Rogues Icelandic WIP's

[RogueNZ]

Hi all,

Am going to begin posting my renders as I rush to come up with something quality for the competition, there is no lack of inspiration but I'm finding it hard to put anything nice together.

As for this render, its using the same terrain and surfacing as a previous render I have posted here - is that against contest rules? And I have used Photoshop to adjust using the vibrance/saturation tool.

I plan on replacing the flowers with something more Icelandic, and hope to keep improving the aurora.

Cheers

[Dune]

For a night feel I suggest reducing the saturation of the veggie colors, as at dusk falls you're likely to see less color (using different eye cells). And the stars are very bright in comparison to the light on the terrain.

[TheBadger]

Agree With Dune. But I also think this is a pretty strong image to start with. I like all the parts. Looking forward to see how you finish it!

[DannyG]

Second Badgers comment, strong start

[inkydigit]

Excellent vista, very cool aurora! 

[Gannaingh]

If it turns out even half as beautiful as your scene you're basing it off of, it's going to be spectacular!

[RogueNZ]

Switched it up a little, have tweaked the aurora and am pretty happy with it, rendering a slightly different version again right now. I feel its a bit too dense in places, but I'm scared if I try dropping the density I will loose some of the details on the right hand side of the image. Fortunately I am not having long render issues like some others have had.

Foreground is pretty temporary and will be next on the list of changes. DandelO's sky is super sexy and I couldn't have done anything like this without it, many thanks..

Cheers

[Oshyan]

Hot damn, that's looking really nice! I like the new PoV, and you have a much better sense of distance and scale now. The aurora to me seems a little over the top, this is either a really long exposure, or a geomagnetic super-storm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm#Definition_of_a_geomagnetic_storm


Also it looks like the image overall has been tonemapped, which is fine, but it seems to have possibly done some undesirable things to the highlights in the auroras. If it hasn't been tonemapped, perhaps it's something to do with the mix of colors in the aurora - not impossible, but again a little over the top. Generally the red areas tend to be at the edges, in the less intense areas of the aurora (in fact you hardly ever see super-bright red aurora). The green is what gets really quite bright, so having red within the brightest area may not be ideal.

Finally, yes the foreground. I will say this: mostly you see flowers and other really happy plants in the late spring and summer. However, during these months daylight is much more limited, to the point where in mid-summer it basically never gets dark. So the best time for viewing aurora is winter-to-spring (and maybe late fall). Which is why you mostly see barren or icy foregrounds in Iceland aurora shots. Conversely, in the winter the daytime is very short, and even when the sun is up it is relatively low on the horizon, meaning it doesn't provide as much warmth and energy for plants. Long story short, what you have here may be possible, but unlikely:
http://www.icelandguest.com/travel-guide/about-iceland/iceland-travel-faq/#When%20is%20it%20daylight%20in%20Iceland

One thing I'll say is that this actually reminds me a fair bit of the mountains around Jökulsárlón, the Glacier Lagoon, and if you could successfully depict the lagoon in the foreground with icebergs (don't worry too much, at night the subsurface scattering is much less of a factor), that would be *tremendous*. It's an ambitious thing to tackle however, that must be said. I've attached a couple of as-yet unpublished aurora photos I took at Jökulsárlón on my trip last March for reference (but there are of course better photos on the Internet, try "Jökulsárlón" and "aurora" for keywords).

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

! ! Getting great. Great pics from you too Oshyan.

[Dune]

Good advise, and great pictures, Oshyan.

[Oshyan]

Thanks guys. Just trying to help with some direct reference.

- Oshyan

[RogueNZ]

Thanks all, I wrote a big reply yesterday but forgot to hit submit. In short, I am going down the watery foreground route, will certainly be a lot of work and I've never done anything like that before so just trying to read as much on water and surfacing as I can.

There is an issue when trying to combine water and aurora. To catch and aurora you generally need to take a long exposure shot, and the effect of this on the water is that it blurs. I really like this look but I don't know of any way to achieve it inside Terragen. You find very few aurora photographs where the water looks as crisp as what Terragen renders.

[Oshyan]

I think Soft Reflections might help you deal with that issue. They'll take longer to render, but should get you the correct look for a longer exposure, or close(r) to it.

To set this up, disable reflections in your Water Shader (set Master Reflectivity to 0), then create a Reflective Shader and connect the Water Shader output to the Reflective Shader's input, and then to whatever surface or object you're shading as water (e.g. Lake object). In other words you want the Reflective Shader *between* the Water Shader and your water object.

You want to start with very low values for Reflection Softness (and make sure Raytraced reflections is enabled, but it should be by default). Maybe try 0.002 or 0.004. The quality is controlled by the number of samples in the Quality tab. The default of 4 ought to work for lower softness values, but if your water is extremely rough or small-scale, it may take more samples and consequently more render time. Increment the number of samples slowly, and only if it seems necessary.

- Oshyan

[RogueNZ]

Initial tests show that your suggestion works a treat

[Dune]

What you could also try, and what I wanted to test (some day) anyway, is using clouds for blurred water.