Serenity

[pclavett]

Hi all. new PC build with Ryzen 9, my old Mac does not stand a chance, the Benchmark test was at least 10 times faster than my old 2013 MacPro with the 2 multicore Xeons. Still this project had a lot of mountain displacement and took days to render on my 2 recent PC builds. Presently inserting a chalet in the same project. Take care all !

[Stormlord]

Hi Paul
Congratulations on your new PC, I also updated 6 months ago to a Pentium i9 which is 5 times faster than my old one.

Looks pretty good in your panoramic render, the sky is very natural, but the river looks very sterile IMO.
Some sand at the beach or sandbanks in the stream, maybe some other stones will improve this scene a lot.
And... Why do you make the trees so dark, they look very black? The scene is great, but the vegetation too dark.
Before you start a new render with a cabin, please read on...

I often render a vegetation pass and overlay it with negative multiply to light up my vegetation.
Please allow me to explain it, how you can do it. You will have a greet benefit from it!

I prepared a small sample scene which has the OldPine.tgo embedded, I'll attach all files to give you a good start.
Now, here's how to...


1. Import your vegetation in your scene, here it's the oldbark.tgo
Normally, you would render your scene here and get very dark (to dark!!!) vegetation as usual

I normally lighten the vegetation up this way...


2. Set the light that it will come somewhere from the FRONT!
FRONT!!!


3. Inside the Parts Shader, set all Base Colors to 1.0 (instead of standard 0.5, this will brighten up the textures)


4. This is how you could render your scene, but wait.. there's a much better way!


5 - Render a vegetation pass instead (you will be more flexible with it)
Set at the end of the Shader Network a black shader and detach the atmosphere and clouds from the Planet, set water to black (with no reflection)

 
6 - Finally I lay in Photoshop above my render the vegetation pass with NEGATIVE MULTIPLY, then you can fade between 0-100% as you like

That's the way I do it.
And you can do it the same way!
Believe me, your renders will look much better...

http://www.dirkkipper.de/FTP_PUBLIC/Terragen_Masking_Tutorial_by_Dirk_Kipper.pdf
If you're interested, look at my masking tutorial which goes more into details...

Or read here...
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,30673.msg298518.html#msg298518

STORMLORD

[Doug]

the snowy mountains are really cool

StromLord - thanks for the tut, i will try it

[Stormlord]

Yes, you can also do it!
It's simple and improves your renderings a lot.

STORMLORD

[schmeerlap]

Nice render. I like the deep fissures in the eroded mountains, and the rocky shoreline.
Some of the larger boulders on the shore (bottom left of scene) are showing a stripy texture. If the stripes are not desired you may want to use fractal break up and or mix the texture image map with a procedural texture to break up those stripes. For me the trees are not too dark.

[Dune]

Nice render and great that you have a really fast machine now. Makes working so much relaxter. I also like the cracky rock. Is it a Gaea terrain, or did you use a voronoi crack?
I agree about the trees, they are very dark and too much the same. I'd add a few more species if possible, and light tyhem up. You can even set base color to higher than 1 if needed. I sometimes use 1.5 for certain imagemaps, but also lighten up the maps themselves if they're too dark. Easier to add some PF color variation then as well.
What I also don't like is the grass at the front. It seems like you've use fake stones grass with an slope restriction, so the sides of the fake grass isn't green. I think just a rough PF with greens and the internal grass pop would be nicer. Have it follow the slope (set rotation as 1/1/1), and reduce X and Z of the object itself to 0.6 or so. Your object will be 6m wide then, and you need to instances more, but it would follow the undulations better. With some nice (world) grass colors of course.
I also often raise the grass height (in object) to 0.5m, and lower the base by -0.2, so it sinks a bit, and better covers where small terrain parts suddenly dip, if you get my point.
And I would add a bit or murk in the water, that is very dark too, and looks a bit sterile.

[pclavett]

Thanks guys for the comments and suggestions. The trees were a bit dark and note that the render was Path Traced..... seems to give better veggies but the problem is the shadows. Will try some additional lighting such as a dome of light behind the camera... or another low grade sun with no shadows. As for the terrain, it was actually done in World Machine. The cracked cliff are Terragen Voronoi. The veggies have to be redone with more variety. The grass is OK for the distant parts but for the foreground not so much..... and Ulco has it right, it is the  PGS from dandleO made with fakestones, not so good when you are closeup. I will remove it with a distance shader and add, real TGO grass in the foreground. I tried to do the water with some density but got those weird lines that appear sometimes, and remmeber that you have to do something with the GI... but will have to look into that. Thanks Stormlord for the tutorial on the veggies, seems like something to try for sure. I do appreciate all your comments and thanks you ! Take care !

[pclavett]

I have been working this week to correct some of the flaws and it is starting to take shape. Went back to change the terrain a bit in WM and also got a chalet to insert into the picture. Included is a test render of the foreground changes. The background has been stripped to bare minimum to make the renders faster. The render is done in path tracing again, with a second opposite sun, no shadows and very soft at about 1/50th of the main sun. I think I will ad a few flowers for colour and a few big boulders. Next is fixing the rest, working on the snow with the other PC. Thanks again for all the help and suggestions !

[Stormlord]

WOW, your vegetation is so much brighter now.
Much better Paul!!!

I use Path Tracer mostly only in Final renderings.
To make a long story short, Pathtracer does every calculation with raytracing and this extends the render times too much.
Therefore I use pathtracer only in final renders, but not for test renders etc.

My 2 cents...
IMO your rocks looking very boring because there are no color variations over the whole rock formation.
More details would be a great improvement for the scene...

STORMLORD

[pclavett]

Final Render of my first take on the project with my attempts to make it better ! The render was done with Path Tracing as it made the vegetation more alive and better light. There was a second sun high above, no shadows, very weak at 0.1. Adjustments in Photoshop with levels, curves, some shadow and highlight adjustment and finally a bit of sharpening..... maybe a bit too much when the render was reduced with bicubic sharper. I am planning a closeup of the chalet in the coming weeks. Have a great weekend all !

[Dune]

Looks really good, Paul. I could suggest a few things, but I don't know if you'd want those. A waterline, up to half a meter above the water level, slightly fuzzy, with darkening of the rock and a little reflection (no-RT) would benefit the shore.
The top of the mountain would benefit by more snow, to make its pattchyness a little softer. Either reduce the voronoi cracks higher up, or add another snowlayer altitude restricted with a bigger slope restriction, up to even 90%.
If you used displacement intersection for the snow, make the patch size of the compute terrain bigger, say 50 or 100. That will increase the white patches, make bigger snow fields. You have to use an additional (loose end) compute normal/terrain for the veggies to sit on then, at the end of the line.

[pclavett]

Thanks Ulco for the suggestions, have been working on the snow this week and decreased the  Voronoi displacement that caused the cracks, was a bit too much. Have now redone the snow completely with 3 different layers at different levels of slope and warped lines of altitude. Should make the snow better. Also working on closeup view of the chalet with the mountains in the back, organized veggies on the chalet lot, a brick wall with bedded flowers. More to come ! Appreciate all your comments and suggestions. Might take a bit of time, one of my PCs is down as the last render blew the AIO Liquid Cooler pump and will get the pieces for the repair only later this week. The think was only 2 year old and now going with something designed not far from you... a Noctua Air Cooler this time, will take a while for me to get over this experience. Hope this does better ! Have a great weekend !

[pclavett]

Hi all ! Well a week later, mountain displacement all redone, snow redone, tried to make a bit of wet shore with more or less success, rock colour adjusted for more variation and lots of test renders..... really takes a lot of time. This will be the final for this view and will work on other viewpoint, with cottage closeups. Thanks for all the help and suggestions and have a great day all !

[Dune]

Soo much better, Paul. I really like the snow now. Great scene!