Northampton, MA and Bach's Well tempered Clavier (My first render)

[odlantern]

I have developed an automated pipeline (in python) where the user can select any address in Massachusetts and a midi file to generate an image using terragen.

The location is geocoded and the resulting satellite imagery, landcover, elevation, road network, and building outlines are pulled from USGS and massGIS.  This data is combined, georeferenced, reprojected to UTM, and resampled as needed to create the image masks for the scene.  An unsupervised classification and cross-correlation is done to increase the resolution of the landcover. 

The landcover categories implemented are:

water,
field,
deciduous forest,
evergreen forest,
mixed forest,
scrub,
barren,
urban

The foreground mountain is made from artificially generated elevation data (it is not part of Massachusetts). The midi file is read up to create some of the characteristics of the foreground including the color of the path and the flowers.  The flowers themselves are placed along the path using a piano roll rendering of the notes in the midi file on either side.

I was hoping to get suggestions on things to change, especially with the atmosphere and lighting, but the scene took 30 hours (!) to render and since a canvas print of this is going to be a Christmas gift, I don't have time to do another high quality render before then. 

I will post more scenes generated with different locations and midi files soon.

Enjoy.
~David

[yossam]

Your lighting appears to be from the right of the camera at about 60 degrees (going by the shadows), but part of your veggies are dark..........especially the evergreens. The atmosphere is blown out (overexposed) so there is no definition to your clouds. I'm still impressed that this came from a python script...........looking forward to more renders. 


I don't know what your render settings were...............30 hours is a long time for this simple a scene.

[odlantern]

I think my camera light exposure might be too high, but I'm not sure.  Perhaps that is the issue causing the lack of definition in the clouds and somewhat unrealistic lighting?  I'm still trying to get familiar with all of these settings since I'm new to Terragen, but I have so little time.

I am rendering these scenes at a very high resolution 4000x3200 to get 200dpi for a 20"x16" canvas print. 

What would be safe detail and anti-aliasing levels to render this scene at for this resolution.  Unfortunately with Christmas coming up I only get one shot at this since I need to create 4 more. 

Current settings are: camera light exposure: 1.34611
Detail level: 1 (definitely going to lower this)
Anti-aliasing: 6

Thanks!

[odlantern]

The biggest difficulty I am having with Terragen is generating a sense of depth and distance.  I just don't get the sense of large distance scales like I was hoping to get.

[yossam]

At that resolution you could probably lower your detail setting to .5 or .6 and set your AA to about 4. I would leave your exposure at default, which is 1. The sun height could be too high, causing issues with the detail. 

[odlantern]

Cool.  That gives me something to work with.  Thank you very much yossam.

My next render is going to be the Quabbin Reservoir.

[Oshyan]

Wow, what a creative idea! And a really interesting end result. I too wonder why it took 30hrs to render though. Is that at the resolution you quote, or the resolution you posted here? What hardware are you rendering on? I think detail 0.6 and AA left at 6 would be good for this at print resolution; I would be worried about aliasing at AA4, honestly.

Regarding your clouds, did you change their color at all? They may also just be very thin and thus highly illuminated. Also if you changed the sun strength at all it would have an effect on the look of the clouds. The clouds are also quite noisy, so you may need to increase quality (of the cloud).

Regarding a sense of distance, I actually get quite a good one here, in general. The city-like features receding in the distance and haze help a lot with that.

Are you planning to add detail to the path, or is it intended to have this sort of blocky, sharp-edged look?

- Oshyan

[odlantern]

My biggest issue here is time.  I wanted to get these done for Christmas and I waited to the last minute like usual.  As a result I don't have as much time to play with all the shaders, render settings, atmospheric properties, etc. as I would like.

Oshyan, my goal in creating this artwork was to try and combine fantasy type elements (driven by the music) with real-world data (driven by actual GIS data).  I pictured the foreground being vivid and fantasy like, and the midground and background being more realistic with hopefully a smooth transition. 

I rendered the scene at 4000x3200 with detail 1.0 and AA 6.  Looking at the resulting canvas print, I feel like I could safely lower the resolution.

I am going to try rending the next scene at 3000x2400 with detail 0.82 and AA 5.  If I did the math right, this should approximately finish over night (12-16 hours). 

Originally I did change the color of the clouds and I believe they were pretty thin as well.  I've since deleted them and added 3d volumetric clouds at near the default properties. 

I've also added a child displacement (power fractal v3) to the path to create some additional detail and remove the computer generated blocky appearance.  I also lowered the scale of the fake stones shader slightly (which the path is made of).

My next scene is the Quabbin reservoir and I'm shooting for a hazy sunset scene.

The hardware I rendered the image on is:
Dell precision mobile workstation
Intel i7-2820QM CPU 4 cores at 2.30GHz 16GB of memory

~David

[odlantern]

I have time this morning to play around with these scenes.  A few things I would like to do:

1. Add more detail to the foreground pond.  I simply used a crater shader and then added a lake object.  I added another surface layer with slope constraints to create the 'sand'.  Any recommendations on this would be hugely helpful.

2. Make the foreground surface a little more realistic.  I'm playing around with different shader combinations to get some type of type, rocky undertone. 

3. Add some type of moss to the path.  Attempting to use a power fractal with small coverage. 

4. Make the atmosphere and lighting more realistic and make the scene look less cartoonish.

5. Attempt to add some of the tree blossoms fallen to the ground and the water.

Here goes... :p