Iceland Contest Entry - Final

Started by Gannaingh, November 11, 2014, 08:09:39 AM

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Gannaingh

More updates! I've primarily been working on the lighting and atmosphere of the scene. I added a low level cloud layer for atmospheric haze to make the distant mountain on the left seem more shrouded by the overhead clouds. I've also worked to make the atmosphere more blue to give better depth of color. I also added two more shrub populations and a grass population to the mid-ground to give more variety, but the grass isn't really noticeable at a realistic scale so I might remove it. Thanks for watching me work!


Hannes

This is really looking great! But I think there isn't enough haze or mist in the air, which makes the scene look smaller imho. The mountains look quite close to the viewer like that.
The clouds are fantastic, and at least in my opinion some haze, mist or fog would make the scene look even more epic.

choronr

This is coming together beautifully.

Dune

You are making it hard for other contestants, though you never know who is secretly brewing something  ;)

RArcher

Really lovely surfacing, details and atmosphere.  I keep hoping that you will push the dominating mountain further into the background or find an alternate point-of-view and really open the scene up with a great vista.

choronr

I agree with Ryan. A better balanced point of view might be needed.

Oshyan

Yes, I think a greater sense of scale and distance is needed. But the existing work that's there is fantastic. Highly realistic surfacing, populations, sky, etc. I think you can keep pushing your base realism like this and then maybe finalize your PoV a little later and fine-tune for that specific viewpoint. But if you want to really optimize around the PoV the whole time you'll want to make sure this is how you want the view to be for the final ASAP. I think a change of PoV might be good, but adding mist, etc. might also help enough with the sense of scale, there isn't necessarily one right answer.

- Oshyan

Gannaingh

Changing the POV is worrisome to me primarily because there isn't very much interesting scenery outside the current FOV. ON the right there is an empty plane that stretches for miles and on the left the background mountain just kinda exists without looking overly interesting. I'll whip up a quick panorama of the area tonight.

I have a separate version of the file with only the base terrain dedicated to finding a more interesting POV, but I haven't been successful yet. In lieu of that I've been exploring the route that Oshyan suggested of optimizing all the shaders, objects, etc. and then incorporating a better POV when/if I find one.

That you for the constructive criticism, it is really helpful with forcing me to push boundaries that I wouldn't think of myself!

gregtee

This was my earlier crit.  I really like and appreciate the overall work done, but the composition doesn't really do anything for me.  It feels like a crop in of a much larger frame. 
Supervisor, Computer Graphics
D I G I T A L  D O M A I N

TheBadger

I also want to encourage you to alter the frame.

And, is it just my monitor or has the image gotten much darker? (I hate this monitor, I am never sure of what I see). It looks to me that it got darker and more saturated. But rather than more color being added it looks like the color was altered in post... I think its not helping.
It has been eaten.

j meyer

I for one like the scene and pov as it is.
Personally I would add maybe a rock or so to the foreground
and something like a house or some animal or whatever to the
opposite side of the water to have some point of interest the
eye can go to.Just my two cents.
Keep it up!

Gannaingh

No luck yet finding a better scene or POV. The big problem seems to be that my entire setup is based around a scene built at this particular distance from the main focus, aka the mountain, and that most of the other potential vistas do not look nearly as good due to scaling issues. Since the deadline is approaching I'm probably going to stick with the current POV with some minor alterations. I'm increasing the FOV and turning the camera a bit to the left to show more background mountains and to give the scene better rule of thirds proportions.

otakar

Gulp! This is amazing. Since I enjoy looking at mountains, this POV seems just fine to me, but then again, I have no vote :) The details and variety you managed to get into this scene are exemplary. I would probably have the same issue, lots of the masking and surfacing (and populations) are dependent on what area the camera covers, once you move that there are many adjustments necessary. But you still have time given that you are already at this stage in the project.

Tangled-Universe

Nice work so far, to say the least :)

I think the sense of scale would improve of smaller wave size and also some wind patches for added realism and interest.

What I also like about a lot of Icelandic scenes is the variation in colours. There's quite nice variation now with all the greens, but perhaps some more yellows or (gold) browns may work.
Difficult to explain, perhaps I should post an example.
Edit: Thinking about this part. I think there's actually too much coverage of the greens. How does it look when there's more exposed rock and grit and stones?

Another suggestion is to make more use of the erosion patterns and their masks to do interesting things with terrain details and shading.
Is it WM erosion or TG erosion?
If it's TG erosion then you can duplicate the erosion node and set the mode to "difference (erosion field)" to extract a mask from the erosion.
If you're a nerd like me ;) you can also perform a subtraction of the displacement before and after erosion and derive the mask procedurally, allowing you to only deal with one erosion node. /nerd

Quote from: darthvader1 on January 20, 2015, 08:17:44 PM
No luck yet finding a better scene or POV. The big problem seems to be that my entire setup is based around a scene built at this particular distance from the main focus, aka the mountain, and that most of the other potential vistas do not look nearly as good due to scaling issues. Since the deadline is approaching I'm probably going to stick with the current POV with some minor alterations. I'm increasing the FOV and turning the camera a bit to the left to show more background mountains and to give the scene better rule of thirds proportions.

I often have the feeling, totally lacking any evidence, that many people use the default camera focal length and only move the camera around.
There's a lot you can do for sense of scale with camera focal length.
So perhaps there are possibilities you haven't considered yet, or may be you did?

Gannaingh

Martin, thank you for your input!

The water could certainly use some attention since I've been largely ignoring it recently. Some  wind patchiness could be a nice touch. Surprisingly, the surface shaders aren't "green" they're all browns and have RGB values with higher levels of red than green.

I've come to the conclusion that the green is enhanced by the blue of the atmosphere making the greens overpower the reds and browns. Some experimentation could be in order on that front. I could do some work to make the greens and object populations more patchy / restrict their slope, but in my initial tests in reduced the prominence of the strata so I kept it at the current levels.

The erosion is from WM and is currently being experimented with ,aka I have that file open as I type, and I hope to achieve...different results, more flow and less straightness in the erosion channels.

I've experimented with an ok variety of focal lengths ranging from about 30 to 65ish mm. One of my personal flaws in terragen is that I have a noticeable tendency to stick the camera at my eye level as if I were taking a picture while standing. Some more interesting camera placement could be in order ;).


Also, here is the latest render fresh off the hard drive. There is a curious anomaly along the far mountains which is caused by the thick cloud layer. It is at what, at least mathematically, should be the lower boundary of the cloud layer but I have no idea why it wasn't visible before or any idea on what is causing it. So much to do!