. A nice, but hard challenge, painting it would be easier (for me at least). I'm nowhere near, but I learned a lot.
I think I would need to make the terrain in PS and WM instead of relying on random PF's....

[TheBadger]

Great effort Ulco! I'm really glad someone with a good grasp of TG2 is trying this.
I love Luminism, so I hope you won't mind me sharing some ideas with you. You can take or leave them as you see fit. If you all ready haven't thought of it.

I thought about this for a long time but always ran into a lack of technical knowledge at on point or another so I did not do it my self, but perhaps you will pull it off.

The first thing I thought to do was, as you say, random fractals. That was pointless I found. But you are getting much better results than I did so far, so who knows.
Then I thought  a satellite resource for an image map to get the first part of the image. The back ground is not real, so I think that random fractals would be fine.
Anyway, what would be the best file type for the image map of that location? DEM, or something? This is one of the technical problems I ran into. There are no tuts I know of on using satellite data as image maps. BUT THERE SHOULD BE!!! If anyone cares.

So assuming you get a landscape your really happy with, that reflects luminist scale. Then Lighting is the most important part.
I was thinking you could use a large flat rectangle, make it reflective, and use that as a bounce light. That should help get light where you need it. Also Lumnisits treated landscapes like portraits, so it would be appropriate to bounce light.

If you could use some of those techniques people posted, where the land produces light, that would help to. The trick would be to get everything in play at once, while keeping wanted shadows just above black.
There was also a post by mood flow where he used an image of clouds to light the shot. I couldn't make sense of that one, but maybe you can. At any rate, the landscape is secondary to the light. The light is everything.

Good luck man!

*Oh yeah, I also thought it could be smart to do three renders. One to light the background, one to light the mid, and one to light the foreground, then photoshop them. But you could also try a merge images in photomatix; no idea if that would work though.

[TheBadger]

Found it i think. Maybe this will help. The place in the painting is the Yosemite Valley.

http://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/catalog/query/(xcm=r3standardpitrex_prd&layout=6_1_61_48&uiarea=2&ctype=areaDetails&carea=%24ROOT)/.do?lastVisited=areaDetails&query=yosemite+valley

[Dune]

Thanks Badger. I have no intention however to buy a map, I'll try finding a small DEM or height map for free, or else paint something. It's not a big deal, this render, just fun. Good of you to remind me about the lighting issues. I knew of them, but didn't use them here. I did use a final surface shader blended by a circle with some luminance, but I don't know if that works ok. It might also be faked by using a color adjust (raise gamma) for a certain area.

I found another interesting site: http://www.shadedrelief.com/

I'm looking here: http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htm but how I can access some heightmap eludes me...

[cyphyr]

Impressive, and a (more than) good start. There is indeed a lot we can learn from the old masters. Definately worth emulating.
Cheers
Richard

[yossam]

Fantastic start.....can't wait for the next version.

[Dune]

I found a jpg of a valley in Yosemite, and a large ter of Yosemite (I already had it  ), but I wouldn't know where this exact spot is. So I'm gonna concentrate on the lighting, and not the exact features of the land.....

[Kadri]

Very nice experiment Ulco

[Dune]

It's gonna be awesome (he said, prudently).

[inkydigit]

It's gonna be awesome (he said, prudently).

you know it!
I can not wait...this looks AWESOME already!

pity we don't have gps coords from the original!
)

[masonspappy]

It's gonna be awesome ....

I think you're right. Fine work!

[Oshyan]

A surprisingly good start on this! It seems like increasing enviro light Strength on Surfaces might be a good addition...

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Hey guys,
Have an idea/request because of this thread. Hope staff could do this.

So imagine in any TG2 scene a place that is too dark because of cloud cover in that area. Now imagine a bounding box/circle in a place on the terrain where you really want light.

Imagine a string (for visualization) going from the center of the bounding box directly to the center of the light source.
Now imagine that you are able to punch a hole through the clouds, that is the size of your bounding box, or a multiple of it, as many times as you like. And in as many places as you like.

Also the bounding box/circle is adjustable and movable. And maybe the bounding box can be any 2d shape you like.

Sounds great, yes?

How hard would something like that be to program?

[Dune]

(he said, prudently)

I meant 'modestly' of course.
You were just ahead of me, Badger. What I sometimes do is take the camera down to where the light should be, look up to the sun, and move or inversely blend the clouds by a simple shape. But it's a lot of work. I believe I once tried a semi transparent default shader on a plane to make a 'shadow' map.
There should be a way to use a PF mask (hit a few times or draw a painted shader), which can be adjustable on ground level, which then should be translated up in the same angel as where the sun is. It would enlarge when going up, but could on cloud level be used to inversely blend them away. The black/white distribution of the PF should of course remain the same when going higher, so a transform shader is in place.
Anyway; new iteration based on the Yosemite jpg I found.

Another thing that would be very handy is a blur node, with adjustable amount of blur, with a blend input of course. When you use a smooth function the Y is mainly going down, so that doesn't work in case of falls from steep walls, like here. These were simply painted in (painted shader) on the terrain.
Credits to Walli for his wild grass version 5, very obvious in front.

[cyphyr]

You can place a camera projecting a "hole blob" image through the cloud. Place a camera at the point you want illuminated and point it at the sun. Add an image map shader and select camera projection (using your newly created camera) and use this as a blend shader for your cloud fractal  and "viola", a hole in your cloud layer. Increase the cameras FOV to make the hole bigger. Mostly works but it's difficult to avoid the "hole punch" look.
Cheers
Richard

Hmm, scratch this, not working as expected at all ...