Amateur Hour - Chain of Islands

[pixelpusher636]

I believe this might be my second post after having lurked in the shadows for years. 😀

TL;DR scroll to the last paragraph.

This scene is finally getting on a bit and moving forward now that I FINALLY have some shoreline surf happening.(ish) Thanks to uncountable hours swimming through the forums for information but mostly my thanks goes to Dune and his surf files littered about different forum posts which provided a nice road map to partially demystifying this effect which I find extremely challenging. So thank you Dune!

I have texturing to do yet on that distant island (the others don't matter maybe?) and the understory could use some work. Maybe another variety of palm? Not sure if beached have multiple palm species.. I will have to research. Suggestions welcome.

A specific question I have is how do I get better lighting? I realize I can crank up different settings prolonging my render time but is that the only way? I have sun elevation 30, strength 5.6 everything else I've left default. Environment light, aa, detail are all default. Is that my problem in this particular scene? Thanks in advance!

[Kadri]

Looks good.

[pixelpusher636]

Looks good.

Thank you Kadri.
Any advice for this?

[WAS]

This is a really good start! One thing I could suggest is a more solid dark green on the distant mountains, to give the appearance of dense tropical foliage. Maybe also some softer roughness on the mountains, rounded off by the canopies of trees.

[pixelpusher636]

This is a really good start! One thing I could suggest is a more solid dark green on the distant mountains, to give the appearance of dense tropical foliage. Maybe also some softer roughness on the mountains, rounded off by the canopies of trees.

Agreed WAS, I know my post was a bit winded but in the third paragraph I mentioned this and thought I could get away with only addressing the closest island. What do you think? I think I might need to address the far right island that's cut off as well as it's fairly close. I completely agree further shading is needed. Are you suggesting I use actual trees on those or faking them with shaders?
thanks for your input WAS. 

[WAS]

I think at that distance it's possible to fake the trees. Hold on, I have a demonstration idea.

[Kadri]

Except a little more higher antialiasing and what you and Jordan said, all i have to add would be only subjective,
like testing if clouds would work in your image. Not that you need any.

[sboerner]

Very nice scene. Agree that clouds may not be necessary. (This is paradise, right?) 

Also agree with Kadri on increasing the AA setting. That would help the render quality of the foreground populations. The population shader also has a render quality setting, which you might want to increase to "High" or maybe even "Very High." You may also want to increase the micropoly detail setting, in small increments and render small cropped areas to test. The surf is fantastic, and a higher MPD should let us see more detail there.

Perhaps lower the sun strength back to the default of 5 . . . the background looks a little overexposed. Lower sun angle might be cool, too. But take this bit or leave it, lighting is very subjective and overall the picture already looks good. Wish I were there.

[Dune]

Good to see you post! I agree with Jordan to do something about the islands. Dark greens on the lesser slopes would do probably, depending on how big you want to render finally. If it's going to be very big, you'd best add some populations (of low poly) shrub and trees on low angled areas. Any reference you're trying to mimic? Hawaii?
I would also move the center tree to the side (left I suppose), to get a better foliage composition, a see-through area onto the beach.
And an important thing is the leaves of the palms; they should get more reflection and translucency, both around 0.4 or so, I'd say to begin with.
No problem with the atmo and sun settings, I think.
Oh yes, and to Steve: with ray-tracing the quality settings on the pops are not used: "...The populator's render quality setting only has an effect when "Ray trace objects" is disabled, i.e. using the original micropolygon renderer...."

[pixelpusher636]

Thanks folks for your helpful tips and advice!

I agree this needs to be higher quality though I wasn't sure exactly how to achieve this the correct way. I didn't want to increase render time unnecessarily so these tips are fantastic advice. After all I'm working on a temporary laptop for another week or so isn't ideal and I swear I can hear it screaming, begging me to stop while it renders. with only 4 cores I was trying to get good results conservatively which is why I decided on no cloud(s) — for now anyway. I was curious how that might look or add to the scene.
@sboerner  believe it or not I believe all the close palms are on either "Very High Quality" or "Ultra" which brings in the next amazing "TDIL" moment. @Dune are you telling me that cranking up the quality settings on populations has no effect whatsoever so long as "Ray Trace Objects" is ticked? Incredibly useful to know! Dune I am for sure off to tweak the settings you suggested on the foreground as this is really what has been troubling me, I mean badly troubling me and I think these changes might just put my mind at ease so I can start working on the foreground.
@sboerner I will also be experimenting with the sun altitude. A higher aa and detail will come at some point when I think that the lighting and composition of the foreground is in check. I did a crop render yesterday with path tracer and the result confirmed what I was thinking. This laptop would die if I wanted to use it effectively as it was lit very well but very noisy since my sampling and aa were down so low.

Thanks again for the tips, kind words and encouragement folks. I shall post results from your suggestions when I have them.

[sboerner]

with ray-tracing the quality settings on the pops are not used

Ah, OK that makes sense. Probably in that category of things I once knew and then forgot. (And there are many such things.   )


Good luck with the image, pixelpusher. Please post updates!

[pixelpusher636]

Well those tweaks definitely helped in the lighting but I was really expecting to have a little shine on the leaves from the reflective shader. I even bumped up to 0.5 just to see if that would help but alas, no specular or reflective activity. At least not how I'd expect. It is possible I did something wrong. I connected a reflective shader inside the Palm network and attached to the reflectivity function of each leafs default shader.

[sboerner]

Are you rendering this with the path tracer? What is the default shader's roughness value? Try lowering that without using a reflective shader, it may be all you need.

[WAS]

I tried to do some distance fake vegetation for you, and honestly, it's just not usable at high resolutions. In the free versions, with low resolution and AA tricks, it's kinda OK, but not realistic or anything and would clash with your foreground.

You're better off probably decimating some of your models into "LOD" versions to use at great distances (that way they don't impact too much on RAM/Populating)

[pixelpusher636]

@sboerner no. I only did a small crop render to confirm my suspicion regarding aa settings and laptop handling it.

@WAS Thank you for your attempt Sir. Your helping really shines in the forums!

I will just have to LOD the Hell out of that distant island then. Final render will definitely be large enough to expose any shading cheats of that magnitude. 😀 Thanks again WAS