Worth the Climb - WIP

[gastar]

its a nice scene

Gastar

[ZStar]

I think I'm almost done with this one.  I changed the tree distribution a little and got the big tree on the left which frames the image nicely.  I got rid of the tiny islands in the channel in the background.  I added a little translucency to the trees.  I think it gives a much more natural look, like backscattered light filtering through the leaves.

[dandelO]

Stunning! Beautiful soft-focus effect. I really like this, the shores and outer islands look fantastic, as do the trees.
Well worth the climb, in my opinion!

[moodflow]

Wow, the lighting on this scene is fantastic!  This image definitely shows the potential power of TG2 for eclectic scenes. 

Your distribution of the trees is nearly perfect. 

Some of the foreground rocks/dirt are a bit on the "noisy" side and a bit flat on colors, but this is a difficult thing to correct in TG2 - maybe add more reflection to the rocks 0.3 or so, but soften them by upping specular roughness to 0.6 or so.

Nice work.   

[Phylloxera]

The second version really is successful, the stone heap in the foreground is really interesting, it brings a key of reality to the image! Good work!

[Seth]

very very realistic light and atmosphere !

[ZStar]

Thanks for the compliments.

Moodflow, I'll give your suggestions a try.  I have really struggled to find the right balance of scales and displacements on the power fractals.  I seem to keep going between two extremes, little or no effect and spikes.  Someday I'll get it figured out.   

Thanks Phylloxera.  I felt the image needed some element of a human touch.  The pile of stones seemed like a good way to do that without distracting too much from the natural beauty of the scene.

[Tangled-Universe]

This has already greatly improved, I like it even more now

The grasses really benefit from the higher render settings and so do the trees.
What's the quality setting of the tree-populations? The left tree seems a bit un-detailed for a render with AA @ 10 and detail @ 1.0.

The water has improved indeed, but I would make the scales even smaller. Maybe so small that it is just not a flat lake. You have to imagine how big these waves look when you're standing next to a tree down at the shore.

If you still have the time and energy you could also try to add some color-variation to the soil.

How did you make the pile of stones? It looks really interesting!

Martin

hope you don't mind a posted the same comment here

[ZStar]

hope you don't mind a posted the same comment here

I don't mind if you don't mind me repeating my response.   

I did reduce the wave size after your earlier suggestion.  I think I have it set at 2-3m right now.  I had tried it smaller but under the previous version of TG the small waves seemed to cause an increased number of dropped buckets.  I could try going smaller with the new version but I'm still having problems with dropped buckets, just not as bad as it was.  The pile of stones is a simple pyramid object with a high density fake stone shader applied.  I had to keep messing with the settings, scale and location of the pyramid to get to look good.  At this point, only the tip of the pyramid is visible.  This is very much a learning project for me so I probably will keep tweaking it.  I sometimes joke that I never really finish an image.   

Most of the foreground trees should be at "Very high quality" and all the others are at "High quality".  I don't know why they don't look better.  Does anyone else have image examples using the free XFrog fir trees?

[Mr_Lamppost]

Improvements all round, Excellent. 

For me the biggest improvement is the atmosphere.