It's been a long time since I posted something (lot of other things to do).
Here's something that was initially meant for testing surface layers. During some early tests I realized that GI lighting looked great for the clouds but the terrain looked way better with a fill light setup. So I decided to use some kind of a hybrid lighting. Fortunately it's possible to choose which light illuminates what.
The birds are made in 3ds max by using a bird model I got from somewhere. It's preanimated. Not flying around but flapping for about 300 frames. I created a particle system with this bird as source for 200 instances. I made the system emitting the birds for about 30 frames so that the birds started their animation at different frames and let them fly around. So at about frame 100 I had a nice flock of birds each in different states of movement. I then made a single mesh out of these particle birds and imported it into TG. I used four of these flock objects (so it's only 800 birds, but 1000 sounds better!
)
The rock including the plants in the foreground on the left side is an imported mesh too. Initially it was a distorted sphere which was displaced with a rock texture map I also used for the diffuse colour and for bump mapping. I grew some ivy on it and added some bushes.
The tree on the right is a Monterey cypress by XFrog.
There is a lot of stuff in this scene and it's a pleasure to see how TG handles this. My computer is a little bit outdated but anyway this scene took only about 11 hours to render in a 2400 X 1022px resolution. I remember when I worked only with the foreground rock in 3ds max. Even adjusting some parameters took ages...
Edit: Check out the final 1080p render here:
http://youtu.be/3_T6zhiI2aM
