Really great 3D landscape art created using modo and carrara...

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Folks,

I ran into this artists a couple of months ago at CGSociety and I just saw his latest work and I thought I'd have to share it with you guys.

The landscapes are created using mostly Modo and Carrara resulting in sometimes stunning realism, especially when it comes to lighting and organic look of the models.
Water, clouds and procedural texturing are still no match for TG2

Here's the link:

http://howiefarkes.cgsociety.org/gallery/559385/

[rcallicotte]

I agree - these look good.

[Seth]

The landscapes are created using mostly Modo and Carrara[/url]

and Photoshop ^^

[Oshyan]

Some nice work there. This is easily the most realistic of them IMO: http://howiefarkes.cgsociety.org/gallery/564072/ Of course it's also one of the simplest, so there's less to get wrong. But I really like the lighting in that one.

- Oshyan

[lightning]

carrara 6 from my personal experiences handles plants a lot better than terragen 2 the only downfall of this program is the bryce like atmo enviroment which is truly awful


i think as carrara develops further it will be one of terragen 2 main rivals along side eons vue products
And i think if planetside really want to succeed in this cutthroat business the need to start integrating terragen 2 with the highend applications is a must...

[Oshyan]

Carrara comes from the background of a general-purpose 3d modeling and rendering application, so it's not a great surprise that it deals well with rendering objects, including plants. I've been much less impressed with its terrain and, as you said, atmosphere model (particularly the clouds). Good object rendering is actually quite commonplace - Max, Maya, Softimage (all with Mentalray, or even their built-in scanline renderers), even the lower-end Truespace and similar products, all handle objects well. That's what they've always focused on though. It's a point of debate whether coming from the landscape side without objects (as we are doing) can ultimately yield better results than coming the other direction, but despite the difficulties with objects in TG2 I'd say so far our approach is competing well. We have some work to do to bring object handling up to where it should be, but I think that is comparatively less work than Carrara and the rest will have to do to implement an atmosphere and volumetrics model anywhere near what TG2 offers, not to mention the power of procedurally displaced terrain.

- Oshyan

[Tangled-Universe]

Carrara comes from the background of a general-purpose 3d modeling and rendering application, so it's not a great surprise that it deals well with rendering objects, including plants. I've been much less impressed with its terrain and, as you said, atmosphere model (particularly the clouds). Good object rendering is actually quite commonplace - Max, Maya, Softimage (all with Mentalray, or even their built-in scanline renderers), even the lower-end Truespace and similar products, all handle objects well. That's what they've always focused on though. It's a point of debate whether coming from the landscape side without objects (as we are doing) can ultimately yield better results than coming the other direction, but despite the difficulties with objects in TG2 I'd say so far our approach is competing well. We have some work to do to bring object handling up to where it should be, but I think that is comparatively less work than Carrara and the rest will have to do to implement an atmosphere and volumetrics model anywhere near what TG2 offers, not to mention the power of procedurally displaced terrain.

- Oshyan

Yes exactly Oshyan, if TG2 develops further on to a point where it handles models as good as the above mentioned alternatives it will become an unsurpassed total landscape(-rendering) design product
I don't think like lighting that TG2 necessarily should be implementable with max or maya or whatever to get these nicely rendered models.
In the end TG2 will end up more like a plugin/tool rather than a stand-alone product with its own unique capabilities and renderer.

Martin

[rcallicotte]

I'd still prefer to see something (SDK productions?) that could enable useful integration of TG2 with other mainstream modeling products...or maybe something internal from Planetside, after they get everything else on their titanic list acomplished.   

[otakar]

Thanks for the link, there are some superb images. For a truly realistic image you need lots and lots of varieties in plants, from the very small to the largest. You reach a limit with Terragen fairly soon (running out of memory), hopefully there will be ways of dealing with it in the future.

[Xpleet]

This looks great, but why do I think that Cararra produces better atmospheres than Vue6.5?

[Tangled-Universe]

This looks great, but why do I think that Cararra produces better atmospheres than Vue6.5?

I think because these images just have some kind of background image or a very basic atmosphere system. It is mainly the lighting-techniques which are responsible I think.

[otakar]

I was intrigued and checked out Carrara's pricing. You can get the download of Carrara 6 Standard for US$175 with a US$99 Platinum Club membership (good for one year), so it's a US$275 expense. Carrara 6 Standard seems to have most of the features of the Pro version, so it's not severely crippled (that would be Carrara 3D Express). There is a comparison chart. I don't know if they run sales, but it seems rather sensible, especially if you want to purchase stuff from the online store.

[latego]

Martin Hedenstroem is to Carrara what Luc Bianco is to Terragen... so astonishing results are to be expected.