Mountain Path

[Dune]

Here's something with an extra sun, overhead at strength 0.1 and no shadows. It lightens up the darkest darks. I also have the opacity of the leaves/needles at 0.85 and a bit of reflection (0.1 at roughness 0.2), and a bit of translucency (0.2).
With no extra sun the darks were just too dark, which was especially noticable under the cart and in the shadows from the bush there.

[Hannes]

I have to say, I'm still not convinced by the "no shadows sun" method. It looks a bit flat to me. At the moment I'm rendering a little hollow hemisphere test file for Paul's image. I'll post it, when it's finished.

[Hannes]

Maybe you already took a look in Paul's thread. I tested the methods, and to my taste the hemisphere method gives the most realistic result (as long as there is no water!!! )

[Hannes]

Oh, and by the way: a fantastic image!!!!! I love it!

[Dune]

Thanks, and I did take a look and you convinced me of the hemisphere method, but still; I'm very impatient, so don't like rendertimes to be any longer than needed. Maybe I'll test a part of this scene with the luminous globe, and without extra sun, to check out differences.
What I do use sometimes is an invisible card (luminous of just white or a bit reflective) to light up areas that I find too dark, locally. And very subtly.

Btw. the rockwall on the right bugs me. I don't like it, so I used some local extra definition (by projected SSS, and vdisp, so I didn't have to use a compute terrain), but it's not to my liking yet.

[Dune]

Some extra tests. A luminous sphere indeed takes rather much longer and is somewhat more grainy, so my preference still goes out to a slight extra top sun. I wonder, btw what the size of that sun would do. Does it, like a light source decrease in strength with bigger size? If it's large enough, it could act as a 'global' light... perhaps. Testing ahead....

[pclavett]

The image is really gorgeous ! Nice composition ! As for the trials, both methods seem to give acceptable results and really cannot make up my mind as to which one is the better, will leave that to experts ! Think I will continue to consider both methods when some spots are too dark and the trial renders will determine which one is best for which image !

[masonspappy]

The execution on these images is beautiful.  Re: the rock wall on the right, would the grassy tufts tend to be pointed a little more straight up and down in real life?

[Dune]

Thanks guys. I just rotated the grass less, rendering now, so I'll see if that's better. I tend to have them rotated with slope more than default, as I don't want tufts to grow into rock. If I were to make this perfect I would add more species and varieties; now it's just 3 trees, 2 shrub and 1 grass.

Here are 2 examples with an extra sun at a size of a million (whatever that means; meters?), without and with soft shadows.

[Hannes]

I could imagine the sun's size affects the softness of the shadow? In your examples there is not much difference I'd say. Maybe a smaller size?

[Dune]

Differences are quite minimal indeed, but I have had with this one for now. I may test it again with a different setup, so will keep it in mind.

[Hannes]

I just thought, I'd test it.
When I wrote the last post I may have thought of light sources. So... where do I change the sun's size??? Visible disc/Angular diameter?

[Dune]

Yes, that's the one I used. Disc needn't be visible, I'd say. Curious what you'll find....

[Hannes]

I just did a test. Didn't make much of a difference in my triesto the other ones...

[Dune]

Thought so too. Now another thing that came to mind was a huge lightsource in the scene, I'll test that out soon. Might be weird...