Waterfall

old_blaggard · April 25, 2008, 02:17:54 AM

This is a WIP that I've been working on for a while. It uses some of lightning's plants and sonshine's log as well as some flowers and stuff from Ashundar. I'm getting to a point where I'm almost satisfied with it - I'm going to be adding some moss to the rock and I'm trying to find a way to get the lighting better so that the plants look more realistic. I'd appreciate any comments you might have before I do a final render

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inkydigit · April 25, 2008, 03:29:24 AM

wow!....no crits from me....looks great....I look forward to see the finale(and a the tutorial!!!)
very excellent!

monks · April 25, 2008, 04:46:23 AM

Cool! Very ambitious, I think you're close to pulling it off.
The back wall needs a lot of work- variation in surface, mosses, etc. The lighting lacks a little depth as you said.

monks

Tangled-Universe · April 25, 2008, 04:59:28 AM

I think Monks has said it all for me.

Maybe you can improve the lighting by lowering the sun angle (it's pretty high isn't it? 55 degrees or so?) and add a very very thin volumetric cloud all over the scene for some diffuse lighting. In addition to that you could also slightly increase the softshadow diameter, but not too much, it looks pretty so far.

In overall the image lacks shadows, except for the tree, which are in my opinion due to the high sun angle and also sun position. Maybe if you change the sun's position more to the middle of the image the rock wall will generate a shadow on the left part of the image. With that diffuse lighting I told before I think it would look a lot more interesting.

For the background wall I'd suggest to make it less noizy. The brighter grays look noizy while the dark base colors do show the displacements/shapes pretty nice.
I think you could try to increase the color-range of the base fractal and maybe increase its contrast as well. This should give some more variation already.
Then you could try to add the brighter grays again, one by one and I'd go for slightly less coverage and slightly larger scales.
And like monks said. Add some nice mosses on flatter slopes and maybe a bush here and there

Oh by the way, while I keep on looking at your image I noticed the following:
The waterfall, which looks great and from which I think it is a masked cloud?, creates very big waves especially where it touches the waterplane.
The water looks like vapor (because it falls from great heigth I presume) and I think it doesn't displace the watersurface that much.

Well well, enough said. It's great work and I hope some of my suggestions will help

Martin

JimB · April 25, 2008, 06:53:23 AM

Quote from: old_blaggard on April 25, 2008, 02:17:54 AM
I'm trying to find a way to get the lighting better so that the plants look more realistic. I'd appreciate any comments you might have before I do a final render .

Try adding a reflective shader to the plants, with a high roughness on the specularity and reflections. Works wonders, and mimicks reality anyway.

Will · April 25, 2008, 07:30:21 AM

Wow, great job mate, I think the pond has a bit too much displacement but other then that its wonderful.

rcallicotte · April 25, 2008, 08:10:25 AM

Wow. How did you do the waterfall?

joshbakr · April 25, 2008, 09:25:08 AM

Looking good so far! I second the suggestion about adding a bit of reflectivity to the plants. I wish I knew how to do that. I also agree with Martin's comment about the water agitation being a little strong, however if there was a way to add a object in the center of the fall (Mist) that mimics falling water with transparency applied to it would be more convincing. I think your adding moss to the rock face is a good idea especially in this wet surrounding. How about in addition to the moss, adding some bushes or plants growing out of the rock face in a few areas? I'll try and keep an eye on your progress as this is inspiring work so far.

Saurav · April 25, 2008, 10:05:28 AM

This is a very good start, I'll be keeping an eye on this one.

old_blaggard · April 25, 2008, 11:32:48 AM

Thanks a lot for the detailed comments! I'm definitely going to try some of those lighting tricks - I honestly didn't realize that the sun was at 55 (good guess, by the way

) - usually I keep it somewhere between 20 and 35, but I am remembering now that I had to raise it up pretty high to help find my POV in the first place. I will definitely add moss, and I'll give it a shot with the plants, although I'm not sure how successful I'll be because of the possibility of the plants colliding with the wall and simply going through it. Finally, some people have told me to add more displacement to the wall and to the water, and some people have told me to do less. I'll keep on looking at reference pictures and try to find a happy medium

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moodflow · April 25, 2008, 01:15:30 PM

Very nice project!

lightning · April 25, 2008, 05:31:53 PM

amazing love the ripples and gurgly displacement around the waterfall

old_blaggard · May 01, 2008, 01:47:27 PM

I'm going to give this one a break for now, but I'd still appreciate comments on how you all think it turned out just in case I want to revisit it later

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http://www.ashundar.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-5239

Phylloxera · May 01, 2008, 02:45:04 PM

Quote from: old_blaggard on May 01, 2008, 01:47:27 PM
I'm going to give this one a break for now, but I'd still appreciate comments on how you all think it turned out just in case I want to revisit it later .

http://www.ashundar.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-5239

Beautiful ! I like it !

rcallicotte · May 01, 2008, 03:12:35 PM

I like it all very, very much, o_b. One small thing that I notice frequently in just about any TG2 renders - the trees almost look plastic. There's just enough something to make them look unreal. I don't see this as anything you have done or not done. Just an observation. I like your textures a lot and the water work is great!