Forest path

[cocateho26]

Newest iteration: tweaked the path, added a few things. and less heavy on the postwork than before... more balance I think.

[cocateho26]

And a darker more cinematic look... my personal preference with this one.

[Hannes]

Beautiful! Well done. Honestly, I like the first one better. You can see more of the bark and some more details.

[mhaze]

Lovely work!

[DocCharly65]

Great new version - both. I like that glow of the foliage.

[cocateho26]

And one more version, a bit different. Got to tinkering with image maps for the path. I think this will be final for now, time to move on to something different!

[sboerner]

Beautiful work. Wish I were there.

[DocCharly65]

Very nice version. I like the details of the path whith it's little branches etc.

[cocateho26]

Calling this final... I thought 1080p res wasn't really picking up the details of the path and it looks like I was right. Jumped up to 3k and dropped detail and AA a bit... glad I just switched to 32gb ram I was running close to 16gb or slightly over for most of the render. 

On another note, those of you that typically render high resolution, what kind of settings do you use/feel you can get away with when going for 3-4k+ over standard HD?

[Dune]

Very nice render, though I still find it very dark. Just noticed the cyclist, and a cat(?) crossing the path.

I do 5000-8000 wide renders quite often and usually use 0.5 and AA6, hardly ever touch the default settings, as they mostly suit. Of course higher AA gives a bit nicer foliage, but only a bit, IMO. Nothing you'd sleep less for

[WAS]

Very nice render, though I still find it very dark. Just noticed the cyclist, and a cat(?) crossing the path.

I do 5000-8000 wide renders quite often and usually use 0.5 and AA6, hardly ever touch the default settings, as they mostly suit. Of course higher AA gives a bit nicer foliage, but only a bit, IMO. Nothing you'd sleep less for

You can also lower pixel noise threshold on AA6 a little bit and get a cleaner result without being as long as AA7. Been noticing this for PT renders. Been helping. Where AA7 seems to drag this helps.

This scene looks pretty good to my eye on the new render. And I'm on my phone at 30% brightness on 4k. It looks pretty real. In fact I think for a photo there would be more light glare on the lens spreading into the darkness muddling it in haze so this is a good middle ground.

[Hannes]

This is really beautiful. The lighting looks realistic to me (on my screen at least). To make the woman and the cat more visible, you could play just a little bit with the heading and elevtion of the sun. Maybe you'll find a sun position, that's more or less similar to yours, where your protagonists get some sun?

[Hannes]

...or maybe reposition the guys?

[cocateho26]

Thanks for the tips guys! I'm going to try rendering some things higher res (still can't go over 5k, but that's more than plenty for my ol' 6700k to handle). This time around I noticed knocking settings down just a bit made it so the jump in resolution only took about 50% longer when I thought I'd be in for a marathon of a render. The original 1080p was Detail 0.75 AA 10 (the shadows keeps coming out grainy, but now that WAS mentioned it I wonder if changing the noise threshold may have been a better tactic. The 3k version was rendered at detail .65 AA 8.

Hannes - The lady on the bike and the puppy were kept in the shadow on purpose... They're both 2D cards and I couldn't get the lighting to look like they "fit", but I still wanted something to be going on in the scene. If you look closely at the right of the path there's a bunny watching them ready to bolt.

[Hannes]

Aaaah, I see!!   That's kind of cool! Well, I agree, the lighting wouldn't be appropriate, but I like the idea!
And now, that you mention it, I spotted the rabbit!