'One For All' - Surface Shader Setup

[Volker Harun]

Hello,
two months ago, I had all my TG2 files stored on two computers and had a 4GB storage as a backup. Within a few days, I lost all data (do not ask!  )
The only files I was able to recover were those, that I shared here. So I will continue this tradition - for my own sake 

Attached is a scene-setup which has two additional groups 'Sandstone' and 'Sandstone Small Scale (SC)'.
I use these as colour-functions of my surface shaders - you get a wider range of saturated colours with reasonable realistic results.

The 'Sandstone' group is for large scale surfaces or camera distances of 200m+.
The Small Scale version is for getting closer down to 20m.
For anything closer some additional variations could (should) be added manually.

Enjoy,
Volker

Edit - the full rendered version of the below file can be seen here: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/60137523/

[rcallicotte]

Thank you.

[Volker Harun]

Calico, thanks for the constructive comment ,-)

I had an idea a few minutes after uploading this file. It concerns XFrog's trees. And it seems to work very good, I'll upload a preview later (tomorrow?).
Do the following:
- Desaturate the plant's textures - brighten them up by about 50%.
- Choose in the object's Default Shader a colour of your choice (i.e. RGB 194/189/142)
- Add as colour function the Shader 'Colour Var SC III' supplied with the file above.
- Get moodflow's soft light setup
- start rendering and begin to hop in wild circles (due to excitement) ,-)

Volker

[AndyWelder]

My constructive comment: Thanks a lot, vielen Dank  This goes for the posted idea too!

[Volker Harun]

I am still hopping around and 'll provide you with a small fraction of a preview - call it a teaser 

Andy ... pass auf, sonst komm ich vorbei und knuff Dich! 

[AndyWelder]

Wow...

[old_blaggard]

Wow!  Diese Baume sehen sehr gut aus! (Just seeing if I remember any of my German... ).

[rcallicotte]

Volker,

I've played around with the planete.tgd file this morning and your file here all afternoon.  I'm beginning to believe I'm missing some foundational understanding that's keeping me from grasping how all of this works.  Your work here is amazing to me.

[Volker Harun]

Calico,
I will go into detail soon - but now it is the time for my wife ,-)
Volker

[Volker Harun]

Attached is the finished preview.
It does look promising - but I hoped that it would have been much more interesting.
I used 2 populations of different grwoth states of a tree. Colours differ only in brightness.

Volker

[Oshyan]

Frankly I think the tree colors blend in with the rest of the scene much better than any objects I've seen previously in TG2 (in some cases contrast is good though). I agree it's a bit dull, but that shouldn't be too difficult to improve with some texture variation in the procedurals that are being added to the image maps, eh?

- Oshyan

[Volker Harun]

Aye aye, Sir!
The lack of contrast is due to the combination of moodflow's softlights and somebody else's fill lights ,)

[AndyWelder]

"somebody else's fill lights" *ggg*
Though a bit dull it still looks 'Wow'. Only thing I would have done is raise the amount of variation in the populations; now there are trees that resemble. (sich zu viel ähneln)
I know , both my English and German suck 

[Volker Harun]

Hi Andy,
I understood both ,-) Do not ask me if I could speak Dutch - I can't!
And I agree - it'll get better! Promised!

One point was the quality of the populations - the above render goes with medium quality, the now running one has higher quality settings and it looks - more defined.

[mr-miley]

Firstly... Volker, many thanks for sharing, both are superb  Secondly, I must be missing something, cause I think that the trees render is superb. I don't think that it looks "a bit dull", I think its spot on for realism. Unless you live on a deset Island or somewhere really hot, natural colours aren't always that bright and vibrant. I'm in the UK (and I'm sure that this goes for most of europe and a lot of the States too) and if I look out of my office window at the landscape that is more than a few hundred metres away it all looks a bit muted and dull (dull probably isn't the correct word to use, but I cant find my theasarus (bugger, can't spell it either  )) I'd say the colouring and contrast of the whole scene is incredibly realistic. Hats off to you Volker... if only I wore a hat