Marshland

[zaxxon]

A misty, swampy morning. All vegetation once again modeled in Speedtree, Mitchell-Netravali pixel filter. Comments are always welcomed and appreciated.

[archonforest]

Awesome render!
Those dead? trees are scary. I would like to see them in a night picture with the moon behind...

[Upon Infinity]

Yeah, good work.  I actually feel hot looking at this picture.

[fleetwood]

That's what it looks like around my area about now, everything that survived winter is thriving. Very nice job.

[masonspappy]

Very well done!!!

[choronr]

Excellent realism here. Nice position for the sun also. Although I would not want to be here in early evening when the mosquitoes come out.

Great coloration of all the vegetation also. 

[zaxxon]

Thanks to all for the comments.
Archonforest: They are scary, I had thought of a subtitle of the "the Three Witches" as I put it together, thanks!
Fleetwood: I'm envious, here in Northern California we are in the midst of a serious drought.
Choronr: No doubt, home to some serious stinging creatures! I thought about rendering a swarm or two, but even  the thought started me to itch...

[Dune]

Excellent render, Doug! Can you tell us the specs for rendering, like detail and AA? You managed to keep the reflections of the grasses nice and soft, despite the small wavelets.

[zaxxon]

The render settings were: detail 1.2, AA 18. I tried .8/8 but the water area was just not defined enough. 1/18 was actually fine in a test render, but I was away for a couple of days and decided to bump the detail a bit. There is a slight post adjustment to the contrast values and a small gaussian blur. About 30 hours to render, so not too bad.

[TheBadger]

Really nice! Looks great! My only crit is that I think the dead trees are a little much. "Snags" like here would be outstanding in this scene, in MO. http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/old-weathered-tree-snag-2266826.jpg But I like it anyway.

[Tangled-Universe]

Very cool!

If I may chime in on the render settings in relation to the water reflections...

I think in this particular case it would be interesting to try the following settings:
Detail 0.8, AA12 @ 1/16th and pixel noise threshold @ 0.025 (default of AA12 anyway).

For the water reflections you disable the reflections in the water shader, by setting master reflectivity to 0.

Then connect a "reflective shader" in between the water shader and the lake object and let that shader do the reflections for you.
Enable raytraced reflectionsin the reflective shader and set the reflection roughness to a very small value, like 0.001.
The default 4 rays for reflections is usually sufficient, so no need to increase that.

The reflections take quite a while longer now, but detail 0.8 and AA12 with adaptive sampling may compensate a bit for it.

I'm curious to see a vertical crop of the centre 1/3rd of the image or so

Cheers,
Martin

[kaedorg]

Just beautiful. Love the quality of render and very nice trees

David

[mhaze]

Another beautiful render. Great trees and atmosphere.

[zaxxon]

TheBadger: I had the same thought about the three 'dead' trees, (I prefer the term 'habitat' trees because of their value in the ecolosystem  ) but at some point the composition had been more or less built around them and they had formed a 'story' in my mind.

Kaerdog and mhaze: Thanks guys!

TU: thanks for chiming in! I did a simple crop of the existing image leaving the mid-third and I think that may work as the basis for a re-render with your suggested settings (if I can build the setup as described). I have a number of 'wetland' trees that I'm working to place in similar environments and appreciate your sharing your expertise with the TG renderer.

[Tangled-Universe]

You're welcome,

If you like I can post a clip file for the water set up in the way I proposed.

Cheers,
Martin