Ben Nevis WIP

[bigben]

OK, I figured it was time to stop tinkering for while and actually produce a finished image.Since I've got the lighting sorted out for this, I thought it would be worth fixing up the rest of the scene properly.  Here is a WIP render of my base rock and soil distribution (with the raw terrain for reference) trying to add some relatively realistic detail to the terrain. Adding displacements is definitely not my forte so this is the hardest bit for me... the first version will just be using the stuff I know so far.  Any comments/ suggestions welcome.

The finished image is going to be a hybrid of the Scottish Grampians and the Grampians here in Australia. There was a metre of snow here when I camped near this spot so the rock distribution is an artistic guess based on a similar hike up Ben Macdui. I'm not going to bother with soil at the top of the mountain as I'll be adding snow eventually. The distant mountains now all have a uniform displacement added to them. Dropped the fractal detail and added a very scaled down version of cbalaska's "cracked face", so I'm a lot happier with that.  The line of rocks along the edge of the small hills in the centre of the image still bother me a bit.  I suspect it may be from my rock distribution but I'll have to go down there later and have a look.

[edit] updated with larger rocks... forgot to resize after reducing displacement.

[bigben]

Tested a render near the cliffs... back to the drawing board... 

[rcallicotte]

I like the rocks in the foreground.  Very realistic.  And the clouds are very nice along with a beautiful blue sky.

[bigben]

Thanks. There's a couple of odd ones still (lower left) but I'm pretty happy with the stones.  This was supposed to be a relatively quick project, but last night I discovered there was a lot more to learn. Fortunately I filled in some of the gaps.  My odd rows of rocks in the distance were outcrops (so that's why they call it "strata and outcrops"  ) which were fixed with some major downsizing of my strata settings, and some reworking of the "cracked face" nodes.

Added some snow and spent a few more hours spinning around in circles until a carefully placed compute terrain node brought it all into place. I have a small render running now with my sunrise atmosphere/enviro light settings. Raised the sun a bit higher and it still looks promising as the only tweak I've made was to reduce the sunlight strength, so animations may just work.  Fingers crossed.

[bigben]

A rough render looking in the reverse direction to check out the scale displacements on the exposed rock faces.  Detail 0.5 (final render will be at 1). Camera height is again 2m, and the scale looks better from both here and from far away. This image was rendered without GI to speed things up. Of note, GI produces a smoother atmosphere towards the sun, and better overall detail in this scene, but the extra displacement does slow it down a lot. (and noticed I had surface details checked)

The horizontal line is a render glitch and matches the border of a render pass.  I'd seen this before on another render which also had triangular variations. I'm assuming it's a known bug? If anyone knows how to avoid it please let me know.

[rcallicotte]

Ben, I like the textured terrain and don't have an answer about the bug except I've read where this or something very similar happens.  If it is the same as I've seen before, and it appears to be, it's a known bug.  Hopefully, it will be fixed with the next version. 

[bigben]

Thanks calico.  It's gone again.. may have been ray traced shadows, but don't quote me on that. Also toned down some of the atmosphere settings.  Slowed down a bit as it's gotten very busy with work.  This is another test of displacements and distributions from a different distance. 

I had a few worries with the water level. The terrain isn't flattened first so a water level of 0 should have been good regardless of distance from 0,0,0. I forgot to allow from some variation due to the low resolution of the terrain, and using a lake I found it to be around -25m (which is half of the TER spacing). Dropped the sea surface in the TER by 1m for the end result so the terrain doesn't poke through the water.

Heading back to the peak now to try some broader displacements to give the mountains a bit more shape... grass, trees, sand, beach and licken still to come...

[rcallicotte]

Good work in progress.  Hope to see the final.

[bigben]

Thanks. The foreground bugs me but I won't know how much until I render it in higher detail (currently running), and add an object for scale.  The displacement seems a bit excessive or is too obvious/fake.  Rendering a version with detail 1 (@2000x1000)  The displacements on the upper part of the image are looking much better so I'll have to wait to see the bottom.  Started a mask for the trees (mostly in plantations)

[rcallicotte]

I'd be grateful to do what you can do so I'm not sure why you're complaining.     Keep complaining, though, so I can learn more.   

[bigben]

I'm very picky with my own work     The little things sometimes make a big difference when (if) you can fix them.  The GI setup in the original Ben Nevis sunrise I posted was largely achieved by looking at the subtle details in the changes of light with distance from the camera, angular distance from the sun and the transition from fully lit to fully shaded. 

This project is looking at only the terrain to slot back into this scene, although it's turned into another learning exercise that got distracted into producing displacements and surfacing for the entire terrain  I may refocus soon before I go mad....

And I tend to blog here because the occasional suggestion from others can also make a big difference 

[bigben]

I tracked down most of my rendering and surfacing problems to the snow layer.  Disabling it fixed the render glitches and distribution problems across the entire terrain. This is pretty weird and I'll look into it later, but for now I have render running with a very basic snow layer.  Both Luc Bianco's and cbalaskas' clip files generated the same problems. They both have a few common elements, and one of these is obviously conflicting with something else I've done.

For now, here's a short sequence I rendered to determine the fractal detail amount that would provide the best base for the "cracked face" clip.  Detail range is 0 - 0.5 Definitely something to keep in mind when adding additional tweaks to TER files.

[rcallicotte]

Ben, I like the first or second clip the best.  The others are too noisy, in my opinion.

[bigben]

Hi Calico.

That's where it gets a bit tricky.... The smaller details in the last few are a bit noisy, but this was handled later by tweaking the "cracked face" scales. The render is up reasonably close, so the large displacements are toob big for my liking.  I don't think I have the next set of renders still, but I'm about to redo the cracked face scaling now that I've sorted out  some of the other issues (mostly related to a shader using "intersect underlying").

Added a 1m sphere for scaling. I'll post that sequence next week.

[Oshyan]

Ben, just to make sure you're aware, "Intersect Underlying" doesn't work properly right now. It will be fixed in the next update, along with some extra options.

- Oshyan