Big Oak Flat

[zaxxon]

All flora modeled in Speedtree. The sky is a reverse-engineered-reduced file from Frank B's cloud pack at NWDA (a must have resource!). These are Live Oaks (or at least my take) and this scene is very reminiscent of many parts of Northern California. Comments and Critiques always welcome.

[bobbystahr]

Lovely...beautiful ground covering veg work...trés natural...well done..love the Oak Trees as well; refresh my memory...these are speed tree?

[Dune]

Well, there's hardly anything to critisize here, Doug, a really very well done render, and superb trees. Simple, but therefore quiet and peaceful composition. Something for me to keep in my favorites folder as very inspirational. Thanks for showing this.

[Tangled-Universe]

Excellent render once again

The road and groundcover small vegetation is very realistic!

The trees stand out a bit too much if it were to my taste for two reasons: leaves look harsh/sharp and too green.
Maybe slightly desaturate the textures?
You can do that in TG by tweaking the diffuse colour setting of the parts shader for the leaf texture.
Usually the colour is 128 for RGB and then I reduce G and B by 24-32 or so. This should make the leaf browner.

For the sharpness hardness I need to think. It's interesting, because all the other vegetation looks damn excellent.
Perhaps it's something technical about the model?
I'm afraid I can't give you any suggestions here right now.

Looking forward to see your next one!

Martin

[alessandro]

Great image, i like the POV so close to terrain, and the way you disposed the items.

[mhaze]

Excellent. The trees and vegetation are very well done and there is a lovely peaceful mood.

[DannyG]

Foliage is really well done. Nice realism in general

[Oshyan]

Fantastic! As a long-time resident of Northern California this is indeed highly reminiscent of many places I've been in this area. Very well done in that regard. It's quite a "naturalistic" portrayal. I do agree with Martin that the leaves of the oak maybe *slightly* too saturated, they often have a more "dusty", slightly grayer quality in my experience. I don't personally think they look too "sharp", and I think a slight saturation adjustment on the leaves would probably take care of making them look more "settled" and integrated into the scene. That's really my only criticism, otherwise it's superb.

By the way, I love that you've been very restrained with the clouds. They contribute to the scene and help establish realism, yet are hardly noticeable in an overt way. When I look at an average photo of such a scene, I am not usually struck by the clouds (at least on an average, sunny day like this), so your approach is very realistic. It's a snapshot I might take if a friend and I were taking a hike, perhaps with them in it, though I am not suggesting you add a human figure.

- Oshyan

[Marty]

Awesome!

[Mahnmut]

I love it!

[choronr]

Pure perfection! I see your work and I get inspirations. Extra fine work Doug.

[DocCharly65]

Absolutely peaceful, realistic and inspiring! Can't stop watching it...

[zaxxon]

Thanks Folks! Truly!  TU and Oshyan, yeah I agree. Saw that in the higher res render tests, sloppy on my part not to fix that before posting . With the lure of so many personal projects in mind I was a bit anxious to free up the machine. I'll tweak with it a bit more. I think that when you're dealing with your own well known environment that  there's always a little bit more knowledge, from a synergistic interaction, that comes into play. This is certainly a fun theme for me.

[otakar]

Really nice scene. The ground in particular looks perfect to me. I guess you could do more with the trees, add some color variation especially, but that is almost nitpicking

[Saurav]

Beautiful render again, the ground vegetations, surfaces and the colour tones as per the prior render are excellent. I like how you add in decaying models as well as lush vegetation models, mimics nature very well.