El Cap V3

[Harvey Birdman]

Hi, all -

Here's another pass at the El Cap render I posted earlier. I still haven't ported it to BB's terrain. I'm reasonably happy with everything except the actual rock of El Cap. I just haven't been able to come up with anything that looks like the real thing. Until I learn/develop a technique that will give the look I'm after, this is going to be as far as this image goes. The foreground 'grass' surface could use work too, but I actually kind of like the way it looks now.

The trees are a mix of XFrog firs and Cottonwoods and Oaks from the VIP site.

[old_blaggard]

I like those trees a lot!  Nice finds.  The foreground looks quite good as well; my only problem with it is that the big rocks seem unnaturally white and the river seems unnaturally black.  I like the detail of your texturing of El Cap, but I agree with you that the terrain itself could be more interesting.

[Harvey Birdman]

Yeah, the rocks are too white. The river would look better if I increased the reflectivity, but I was afraid it would increase the render time. (I won't say how long it took, but like an idiot I rendered it on my main desktop machine. I was finally able to reclaim it last night.)

[rcallicotte]

The rocks are the only problem I see.  The rest is nice.  Good grass, mountains look real, sky is good.  Maybe just use some special texturing for the rocks.  I think someone recently did an explanation of using the Power Fractal along with an image for rocks that makes them look very real.

[Harvey Birdman]

Yeah, I think I saw that. I'll keep it in mind in case I can fix the El Cap face issue.

[Oshyan]

I was going to say I like how things really do look "big" here, and they do, but actually El Cap is even bigger than the tree size seems to show here, I think. I'm struggling with this problem in a St. Helens scene right now, where making the trees the correct size makes them look all but invisible from a normal viewing distance - they look just like green fuzz rather than trees. But if realism is the goal it's necessary to figure out how to make it look right. See here for example: http://www.astronomynotes.com/nature/yos7.htm I guess your trees could even be about half the size they are for realism, but maybe it's just the trees on top that are throwing me. http://warchild13.com/images/El%20Capitan.jpg

In any case it's a nice image, it just needs more color and refinement. Nailing the rock texturing would be huge but is of course very tricky. Improvements to the water system, including transparency, should help you a lot in making the river realistic.

- Oshyan

[Harvey Birdman]

You know, you're right about the trees. The trouble is I'm not scaling them down at altitude. I think the scale is right lower down, but in real life the size of the trees gets smaller as the altitude increases, right? I think the tree line in the Yosemite area is about 10,000 feet. The top of El Cap is 7569; the valley floor is 3971.( The really big Douglas Firs and redwods are around 5000, I think.) The trees at the elevation of the top of El Cap are pretty shrunken , iirc. Still trees, but nothing approaching the 150 ft+ of the big douglas firs. I sort of envisioned the stuff on the vallery floor as being about 30-60 feet high; I suppose the stuff at the top shouldn't be any higher than 20-30 ft, or about half the current size, at biggest.

[Oshyan]

Yeah, that seems to make sense. Also the trees at the top seem to either be a different type of tree, or just really stunted and/or gnarled (no doubt due to exposure).

- Oshyan