Fog Valley

[moodflow]

Well this one didn't come out as hoped, but I figured I would stick it out.  The cracks on the ridges are WAY too overpowering and regular, as I forgot to break it up a bit.  And I should go back and fix it. 

But after a "combined" rendertime time of 232 hours and 23 mins (for 800x600 @ quality 0.8 ), I think I'll live with this image as-is, for now.

I rendered this on 4 cores (so it effectively only cost me 96hr, 26mn).  I am very confident the culprit was the population of pines in the valley.  I used a large pine tree model with some custom complex tweaks in the object shaders for added realism.  Additionally, I noticed the populations behind the mountains were also rendered (no way around it on this image), adding to the time significantly.  Hopefully they'll have this fixed in the future.

Rendertimes for each core:
core 1:  96hr, 26mn
core 2:  64hr, 1mn
core 3:  37hr, 46mn
core 4:  36hr, 10mn

I am satisfied with the lighting and how the snow sticks to the surfaces.  The foreground pine has custom tweaks to simulate frost and snow on the needles, and this seems to have worked quite well.  Additionally, there are background stars, though hard to see at this resolution. 

Definitely more work to do.

This image uses alot of my older groups setups, which I've since updated.

Attached is a screen of the nodes for anyone who is interested.

[dhavalmistry]

you are right...the voronis seem to be a bit over done....

I love the lighting, atmosphere, clouds and color on middle left mountain.....

what were your GI settings??...and pity about the render time....

[rcallicotte]

Agee with DH, but then the voronoi could be played upon to make it work.  I like the overall scene and it looks real.

[moodflow]

I consulted my inner child for an opinion of this image.  Here is his one word response ---> "sux".

I guess that means, I have more work to do, LOL.   

[Seth]

LOL !

[rcallicotte]

Not a lot of work, in my opinion.  The tree I didn't notice before, but it's out of place.  Otherwise, I think the voronoi could be taken to another level and it would be pretty cool.

[Virex]

Tree's don't go that high, especialy not far above the snow border. Some low-growing vine-like vegitation would be more believable.

As for the vornoi, the cracks are a bit to deep and to dense. Consider making them shalower at the least.

Other then that, Thumbs up through the roof 

[moodflow]

Tree's don't go that high, especialy not far above the snow border. Some low-growing vine-like vegitation would be more believable.

As for the vornoi, the cracks are a bit to deep and to dense. Consider making them shalower at the least.

Other then that, Thumbs up through the roof 

Yea, as stated, I forgot to connect the breakup/distribution of the voronoi.  Well, atleast we know where to go if we need our backs scratched.

As for the tree, I kinda wanted to make it a special case, lonely tree.  I've seen trees this high before while snowboarding, but they are small, infrequent, and look like hell due to the harsh conditions.

New images in the works that employ this and other techniques.  Man, this is a blast!

[schmeerlap]

Overall, I find this an eye pleasing scene with a good pov. Yeh, the lone tree doesn't look right; if not out of place maybe it would look better if it leaned with the slope rather than against it. Making the trunk thinner I believe would give it more appeal proportionally. I'm sure the striations created by the voronoi is fixable, but that's way above my dopey head. And the complexity of your node network is still making my head spin. When you have render times of such length I find it tempting to sneak into Photoshop for some furtive patch and repair that'll only take two or three hours. I might have done a pre-render to see where the mist lay, and then bunged a patch of medium quality firs where they show above the mist.