News from the canyon

[DocCharly65]

After some weeks (only partially successful) render time for my canyon animations, I tackled the thing differently.
The terrain with 100 km² is just too big to get one perfect flight through the canyon.
Too much populations and detail work necessary and even my core i7 feels sick while working on the terrain
Last week a friend asked, why I don't play batman anymore with the new PC and I told him "I planted 5 million grass"
- yes - in this grammatically wrong way ... sounds sooo funny - even in German language 

I will need to do smaller areas and shorter scenes.
... and  so I found nice new details, new solutions --- and this nice little mountain lake on the tableau above the river:

[attach=1]


Here is the view when you have almost arrived at the lake:

[attach=2]


And here you can get a little imagination how big the terrain is:
This weekend I will modify some of the pop-rocks. I don't like direction size and the look of some of them and learned last days that you can modify single objects of a population...

[attach=3]


Here is what I did the last 3 weeks... i like the sunrise but I will have to work on it... still not satisfied. And I am little proud on the water movement but I will change some details.

[Oshyan]

This looks very promising. I am personally a fan of having more cuts and shorter pieces rather than one big, long flight, so this works in my favor. And you're right, it's also just difficult to really make a super long camera move work well throughout.

Regarding the new scene, it looks nice. I think just some of the vegetation looks a bit oddly colored, too much yellow perhaps, but definitely too much saturation on some of the trees/bushes. Otherwise looking pretty good though. I look forward to seeing it animated.

- Oshyan

[Marty]

Awesome animation!

[Marty]

I'm no expert Oshyan, but cant one take down specific color saturations in After Effect like in Photoshop? Or do you have to rerender?

[Oshyan]

Doing color adjustment for a specific tree or species might be tricky on a still image, but certainly possible. On an animation it'd be harder, but possible do-able with more advanced composing or video editing software like Nuke or After Effects.

- Oshyan

[DocCharly65]

Thanks Oshyan & Marty 

I think that you mean the "Umbrella_Magnolia" in the forground of the second picture?

[attach=1]
I have already started to set back the diffuse color to the original "grey"
For most of objects and plants I set it to almost white, because I didn't like the dusty colorless grey look.
But you're right - especially the yellow is too much.
Here I damped the saturation of the "yellow trees":
[attach=2]


In the first picture this "Umbrella_Magnolia" doesn't appear.


The pictures show two different scenes:
01 scene rising from the grass up into sky for a look over the small lake
02 & 03 scene flying from the river towards the lake.

I hope in the next months I will understand some more about Hannes  mesh displacer:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,19028.0.html.
Then I could try the scene 01 with slightly moving grass... 

For the water animation I found a great starting point for my experiments:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,16104.0.html

[alessandro]

Great WIP, the water flow is indeed remarkable.

[Oshyan]

Yes, that updated version is better with the saturation. Still seems a bit yellow to me (would be interesting to see a real-life photo example of that tree). But maybe some color variation would help.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Very cool. Hope you take this as far as you can.

[Hannes]

Agree with Oshyan. Color variation would be great. And as far as I can see you used only two species for this image. Maybe some more would make it look a bit more natural and "chaotic".

[DocCharly65]

Thanks for the suggestions 

I'll improve the mixture of trees a bit, once I know my collection of objects better. I have used a couple of magnolia, a few elm trees, bushes and bare bushes. The rest are two variants grass, some ferns and sporadically prairieroses. I hope with this jumble of plants I don't offend any botanist.

But now I first must wait again some days because yesterday I started my next... lets call it "feasibility study" 

After that I want to do more changes:
In my animation I am proud of the first little success with fakestones on one side but on the other side I think I will change the riverside completely.
I want to change the riverside into the look of the lakeside (in the first pic on the top of this topic).
E.g. in the animation I don't like the single tufts of tall grass together with the rice leaves in the water.

Does somebody agree with me to go in this direction?

[DocCharly65]

Last days I worked on the complete redesign of the canyon scenery... This is the result. Smoothing shader on the terrain, 30.000.000  instances of plants... will be funny to animate it
But I am in good mood and I like this river course with some hills much more than my older concept of the canyon.

I needed many tryouts until the trees had a uniform size ratio. I used mostly xfrog-plants: Sweet Birch, Umbrella Magnolia, OC06_5 (Bare bushes), Sessile Oak, an three types of grass. Also I changed the remains of the fence to a texture bleached and weathered by the sun. The balloons are unchanged.. even same place

I think an animation with the sun rising between the hills (direct under the two balloons will look nice). At the moment I do some experiments with the sun-disc and some clouds.

But the late morning scene is quite OK in my eyes.
Hope the redesign is the right way?

[attach=1]

[Dune]

It's getting better and better.