The Lost Forests of Iceland

[zaxxon]

Well...there was no limitation in the Contest rules stating only 'contemporary' Iceland images, so I've decided to use Mr. Peabody's "Way-Back Machine" and travel to Iceland about 2,000 years ago, long before the industrious Vikings devastated the eco-system. It was actually Oshyan who coined this title in an earlier post  .  So this is an Iceland with trees and forests, which gives me a chance to play with some snow laden trees. These are just sketches and not preliminary lay-outs. Thanks to Choronr and Markal for their work on creating some really fine auroras and specially to Bob for some additional insights and files sent my way. Guy's if any part of lights that I do look good that's from Bob and Mark, the funky, that would be my doing :

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,11825.15.html

Still pretty early in the aurora experiments, these things take forever to render, even with reduced settings. The trees are a variant on the Blue Spruce from the Speedtree Library. The terrain was made in World Machine . I'm usually reluctant to post wip's, but I believe that is part of the spirit of these competitions  .

[Oshyan]

Promising start! Snow on trees looks pretty cool (particularly in the bottom image), and I love the aurora possibilities. I'd like to see the moon (?) exposure from behind dialed down for that one though, see if you can get the aurora to even light up the landscape a bit.

Also if the render times are too long (and I do remember them being long for Bob's file), I may be able to help with an aurora setup of my own. I think it'd be faster rendering. PM or email me for details.

- Oshyan

[zaxxon]

Oshyan, yeah that one definitely has a pronounced glow, I have some tweaking to do with aurora's (duh!), but that little image at det .45 and AA 6, even with reducing Bob's setup (which I've now scrambled beyond recognition) from cloud quality of 40 to 24, and atmo quality from 256 to 128 took almost 14 hours on my 6 core machine (sheesh!). Here's a cruddy resolution test that has the terrain lit with some of the aurora, that's a definite factor that would be included in any final renders. Thanks for the offer!

[Oshyan]

Ooo, I like that last-posted image. More dramatic camera angle, aurora more highlighted. Hmm!

Those settings are pretty crazy, so yeah. This might be a situation for Defer Atmo. Or maybe you can experiment with my aurora setup, it's a bit different-looking than Bob's, but may also serve the purpose...

- Oshyan

[choronr]

Hey Doug, those are really looking fine. Sorry for the long renders, I have a bad habit of doing that. I've always liked the undulating drape effect of auroras. Reflective snow should capture some of the light of the aurora.

BTW, what is your cache size?

Keep on...

Bob

[TheBadger]

Like image 2 a lot. All cool so far though.

[Dune]

Thanks for showing these WIP's. I do think it's nice to see some development instead of just a finished render, though posting an absolutely stunning render without warning is fun too. I can't remember my aurora's took that long, but then again, I don't make the clouds really stratospheric(cally high).

This is looking really good, I particularly like the second render. If you can get some really nice hard and soft snow shapes on the ground with some glistening (hard and maybe unnatural with backlight though) it will be really nice.

[Kadri]

Those renders do look nice and nearly finished.

[mhaze]

Great work, especially the last one. Regarding the render speeds of the Aurora Borealis if you remove all warping from the PFs other than the one redirecting the main shapes it will speed up considerably. I'm using a quality value of 4 for the clouds.  Its getting the clouds to light the landscape I'm struggling with.