[wip] Lake Beach

Started by Sdados, July 27, 2013, 09:34:16 AM

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Sdados

Hi there! I am trying to learn terragen, someone could have seen my introduction post in the Support section.

So, here I am with a first work in progress. I would like to build this image little by little with the help of the community in order to learn something new.

[attach=1]

The thing I would like to work on now the most are the shaders. Right now I feel they are really weak, so I will have to study the shader section of the wiki. Right now I am using surface layers with displacement, distribution and color shaders. I would like to know how I can add some glossyness for example... I saw that there are different shaders that could do something like this, but I cannot understand where to use them.

Also, I know that this kind of renderings are quite slow, but the image you see took 20 minutes on a i7 4770k with quite low settings. Do you think is normal or there is something I could optimize?

Thanks for any help! :)

TheBadger

Hi Sdados

Welcome and great image!
I see everything here needed to make a great render... lots of nice terrain elements and a good sense of scale. I suspect you will have a really nice world to make renders of when your done.

Right now in this early stage the only thing that bothers me, is the left most tower mountain on the left side in the background. It takes away a little bit of the splendor from the main mountain. It also affects your compositions balance a bit negatively.

On the render settings stuff, there are people here who will answer you better than I ever could. So Ill just keep my mouth shout so I don't confuse you on anything.
But just know that on the weekends its gets a little slower in these forums (generally).

Looking forward to watch this one develop.
It has been eaten.

Dune

It's a good start. I would change the clouds to larger feature size (density fractal) and see what happens. For testing the terrain features, better disable the clouds temporarily (faster). Where would you want some glossiness? You can use the reflective shader, default shader or water shader for reflections. For a wet beach for instance, use the reflective shader but disable ray traced reflections (which make it act like a mirror and is really nice but adds to render time). Restrict that reflective shader to the height of the shore, near water (lake) height with a distribution shader. You can add a surface layer without color at the end of your line of shaders, mask/blend it by a distribution shader with the appropriate min and max heights (final position), and add the reflective shader as a child to this surface layer. Before the reflective shader (on top of it), you can add a color adjust shader with the gamma set to 0.8 or so, which will darken the wet area a little.