New Computer = A Return to Terragen

[blattacker]

Well, it finally happened, I finally got to upgrade my AMD FX-6100 rig to a more modern build. There's a lot of things I'd still like to upgrade (I bought a lower end prebuilt so I could upgrade it), but the new machine has significantly more processing power (and cores) than the previous build, so I thought it was a good time to make my way back to environment design. This project started out as trying to figure out a good workflow in World Machine to create realistic convergent plate mountain ranges, but that fell through pretty quickly. Instead, it became a month-long project to get better at texturing in Terragen. Heightmap comes from World Machine, almost everything else was done in Terragen, with some minor post processing done in Photoshop (primarily applying a LUT and adding some lens artifacts). Let me know what you think! As a bit of an aside, if anyone knows a good method to stop Photoshop crushing shadows to almost pure black when converting from 32/16-bit to 8-bit, let me know!

[Dune]

Congratulations on the new rig.
Regarding the render; I can say "very nice", but I think an honest answer is more beneficial. Then I would say "you can do better". I don't think you need a WM terrain, as this can be made in TG as well. The vegetation is a bit undefined and only one species(?). And I can't really see what the front lower area is, a lake? Perhaps another POV would be better, or losing some of the trees and replace by barren areas, or grassy alpine slopes.
Texturing of the rock is nicely done, but I think you should concentrate on building terrains in TG, and see what can be done internally.
I hope you don't mind my 'harsh' words, they are well-meant.

[blattacker]

Regarding the render; I can say "very nice", but I think an honest answer is more beneficial. Then I would say "you can do better". I don't think you need a WM terrain, as this can be made in TG as well.

I appreciate the honest response! In regards to using TG to sculpt the terrain, I tend to stick with World Machine because it's what I'm most familiar with. With World Machine, if I have an idea of what I'm trying to do, I generally have a solid idea of exactly how to accomplish it before even opening the software. I'm not quite at that point with Terragen, though I'm improving every day. That being said, no offense to the developers of Terragen, but I do prefer the look of World Machine's erosion devices, and I haven't been able to get similar results with Terragen's.

The vegetation is a bit undefined and only one species(?). And I can't really see what the front lower area is, a lake? Perhaps another POV would be better, or losing some of the trees and replace by barren areas, or grassy alpine slopes.

Weirdly, there are 5 different species of trees present, each with a further 5 different versions of the model (SpeedTree makes it easy to quickly create multiple variations on the same plant). I do agree that they all look similar in this. I seem to be having problems with the .mtl files SpeedTree exported with the models, so it's possible that they're all just getting the same generic material applied, but I'm not positive. The lower area is indeed a lake, and it was a bit more obvious before the Photoshop process. The LUT was not super kind to it, but I liked the overall look, so I just kinda stuck with it. I can definitely try some different angles, though!

I can also very easily make some grassy alpine slopes, there is a ton of ground cover populations that I didn't find out until rendering were completely hidden by the trees, so it'd be a simple matter of adjusting the tree populations a bit to expose more of that, I'll give it a try!

Texturing of the rock is nicely done, but I think you should concentrate on building terrains in TG, and see what can be done internally.

Thank you! The rock texture is something I've been working on for what feels like forever. I definitely want to get better at working completely in Terragen, since procedural is my preferred way to work. Right now, it's just convincing myself to get outside of my comfort zone. I've been dipping my toes in the water by rendering out lower detail heightmaps from World Machine (essentially just basic shapes with no surface detail) and using Terragen to refine the surfaces, but I'm having a bit of a rough go of it. I'll probably spend my next "Work on Environment Design" day watching/reading some tutorials to try to get a better handle on it. World Machine might always be my first love, though, ahaha!

I hope you don't mind my 'harsh' words, they are well-meant.

I don't mind at all! This is exactly the kind of feedback I always hope for! I think sometimes my responses come across as trying to give excuses, but it's really more of just explaining my process/thoughts. It's literally been responses like these that are the reason I've been able to improve over time, and have been able to work at it enough to realize Environment Design might be more my jam than VFX, as far as dream careers go.

[Dune]

Good!

Speedtree is excellent indeed. But you may need to check the internals of the objects, also for reflectivity and translucency... and color variation!

I can imagine when you're familiar with WM, you stick with it, but it would really be worthwhile to first try to make the 'empty' terrain you need in TG (perhaps with a bit of help from here, if needed), and then introduce the excellent erosion plugin of Daniil. It might surprise you.

[blattacker]

Going through, it looks like SpeedTree exported a part in the .mtl with no associated textures on it with several of the models, which was what was throwing up the warnings in Terragen. Manually edited the .mtl files and things seem to be working properly now! I'm running a quick render to see if that fixes the "sameness" my different trees were experiencing. Failing that, though, my plan is to pipe in a couple pf shaders to the color function on the leaf parts, which should provide enough variation to visually separate the trees a bit more, since that will probably be quicker than opening up 25 different models in SpeedTree and varying the colors ahaha

Looking up the erosion plugin you mentioned, I'm definitely going to have to give that a try! Just looking at the preview images, it seems much closer to the erosion I've come to expect from World Machine, and it has thermal erosion, which is something I could never figure out how to do in Terragen!

[blattacker]

Adding a (probably final) comment to ask a question that I don't feel merits an entirely new topic: I'm working on a scene done completely in Terragen (and discovering that function nodes were a major missing component in my previous attempts at working completely in Terragen), but I've noticed that render times are significantly increased when working fully procedurally, even before textures/shaders or atmospherics are worked on. Is this to be expected? I'm using simple shape shaders to mask out areas so only visible portions have any displacement applied to them, but that doesn't seem to help at all. I imagine this is a result of all the calculations being done at render time, rather than having the base map be partially processed already with a heightmap, as well as the increased fine detail level, but I wanted to double check that I'm not doing things in an non-optimal way. A similar heightmap built in World Machine takes about 35 seconds to render in Terragen with no shaders/atmospherics applied, whereas the fully Terragen version takes upwards of 2-3 minutes. I can provide the project file if anyone wants to take a close look at it (it was made following the TerraTuts Cliff tutorial, and only differs by adding some additional perlin noise lateral displacement along the cliff face).

[WAS]

Some blue nodes can make things slower, but also, I think a more important aspect is the scale of functions. Take mixing in different scale noises, if you're scaling down, the smallest scale may become so small the renderer is wasting time on detail you're not even seeing due to camera position.