Marble Hill

[fleetwood]

A flower or two has finally tried to bloom hereabouts, but snow fell yesterday and some persisted in the shadows all day today.
Needed to see a sunnier place.   


plants - Walli, Ulco, TheBadger, Chris Stein, Mandrake, Jochen Meyer, xfrog

[yossam]

I really like this. The only thing that kinda bugs me is the brightness of the fake stones. IMO. 

[TheBadger]

Lichens look great! the brush (brambles?) look fantastic too.
Nice render.

Thanks for using the shrooms. Hope they did not abuse your ram too much?

Agree with Yossam.

[archonforest]

A great one! Wonder how come non of my renders are this sharp

[mhaze]

Excellent! The lichen on the rocks is particularly good.

[j meyer]

  Nicely composited plant life.

[choronr]

Very good details and sharpness here. These small places in nature can yield some very good ideas.

[inkydigit]

excellent stuff!
love the 'shrooms!
lots of great crisp detail here!
white stones a bit too bright maybe... but only maybe, could be camera settings!

J

[fleetwood]

Thanks for all comments.
I expect I'll make another render of the stony area and tone down the "marble" fragments. Really I didn't intend them up to be so bright, it's something in my stone network that is boosting my chosen colors, but I left them white because they reminded me, not really of marble, but of the white quartz litter you're supposed to look for when prospecting for the mother load.

I wish I could take credit for the lichen but I retiled/up-sized a bark image texture from Mandrake's dead branch model and it happens to uv map quite well to Jochen Meyers dead tree.

The sharpness is probably due to the pixel filter and render settings (26 hours to render on my old intel quad Q6600 :
         Pixel filter - Catmull-Rom sharp
         Detail         1
         AA              16
         GI      detail 5  quality 6 radius 8
         Occlusion weight 1.3         
         Bounce 1.3
         Gamma correction 1.8
         Contrast .25

[Dune]

You can really tell the high detail settings, it's very photoreal in that respect. There is one thing that occurred to me, there's a 'stripiness' in the upper left corner, vertical banding. If you're going to attack this again, have a look what that could be. It's worth it, that's for sure!

[fleetwood]

Dune : Thanks for pointing that banding out.
I recently moved my monitor to a higher position. Everything on my monitor now looks a bit darker from my new lower view angle. I must say I didn't even see any vertical banding in the shadow area in the upper left until I actually stood up and looked down at my screen.

I'm in the middle of a re-render and the preliminary pass for the upper left buckets is done. Interestingly there is no banding visible at this point, although I didn't change anything but the shaders for my largest size fake rocks.

  So it looks like I will be in suspense to see if banding is going to re-appear (I'm guessing it will) after Terragen applies the final GI surface detail in the last minutes of the render.

[Kadri]

Looks nice!
Not sure but the banding looks like a straight line of the plant distribution.

[fleetwood]

Kadri : Not sure yet, adjusting levels on the image certainly brings out the banding in the heavy shadow area. Perhaps Jitter and soft shadow related ? soft shadow samples are at 11 on this.

Also I had some odd grid like patterns in the underlying terrain in some of early stages of this image, but thought they were gone.

[Kadri]

Yes could be something like that too but is there a line like pattern on the ground and slope kind of distribution of the plants?

[zaxxon]

The close-up composition is very well done. The render settings certainly deliver a strong and detailed scene. I really like this image. The only thing that detracts my eye is the dark denseness of the shadows. I keep trying to see 'deeper' into the shadow detail. Perhaps some post work will bring that out if you think it would add to your concept. Once again, this is a fine render and lovely concept, I hope we'll see more of this type of theme.