Using fake stone as trees (my first finished scene)

[Njen]

I finally finished my first scene. I wanted sort of an unreal element to the landscape, in the hopes it looks a little more fantasy-ish, hence the cloud formations and the terrain shape. Sure there are a few bits and pieces I can play around with until the cows come home, but I think it's more important to leave it and move onto my next piece. There is a touch of Photoshop in there.

One thing I'd like to mention is that the forest was created using the Fake Stones Shader. While I think it kind of falls apart the closer it gets to camera, which is expected, it does a great job in the distance of looking like a bunch of trees. And I probably saved a bunch of time taken to render in doing so.

Scene stats:
Detail: 0.75
AA: 8
Cloud and Atmosphere Samples: 64
(Athlon 64 3700+)
This scene weighed in at 4 hours to render, but I think that mainly has to do with turning on ray tracing in the atmosphere. Turning it off would not make a big difference to the image, though would have probably saved a half the time (but I was rendering it overnight, so the extra time didn't matter to me).

Enjoy!

[littlecannon]

Interesting way to use stones... your right, from a distance they look good. Nice Image.

[Phizzog]

Very nice, I like it. Fake trees look very good.

[RealUser]

Nice idea (fakestones) and good render. You can fake shrubbery tooo with the fakestones shader. Use very little feature scale with strong displacement (radius of the stone for example). From the distance, the stones look like bushes.

[buchvecny]

im wondering how u made the sky :S

[Njen]

In the Density Shader for the clouds, I altered the Noise Stretch XYZ in the Tweak Noise tab. I am at work and I don't have the scene in front of me, but it was something like (0.12, 3, 3). Then I put the coverage to something like -1.2. After that it was just a matter of increasing the contrast, decreasing the roughness and decreasing the Edge Sharpness. Even though TG2 told me that I only needed 20 samples or so to get my quality of clouds over 1, in reality, because the noise was stretched so much, I had to put the samples to something like 64 (quality was somewhere around 5).

If you want, when I get home I can post the clouds as a file

[RedSquare]

Hey! njen, great minds think alike, also on my first render and my clouds are almost the same. 

[crazymonkey]

cool idea with the stones, and the clouds! great work.

[Oshyan]

Love the sky. Cool idea with the stones as well. I'm not sure that rendering real tree instances would have taken much longer, TG2 is actually surprisingly efficient with instance rendering, but it's a good technique regardless.

- Oshyan

[Ricowan]

The thing that makes this more useful than a proper tree population is there's no need to size and position a population, determine object spacing/rotation/scaling, etc.  Very cool idea!

[gerryR]

live the sky, clouds are SIC 

[Volker Harun]

Cool idea with the fake tree shader ,-) The sky is great though I am getting sick, thinking of the chemestry inside aeroplanes' fuel.

[Dark Fire]

Great colours, and I like the clouds...