Ice Age Migration

[alessandro]

Learning TG since about 3 weeks, as a second project I wanted to create an ice age scene and use some heavily furred characters, very curious to see how TG3 would handle those.
So I've first set two distant heightfields for the mountains and defined a frozen, icy layer lake where animals would walk on.
The two adult mammoths, the baby mammoth and the the wolly rhino furs have been created in Look at my Hair (a DAZ Studio plugin that I developed with my team-mate Kendall) and exported as textured .OBJ's.
TG3 was able to import those massive meshes without a hickup, and render was reasonably fast (circa 5 hours).
Here comes the .OBJ polygon counts for each model:

Mammoth 1: 3.250.000 quads (575MB)
Mammoth 2: 3.250.000 quads (575MB)
Baby mammoth: 2.200.000 quads (330MB)
Wolly rhino: 5.000.000 quads (780MB)
Distant mammoths (not furred):  (30MB)

It's a crazy test, I know, but I couldn't resist trying to use furred critters...

Adult Mammoths are Dinoraul's, Baby Mammoth is built out of DAZ Studio African Elephant model, and the Wolly Rhino is included in my Rhino by AM model (sold at DAZ store as well).

Being oriented to landscapes I take TG doesn't have dedicated shaders or features to render skin, hairs and 'organic' materials. Nonetheless I'm not unhappy about how the fur looks. Of course if you have pointers to shader tweaking to achieve better looking materials for organic stuff, I'm all hears.

Said that, I will probably re-render the scene using render layers to gather mask maps for the animals and overlay those with Renderman renders for the furred characters, and composite the scene, just to experiment.

Cheers

EDIT: minor postwork done to enhance contrast and lowered saturation or yellow channel a bit.

[inkydigit]

Hi Alessandro these are awesome!
I love Wooly Mamoth and Wooly Rhino!
I love the frozen lake/glacier too!

Cheers
Jason

[alessandro]

Thanks Jason, I'm glad you liked it! 

[TheBadger]

Go ahead, tell me you don't want animation in Terragen.

The fur looks great! The scene is (animated) film quality. I love the look! Its great man. Fun too.

Were there really fury Rhinos? Their much better looking than bald African Rhinos, IMHO.

[alessandro]

Go ahead, tell me you don't want animation in Terragen.

The fur looks great! The scene is (animated) film quality. I love the look! Its great man. Fun too.

Were there really fury Rhinos? Their much better looking than bald African Rhinos, IMHO.

Thanks! 

Oh yes there were wolly rhino's (actually I mispelled, they are woolly): https://www.google.it/search?q=wolly+rhino&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&gws_rd=cr#fp=a250858b65e716a6&q=woolly+rhino&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&spell=1

It's since I watched the BBC 'Age of Giants' documentaries (a set of 3) recently broadcasted that I wanted to make a scene with both the mammoth and the woolly rhino

[EoinArmstrong]

This is fabulous!  Yeah the fur looks great - especially the rhino's!

[Kadri]

Nice image Alessandro!

Terragen is great in the way it handles big image files , object files.
I tried with much bigger files just for testing and got no problem at all.
When you have enough Ram TG3 just says OK.
You could easily handle a big all woolly herd too probably

We just need better, easier object shading probably.
The big mammoth looks too shiny but that fur in general looks OK to me.

[inkydigit]

just realised I too mis-spelled woolly!
oooops!
)
J

[mhaze]

I've just had to go and buy that plugin!!   Brilliant work. I love that landscape to.

[Kadri]

I missed that plugin part Alessandro.
Looks like a nice plugin and price is great too.
We will get very woolly images soon probably

[Hannes]

Wow, I'm really impressed by that fur! First I thought you might have rendered out the animals in another app and finally comped it together. Look how well the indirect lighting works in TG even with fur.
You're probably the first one who rendered fur in TG. I did something similar for my "Mosquitos!" guy to create body hair, but I wouldn't call that fur (although I know some guys, whom I would describe as really furry).

Now we only need sub surface scattering to make the ice more translucent! I really hope this is planned for the future.

[alessandro]

Nice image Alessandro!

Terragen is great in the way it handles big image files , object files.
I tried with much bigger files just for testing and got no problem at all.
When you have enough Ram TG3 just says OK.
You could easily handle a big all woolly herd too probably

We just need better, easier object shading probably.
The big mammoth looks too shiny but that fur in general looks OK to me.

Thanks Kadri, indeed a class of shaders properly designed (and/or improving current TG render engine) to be used with particular surfaces would enhance TG applications a lot. I'd be delighted to be able to render skin, hair/fur and organic stuff within TG and with better results than the one I achieved in this image (which is anyway satisfactory for me).
But I do understand that TG is oriented to landscapes and in that regard produces amazing results.
I'll certainly experiment with shaders some more and see if I can come up with some skin or organic materials that can be used at some extent.

This is the same woolly rhino rendered in C4D+Vray: of course I don't expect to ever get a similar result in applications designed for landscapes, but if we can get half way would be already cool

[alessandro]

Wow, I'm really impressed by that fur! First I thought you might have rendered out the animals in another app and finally comped it together. Look how well the indirect lighting works in TG even with fur.
You're probably the first one who rendered fur in TG. I did something similar for my "Mosquitos!" guy to create body hair, but I wouldn't call that fur (although I know some guys, whom I would describe as really furry).

Now we only need sub surface scattering to make the ice more translucent! I really hope this is planned for the future.

Hi Hannes, yes SSS would really be a nice addition!

[alessandro]

If I'm allowed to do some self (blatantly biased) promotion, Look at my Hair is a cheap DAZ Studio plugin that allows to fur any object that can be imported into DAZ Studio (thus not only DAZ/Poser figure but virtually any .obj object that you can throw at it).
The plugin has a wide set of tools, deformers and instruments to comb, cut, scale and shape hairs and afterwards you can choose to render within Studio (which uses 3Delight, a RenderMan compliant render engine), or export to a textured .obj, thus having all you need to later import your furry critter to an external application and use it.
At the following links you may find lot of information and renders about it:

https://www.facebook.com/LookAtMyHair (official FB page)
http://www.furrythings.com (LAMH blog)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc56g6BEO2k&list=PL_JdHHW5yFwbqeq6aJzKtfEdbpt9k4HY6 (1.0 tutorials)

We are currently testing the 1.07 beta which will enhance the plugin introducing several new features asked from users, one of those being an 'adaptive' .obj feature that allows to squeeze geometry size on export without much loss of quality.

[Dune]

Now that is really nice, Alessandro. Great looking scene and terrific animals. I agree about the shininess, but I hardly dare say it. Did you say these were for sale somewhere?