My first landscape

[Kivak]

Hi all!

I'm brand new to 3D modeling and just got WorldMachine/Terragen not long ago. After watching some tutorials and fiddling around with some things, I finally sat down and put some time into a scene. This is still a work in progress, but I wanted to see if I could get some pointers! Please feel free to tear this apart, I really want to have a better understanding on what can be done to make this better.

Thanks for any and all suggestions!!

-Kivak

[zaxxon]

A beautiful start with a beautiful scene! Nice classical composition and color. Some greater detail would be be a goal if you're going toward a 'realistic' look.  Lots of options to modify heightfields and add tremendous detail with displacements and textures, and many techniques are described fully with examples, in the Forum here. What was World Machine output rez? I generally prefer to get a head start with 4k + rez out of World Machine, then let TG do the finishing magic. 

[Kivak]

A beautiful start with a beautiful scene! Nice classical composition and color. Some greater detail would be be a goal if you're going toward a 'realistic' look.  Lots of options to modify heightfields and add tremendous detail with displacements and textures, and many techniques are described fully with examples, in the Forum here. What was World Machine output rez? I generally prefer to get a head start with 4k + rez out of World Machine, then let TG do the finishing magic.

Thanks Zazzon! Yeah one of my biggest struggles in Terragen has been trying to get a really nice sheer cliff. If I recall my geology an exfoliated cliff is what I am after. Last night I found some information on the "Strata and Outcrops" displacement shader which looked like it might hold some promise. But I haven't been able to make the cliff I am looking for yet. The export from WorldMachine was only 2049x2049... So I will definitely try to up that a bit and see if that helps with a little more surface detail.

Thanks a lot!!

[Dune]

It certainly is a promising start, Kivak. You'll get the hang of it, I'm sure. One thing that strikes me is the use of a tile photo for lake bed. Correct me if I'm wrong. Visible at the opposite shore, though it does a good job in the front water. These structures/textures can all be faked with clever use of power fractals for both color and displacement. And then you won't have to bother about tiling.

[Kivak]

It certainly is a promising start, Kivak. You'll get the hang of it, I'm sure. One thing that strikes me is the use of a tile photo for lake bed. Correct me if I'm wrong. Visible at the opposite shore, though it does a good job in the front water. These structures/textures can all be faked with clever use of power fractals for both color and displacement. And then you won't have to bother about tiling.

You caught me! Yes I was experimenting with a stone texture rather than creating all the little pebbles with the rocks displacement shader. But your right, it absolutely looks tiled. I had thought about adding some foreground detail (island, inlet, etc) or distorting the shore so it isnt so straight. Is there a way to use a power fractal with the crater shader to make the shoreline more ragged? Or is that something better done in worldmachine? I originally thought of creating a very small mountain in worldmachine, flattening it to only a few meters high, then inverting the height to make it into a lake. I am sure there is a better way...

[Dune]

You can use a power fractal on the rim input, or warp the crater with a warp shader + a vector displacement shader + a power fractal. Just experiment and look up close what happens, when you change settings.

[Cocateho]

Very nice start! You could do a lot with this basic setup. Going off what Dune pointed out about the lake bed tiling, personally I like it a lot in the foreground, and maybe worth keeping it, but possibly adding another surface shader/power fractal height constrained just to the shoreline so you can have a beach and a stony lake bed?

[Kivak]

Thanks Dune and Cocateho!

I took some of everyone's suggestions and added a few things of my own to try and make it a little better. First, I used WorldMachine and inverted a mountain to construct a lake without using the warp shader (I wanted a little more control). I then eroded and flattened it in WorldMachine to be nice and shallow so the rocks would show through the water surface. I also added a second variety of trees: Colorado Blue Spruce, to add some more variation. I also used Mr. Lamppost's grasses to make a nice lush ground surface (Thanks Mr. Lamppost!!). I also added a few rocks to make it a little more realistic - otherwise the grass made it look like a golf course! Lastly, I pulled the water up a little bit to reduce the shoreline rock coverage. I never intended for there to be so much of a rocky shoreline.

One struggle I had was making the lakebed... I used WorldMachine to create the lake, used a splat generated from worldmachine which went up from the bottom of the lake to the shoreline using an elevation selector. That's the mask I used for my shoreline rocks. But, as you can see, the mask didn't end up being level (notice the rocks in the far side of the lake and the grass coming right to the water in the closest shoreline). I am wondering whether the lake or the actual water are tilted somehow - its very odd.

Also, I really don't like how pixelated it is at the lake surface at the center of the image. This render uses antialiasing of 20. But it is rendered at 1920x1080 true size. I am wondering whether it might be better to render it at twice the size and half the antialiasing, then downsample using photoshop. Any suggestions on how to get a nice soft shoreline??

Thanks everyone so much!!

[archonforest]

I like the improvement of the scene
The shoreline kinda needed as without that looks weird. Like the part on the right side where not sure where the lake ends imho.

WOW, AA on 20?
I want to see what Oshyan will say about it...hihihi...

[yossam]

I don't think it's pixelated, I think it's the wind patch you are seeing. 


And AA 20 is overkill, IMO. 

[Kivak]

Archonforest and Yossam:

After reading your comments, I checked into that a bit more and found Oshyan's post on rendering. Oops!!! Yeah 20 is a tad overkill!!! I was really hoping for better water. So now that I tried 20 and it didn't work, it's off to find something more reasonable.

Yossam: Wind patching? I need to look into that... That would be awesome if I could get rid of that grainy edge! Thanks for the suggestion!

Archonforest: I completely agree with you about the shoreline. I really need to get that fixed. The rocks are really important.

[Cocateho]

The shoreline on the left looks good to me, kinda like a slightly eroded edge but it would make more sense to have that around the whole lake shore. As far as the graininess, if tinkering with the wind patch settings and water smoothness doesn't help try lowering the pixel noise threshold. I'm not actually sure if it would help or not but it's all I got 

As for getting more variation to your vegetation you can apply a power fractal to the color of an object population, so you could have variation within species instead of simply adding more veggie objects. That aside your surface shaders in the background match up pretty well with the grass 

[Oshyan]

I think the more recent image is a nice improvement, though still some tweaking to do. But you appear to be learning (and improving) fast.

Yes, AA20 is high in general, but also isn't going to solve your water issue. I think increasing Detail would help most, but it's going to cost in render time.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

You can probably get rid of the noise in the water if you use a reflective shader for the reflection after the water shader, set at soft (0.002 or so). Set reflection to 0 in the water shader. Takes a little more time, though.