Here's another try at some snowy mountains with a valley. Still trying to get the hang of this thing and lots of work left to do.
The mountain displacements are all procedural (alpine shader), except for one image map used for the background mountain, scaled appropriately and placed off in the distance. There is additional minor displacement added to all the surfaces for each surface layer of colors. I used one image map for some of the rocks on the mountain. I am pretty satisfied, but it could have used some more sharp variation.
The close up granite "rock" to the right was created via a distance shader, to where an arbitrary radius from a reference camera was colored to simulate rock. This rock also features a voronoi noise stack to simulate cracks and criggles. It didn't come out the way I had hoped, but I started getting impatient and thus called it complete. It would have been better off with more detail and some foliage.
The river itself is an image map created in photoshop, then scaled to fit the scene. This was tedious. To get the river to match the TG generated terrain, I had to render a top down view, do a screen capture of the preview window, then pull this into photoshop for reference. It worked perfectly. I then used this image as negative displacement to push the river depth into the terrain. Then I added water to the appropriate height to fill in the river. The ripples were extra large for the scale, but it gave the river the semi-rapids look, so I kept it. It looks 'too' perfect at this point, but thats ok for now.
The background fortress/castle was created in Google Sketchup in about an hour or so. I then exported it to .obj, then imported it into TGTP, and then colors and surface effects set from there (ie. the semi shiny roof, and slight displacement on the walls - though most cannot be seen from this distance).
The clouds were created in 2 layers. One cirrus layer that I dialed in a while back, and a standard cumulus layer. More work to do to get it the way I want.
The populations could have been done ALOT better on this one, but I was getting impatient. In fact, it placed trees onto the main rock to the right in a way I didn't like, so I cloned one of them off the face via Photoshop. Additionally, I used low polygon trees to keep render times down. I think the image would have been way better with high poly trees. And the ground is MUCH too regular in color.
Additionally, I see some contrast "weirdness". I am still working on ways to get that dialed in, likely via light projection due to GI from the background object.
Stats:
Total render time: 16.5 hours (using 4 cores). A single core would have taken over 66 hours, ouch!
Quality: 0.8
AA: 10
GI 3/3 + surface detail
SS: 20/9
Minor postwork in photoshop, such as levels, sharpening, and saturation.