The Long Wait

[WAS]

Incredible! There looks to be a subtle chromatic aberration effect, can I ask how this was achieved?

There is indeed Chromatic Aberration. I am glad you guys wonder about it, I wanted it to be subtle enough.
This was added in post in Nuke using this plugin

Wow, it looks great. If anything like the CA is like a expensive DSLR sensor gets these days, very subtle indeed.

Thanks for sharing that script too, cause I can port that to HLSL.

[KyL]

You're welcome. It's one of my favorite plugins, very simple and it does a great job!

[RogueNZ]

I'm not a Nuke user, but am desperate to find an equivalent effect for Photoshop! Thanks for your explanation

[Kadri]

This looks wonderful.

[Tangled-Universe]

Fantastic work, I really love it!
Great photorealism!

Could you elaborate a bit on your Nuke workflow besides adding a bit of CA?
Anything special with regards to exposure/colour?

Also, did you model the astronaut/pilot?
My hands are itching to give this scene a take with my new render monster

[KyL]

Thanks.

My workflow in Nuke is not crazy, I use it to mimic what would happen with a real camera essentially.
First thing I do is creating a fake "LUT" to mimic a real camera behavior. This soften the high values in a similar fashion to what Terragen does in the render view (I wish I could have the exact match though). I also lift the black a touch to be sure that nothing in the picture is totally black.

The biggest thing I do in comp is the Depth of Field, as the one straight out of Terragen still presents artifacts. I like to be able to adjust it afterwards also.
Then I added a subtle lens flare, a soft glint on the highlights, a slight vignetting effect and a camera grain. And a tiny increase in contrast at the end.

That's all. Basically just adding this tiny imperfection we miss from the raw render. I didn't use any passes, except the depth for the defocus of course. All the colors are untouched and straight from the cg render.

I used nuke non-commercial for it and was never bothered by its limitation. This is an awesome tool if some of you guys are curious about.

I bought the Pilot here. I strongly recommend this guy work, this is really well made and totally worth it for the price!

I'm curious to see how fast this would run on your machine too. I am rendering a sequence at the moment, but I will see if I can arrange that once this is done.

[Oshyan]

First thing I do is creating a fake "LUT" to mimic a real camera behavior. This soften the high values in a similar fashion to what Terragen does in the render view (I wish I could have the exact match though). I also lift the black a touch to be sure that nothing in the picture is totally black.

This might help:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?msg=171538


- Oshyan

[KyL]

Nice! Thanks for the link, this will come in very handy...

[Dune]

What are the limitations of that Nuke version? Size?

[KyL]

It's fully detailed on the link I gave, but mainly you can't render higher than 1920*1080 and can't use third-party plugins.

[archonforest]

Great render!

[Dune]

Thanks, KyL.

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks.

My workflow in Nuke is not crazy, I use it to mimic what would happen with a real camera essentially.
First thing I do is creating a fake "LUT" to mimic a real camera behavior. This soften the high values in a similar fashion to what Terragen does in the render view (I wish I could have the exact match though). I also lift the black a touch to be sure that nothing in the picture is totally black.

The biggest thing I do in comp is the Depth of Field, as the one straight out of Terragen still presents artifacts. I like to be able to adjust it afterwards also.
Then I added a subtle lens flare, a soft glint on the highlights, a slight vignetting effect and a camera grain. And a tiny increase in contrast at the end.

That's all. Basically just adding this tiny imperfection we miss from the raw render. I didn't use any passes, except the depth for the defocus of course. All the colors are untouched and straight from the cg render.

I used nuke non-commercial for it and was never bothered by its limitation. This is an awesome tool if some of you guys are curious about.

I bought the Pilot here. I strongly recommend this guy work, this is really well made and totally worth it for the price!

I'm curious to see how fast this would run on your machine too. I am rendering a sequence at the moment, but I will see if I can arrange that once this is done.

Thanks KyL!

I'm slightly surprised to see you're using nuke for depth of field generation.
It goes against my intuition and understanding of what depth of field is -and how you calculate it in a renderer- that you choose to use a depth-map, which is basically only information along one axis.
Your render quality is great, so I'm surprised to read that TG's dof gave artefacts. In lens calculated dof should always be superior, so I wonder if Matt is using some aggressive optimizations which may cause this.

Thanks for pointing out the models. I bought it immediately and then realized I'd need to rig it, dang!
I also bought his most recent model, the orange one, looks really great and I have some ideas for it. Also needs rigging *shrugs and sighs* haha

It would be awesome if I could check it out on my new machine, so please drop me a line.

We could also do a collab if you have time/interest and perhaps use the other model. Just throwing some ideas here

[cyphyr]

I often find that Terragens default set up for outputting a Depth render layer is not that good.

This is down to it's far clipping distance being at 1e+016.
Realistic DoF only really happens relatively near the camera.
When focusing on a relatively close object he difference in blur to something that is 100m from the camera and 1000m from the camera is minimal. Whereas the difference in blur between 1m, 5m and 15m is much more noticeable.

Dropping this down to a far clip that is just touching the horizon (maybe 10000) or even closer gives the grey scale depth pass much more detail.
Of course this would have to be done as a second pass as you wouldn't want to mess up the original render with a small far clipping distance.

[WAS]

I often find that Terragens default set up for outputting a Depth render layer is not that good.

This is down to it's far clipping distance being at 1e+016.
Realistic DoF only really happens relatively near the camera.
When focusing on a relatively close object he difference in blur to something that is 100m from the camera and 1000m from the camera is minimal. Whereas the difference in blur between 1m, 5m and 15m is much more noticeable.

Dropping this down to a far clip that is just touching the horizon (maybe 10000) or even closer gives the grey scale depth pass much more detail.
Of course this would have to be done as a second pass as you wouldn't want to mess up the original render with a small far clipping distance.

Maybe Oshyan or Matt can chime in, but I think the default DoF is setup for landscapes, sweeping vistas, etc. Take this image for example, it has a large depth of field, with the foreground and close background in focus. The horizon is slightly out of focus. It looks wonderful and definitely draws your attention to what's meant to be focused on in the scene. Though it admittedly was a bit windy for this sort of exposure when they did this lol

TG out of the box with the default scene gives you a large landscape scene 10m off the ground.