The gorge (final animation on page 2)

[Hannes]

I was looking for a way to get rid of the vertical stretched displacement on steep walls and found this thread:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15407.30.html
Kadri used Jo Kariboos file there. The crater is inverted to create a tower. I inverted it again to get back a crater, placed some instances of it in a (irregular) line to create a gorge with nicely displaced walls. Additionally I used dandelO's cracks and some more voronoi fractalized stuff by glen5700 as far as I remember.

[TheBadger]

Thats very nice, Hannes!

Another good one.

[Dune]

Great, Hannes. Maybe a little less birds?

[Hannes]

Maybe you're right, Ulco. I am thinking of creating an animation (the view of a paraglider jumping off the edge of the gorge and slowly flying through). Either I leave the birds out completely or I'll have to use my animated ones.

[Dune]

Good idea, that would be a great animation. Him/her passing a few unobtrusive birds (soaring buzzards?) would be interesting. If you use your animated birds, it might distract from the descent.

[inkydigit]

hang/power glider... great idea!
I love this gorge... great place for a flight!

[Zairyn Arsyn]

this is really good Hannes.

i really like the displacements/slight overhangs

[Markal]

Superb, this is an awesome image and an excellent camera angle...the birds seem a bit over sharpened...or maybe its my monitor? Excellent image!

[Jo Kariboo]

Very nice formation of rock and distribution of vegetation !

[mhaze]

Very nice Hannes. Dune have you got something against birds after all there are rather a lot of them out there in the landscape

[Dune]

I hate birds, I'm an ornithologist 

[Walli]

very nice scene, reminds me of france.

[Antoine]

great work !
I like the rock shaders and the trees.

[Hannes]

Here is a low quality preview animation of the first 262 frames of 400. There's a lot of shadow popping and some weird displacement artifacts. Rendertimes were 15 to 20 minutes per frame at this low quality and resolution. The water shader is replaced by a glossy surface shader at the moment for testing purposes.
In the meantime I'll have to turn off some of the very fine displacements to reduce rendertimes. I animated the mist a bit and deleted some of the plants that weren't visible. I'll do some tests to render out a higher quality animation. Probably I won't be able to use really high quality settings, especially turning on "detail blending", because rendertimes are incredibly high even with the actual settings.
I used "receive shadows from surfaces" in the atmosphere and in the mist's quality tab to create some subtle godrays and to make the sun not shine through the terrain.

[Bjur]

Outstandig! Great image and even greater animation Hannes.

Any chance your final render will have a more cinematic frame (thus wider)?
The camera movement is also excellent and felt "real".

Now the horror: I think it is a bit too fast. The tempo feels more like the speed of an helicopter or so.
Yeah, unfortunately another 100-200 frames for the same distance to slow everything down would add even more horrible render time..

But your beautiful canyon and its impressions just shouldnt pass that fast ("In the name of eye candy!").