The Staircase

[otakar]

Just an attempt to see how TG3 does with objects. Looks fine to me, what do you think? (turned raytracing off to get displacements to render).

The model is Perfect Escape from Dreamlight.

I was experimenting with spot lights but only got ugly pixelation on the render (even with higher quality settings) so I increased exposure instead to brighten up the unlit areas.

[choronr]

I'm impressed. What you did to impact the lighting worked.

[Dune]

It does, however, tear apart the vertices here and there. And overall, I think you can get away with Raytracing after all and only apply bump. I don't think it'll make a huge difference, but won't break up the geometry. Nice if you do a direct comparison.

[otakar]

Thanks. Good idea, I will do a comparison render. About tearing apart those vertices, how would I go about that without modifying the model? Any function for this in Poseray?

[otakar]

Here's the raytraced version. Doesn't compare well IMHO.

[Dune]

I prefer the latter, no tearing apart. The biggest difference is on the floor, but you could replace that with TG ground plane and fake stones. The staircase isn't supposed to be very rough anyway (marble or such).
I think the normals are calculated to smoothly though, some flat planes look rounded. Did you haul it through Poseray?
The tearing apart can't be helped, IMHO.

[otakar]

Interesting, the side-by-side. I can control the roughness by adjusting the displacement multiplier, if that is what you are pointing out. I do like the crispness of the pillars in the raytraced version, though. However, where it falls flat are the flat areas (ha!), such as the walls and the floor. You can get around that I guess (at least for the floor as pointed out) but it's a lot more work. No, I did not run it through Poseray, though I did load it just to make sure the materials mapping is intact.

[Andrew March]

Part of the problem appears to be the smoothing angle on the imported geometry, which often appears as shadows where non or little actually exist. I really think that Terragen as a standalone solution for all your render needs doesn't work too well but as part of a pipeline holds it's own fantastically. A lot of people think being able to render eveything in one package saves time when in reality it does quite the opposite.

Do you have access to any other render capable package, Max, Maya, Lightwave, Modo, etc?

[otakar]

Andrew, I am just a hobbyist. Really, Terragen (Pro) is already a stretch for me, but I want to be able to render scenes other than large scale landscapes as well and get acceptable results. As far as that goes, I am quite happy with how Terragen has progressed in its capabilities. Think about it, we had only rudimentary object support when TG2 first came out

I am sure scenes like this render better in something like Max, but I will probably never be in that league. Just trying to have fun here and squeeze the most out of TG.

You and Dune did make me curious though so that I may run this thing through Poseray and check if it has any impact.

[Andrew March]

Give Blender a try mate, it has been used by a lot of people as a stepping stone onto greater more expensive packages and believe me it is quite capable and of course free!

[otakar]

I did install Blender and tried it a couple of times, but could not get the hang of it. Terragen is so much easier to work with

Here is the next version - after taking the model through PoseRay and welding vertices. I did have to adjust some displacement multipliers as a result to get rid of the general flatness. I like this version (again, raytracing turned off for this exercise).

[Dune]

After welding vertices, you may have to recompute normals to get rid of the 'rounded' shadows on flat planes. If the parts are in groups you can choose rounder parts to be computed with a larger degree of roundness (like 75 or so) and flat areas with the default 35º.