Above the Rockies

[Hetzen]

Here's a small crop of a 6k skybox side I've been playing with. C&C welcome.

And a link to a 4k version...

clients.mediastation.co.uk/Terragen/RockiesSide3Crop.jpg

Cheers

Jon

[ra]

Wow cool. The clouds give an enormous sense of scale to this! Great render

[Kadri]

WOW!

The only different thing i would try would be just a little more whither clouds .

Great render Hetzen 

[Hetzen]

Thanks Ra.

Kadri, I think you're right. That cumulous layer needs some more work. Certainly brighter.  I want to see what happens at AA8, because they're a bit noisy and don't blend as well as I had hoped into the horizon at this resolution.

[Saurav]

Supurb work, everything looks spot on to me.

[RichTwo]

Tremendous sense of scale here!  My only thing is that the "erosiveness" seems a tad uniform, like straight lines. That would be TG2's natural effect without a warp or redirect shader added.  I'm not sure how to effectively make that happen, though.

[Dune]

Great piece of work, Jon! And carefully stated; how about just a little more color variation in the rocks?

[TheBadger]

Its a photo, he's cheating! 

[FrankB]

awesome work, Jon!

[Jo Kariboo]

Excellent!!! I very like this one.

[Oshyan]

Very nice indeed. The background/further distance areas are pretty photorealistic. Is there any post editing on this? Some of the clouds look blended or otherwise edited in post. Not a bad thing, just something I noticed. Overall, great work.

- Oshyan

[Hetzen]

Thanks guys, some useful comments above.

I'm waiting on another GI pass to kick off a render over the weekend. I've Adjusted some cloud settings to make the cumulous brighter as well as adding another cloud layer to bleach out the horizon. I'm going to see what more I can do to the surface textures today and tomorrow, but as this skybox is intended for camera orbits of an aircraft a lot of detail will be lost to motion blur.

@Oshyan, the only post work on the image above is from the default settings of the HDR Toning in photoshop from converting the exr to 8bit. I've set up a skybox in AfterEffects which rotates in accordance to a camera from Max. The sides have been set up to work in Linear colour space, with layers for Surface RGB, AtmosRGB and AtmoAlpha, which I'll use to grade the final composite.

I'm very much liking the GI cache feature. In this instance it allows us to split each side into smaller crops to render but maintain consistant GI when stitching back together.

[jamfull]

Beautiful.
I'm curious how you are achieving your snow distribution and erosion. Is this all procedural or are you using heightfields? or geocontrol/worldmachine?

James

[Hetzen]

Hi James. Thank you.

There are a variety of techniques going on here. The maximum size heightfield I could make with the ram on my workstation at the time was 8k square, so there are two instances of HF, one 8k square for near ground, which is masked into another 8k square HF for mid ground. I used HFs because I can erode them and use those erosion masks to influence other textures. So resolution was an issue. Far distance is TG procederal with the same surface rules.

The snow uses modulated altitude masks which you can find here..
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=13236.msg133022#msg133022

The PF settings in that clip are not quite optimal, so you'll have to play around with the noise and other constants to get the effect you are after, ie a non flat line along a set altitude. There are two in this scene used for the snow, one for north facing and one for south, using a get normal set of functions to mix between the two. Also the surface layer is set to Favour depressions coupled with some altitude blended erosion masks to get the 'run-off' into the valleys.

And a reflective shader really helps snow pop.

[jamfull]

Thanks. I just saw you replied. Like some others, I've not been getting my reply notifications.

James