Trees at Sunset

[Inscrutable]

Here's another render of mine. This one sort of developed a bit of it's own accord, starting out as yet another empty desert, and then changing to a stoney, rugged mountain, before further developing trees and some grass.  In the end, despite it being rather accidental, I actually quite liked the result and decided to render it in full.

Slightly annoying thing is that the grass in the foreground isn't actually sitting on the terrain and I'm not sure why as it's a population (luckily I don't think that it's too obvious because of the lighting, so I'm happy to leave it as it is).  I've noticed in the past that this can be the case when I have used twist and sheer, but haven't experienced it when using only unaltered fractal landscapes.  It just seems that it isn't correctly calculating the height of the terrain.  Does anyone know whether this is related to the camera height above terrain being incorrect?

Anyway, as always I'd be most grateful for your comments; and if anyone can explain the issue I've metioned above, that would be a bonus!

Inscrutable

[Mavcat]

What i see are 3 different (and nice) terrains,you have the grassy area in the foreground,in the middle you have a desert and in the background i see mountains :p I really love the right part of your render,beautiful sunset and such Overall,its a nice render

[rcallicotte]

The lighting is somewhat soft, which is nice.  How did you do that?

[Inscrutable]

Ummmm, I'd love to be able to offer some sort of authoratitive answer on producing the soft lighting, but to be honest it was accidental!  So in the absence of any actual knowledge, I'll do the best I can and list the settings that may have contributed:

Atmosphere:
Quality = 128
Redsky Decay = 5
everything else = default

Cirrus Layer: (positioned in front of the sun, by chance)
Quality = 20
Cloud Colour = 225, 147, 74
everything else = default

Lighting:
Used Oshyan's clip file
Sunlight elevation = 6

Pretty much everything else is default.  If I think of anything else I'll post my thoughts but I think the main thing is the positioning of the clouds in front of the sun.


Inscrutable

[rcallicotte]

I'm guessing you hit a sweet spot all around and using Oshyan's clip file is helpful, no doubt.

[Oshyan]

If you are using the built-in "Grass Clump" in a population then the reason it isn't conforming to the terrain is it uses rectangular, planar (flat) patches. These do not distort to match the terrain, so they don't work well on sloped areas. The best way to get high quality grass that conforms to all types of terrain is to instance single grass objects, but of course this is much more resource intensive.

- Oshyan