North American Mystery Island

[Marty]

Wanted to make a dark B&W of a very basic Terragen scene: Just added trees, water, clouds and some terrain color. Birds and most B&W work done in PS.

But more than just sharing some basic work I have a question: If I wanna make great mountain/rock surfaces in Terragen: Like a somewhat close scene of a desert mountain or a grey rock mountain: Is there any turtorials, resourses, clips files I can study? Great surface sis what I wanna do more than anything else in Terragen. Thanks for any answer!

[Marty]

I know how to make some basic surfaces, but I wanna know if there is some resources out there on making different kinds of real looking mountain rock? Again thanks in advance

[N810]

yea, there are lots of them,
But they are not very organized,
you might try a bunch of forum searches. 

[Marty]

Oki. My Terragen got a problem. What I wanted was to make the water reflect the mountains above, but as you see: They reflect something else (if you look at the mountain tops). This is an image of the water turned upside down so you can see (compare to the mountain in the B&W-image above). Something is wrong

[Oshyan]

For resources, check out NWDA: http://www.nwdastore.com/

Regarding your reflection issue, it *is* rendering the reflection of your scene, but at a lower detail. Normally water is rough enough that you don't see such issues and so the default settings are optimized for faster rendering. Rendering full detail in reflections is slower, but in the case of very, very smooth water it is needed of course. To fix it you would need to change the Ray Detail Multiplier in the Render Subdiv Settings node *inside* the Renderer node. So click the Renderer node in the node list, click the Gear icon at the top-right of the settings window and choose Edit Internal Network, OR right-click the Renderer node in the node network view and select Internal Network. Then in the internal network view find the Render Subdiv Settings node and increase Ray Detail Multiplier to 1.

- Oshyan

[Marty]

Hehehe I knew you had the solution Oshyan: Thanks! I will learn that for my next one (wanted to know if you could get better water reflection anyway), but this beeing such an easy scene I just did it in Photoshop (this time only I promise). But here is what I wanted to do:

[TheBadger]

looks really nice.

[Kadri]

Looks good.

[Matt]

For resources, check out NWDA: http://www.nwdastore.com/

Regarding your reflection issue, it *is* rendering the reflection of your scene, but at a lower detail. Normally water is rough enough that you don't see such issues and so the default settings are optimized for faster rendering. Rendering full detail in reflections is slower, but in the case of very, very smooth water it is needed of course. To fix it you would need to change the Ray Detail Multiplier in the Render Subdiv Settings node *inside* the Renderer node. So click the Renderer node in the node list, click the Gear icon at the top-right of the settings window and choose Edit Internal Network, OR right-click the Renderer node in the node network view and select Internal Network. Then in the internal network view find the Render Subdiv Settings node and increase Ray Detail Multiplier to 1.

- Oshyan

The ray detail multiplier might be OK here, depending on the roughness of the water. But in this scene the ray detail region needs to be padded to include the region outside of the camera view. The setting you want to change is "Ray detail region padding" in the render node's Advanced tab. A value of 0.5 will probably be enough.

Matt

[Matt]

Also, in that test render, the render is cropped to only the lake. That means that the whole mountain is outside of the crop, so with default settings it's outside of the ray detail region. This means you also need to switch the "Ray detail region" to "Detail in camera".

Matt

[Marty]

Thanks Matt (and again: Thanks Oshyan). Really appreciate your good answers. I see you both work at Planetside so I just have to say this: Terragen is amazing!

[Matt]

Thanks

[inkydigit]

Looking really nice....