Golden October revisited - the final Final!

[FrankB]

Hi there,

I thought I may give it a try to revisit a scene named "Golden October", made back in 2001 with TG0.something.
Back then it was a combined effort between Peter Kleiner (running terradreams.de) and Martin Brunker. Back then, between us three, Peter had the best eye for finding great POVs and making nice looking seas, Martin was the master of surfaces and I had fun with atmospheres and clouds. This is the original image from 2001 that resulted from it. We've been pretty proud of it ;-)

http://www.planetside.co.uk/gallery/f/tg09/golden_okt_1024_2.jpg.html

Now, let me say something about this revisited golden october image. It's not an attempt to actually recreate the same image, that wouldn't even work. Instead I found it interesting to take an essentially identical scene and see and compare how much farther one can go using TG2.

That being said, I thought it would be good not to go too far from the original scene, meaning, I didn't want no additional mountain, or a disorted terrain or any other prominent scene modification.

This is a work in progress.
For example, the entire sky is temporary, a placeholder if you will, and eventually will look completely different. Also, unfortunately, in the final render I figured that the foreground is in some sort of half-shadow, which I haven't intended and which doesn't bring out the lighting of foreground like I wished. However I think I made a decent start with the terrain and vegetation as a whole.

A propos vegetation:
- Klas Gras
- Lighting Grass Pack
- Bush Pack (from this site, I don't remember who did it and there are no credits inside the package).
- Wallis Gras Pack

A few stats for the WIP render:
- Quality 0.8
- AA 10, using a new AA mode from the upcoming beta
- GI 2/1
- 13 hrs render time, on a good old, yet slow dual core (2x1.6 GHz)
- Resolution 1600x1050

So, for the next version I'll try adding trees, and maybe the final sky.

Best regards,
Frank

[matrix2003]

BRAVO!    Just all around awesome!!

[chefc]

BRAVO!    Just all around awesome!!

[Mohawk20]

Soo much more realism and life in the image! The water looks great, like it's actually moving...

Good job!

[sjefen]

Spectacular.

The only thing I think you should fix is the grey texture on the mountains in the background.
Give the mountain textures some more details and this wont be far from photo realistic.

- Terje

[dwilson]

This is already a really great scene.  I look forward to seeing future verisons of it

[rcallicotte]

Very good scene.  I think the foreground grass looks stiff, but maybe it does in real life.  Haven't been there.

[inkydigit]

superb detailing and overall scene!

[Mr_Lamppost]

It will be interesting to see where this goes, it is pretty nice already.

Those clouds look good although I would probably change the seed of the masking fractal as the almost symmetrical large scale distribution looks a little contrived but that's just me being picky. 

[Esgalachoir]

I like the fake stones on the beach, they seem just right.

[FrankB]

Thank you for the comments - I think I should be able to render the next version sometime next week. In the next render, I'd like to change the clouds. It's correct that the current ones, especially their distribution, doesn't look good, but again, they've just been a placeholder in this first version.
Further, the next image will have trees and different grasses. I may also ty to put trees on the foreground, but will have to elevate the camera for this. I'm interested in keeping a view on the ground at the same time.

I've also been playing around and attempted to make the sky look somewhat like in the old TG original, but no chance. The key is being able to switch off clouds casting shadows, while still allowing clouds to cast shadows on themselves, which is not possible in TG2, to the best of my knowledge. There are workarounds, though, such as increasing the ambient color in the atmosphere, or adding and ambient occlusion GI source, but it just doesn't have the same effect as the one in TG0.9 when switching off "cast shadws".

That old switch wasn't very realistic, but from an artistic view, it was very interesting, and I am mising that in TG2.

Anyway, as I wrote earlier, I don't actually want to do the same image again, so it doesn't matter much.

Again, thanks for the comments.

Frank

[MacGyver]

Looking forward to see how this develops! I like the original very much

[FrankB]

Here it comes my TG2 friends, "Golden October 2008":

[attach=#]

Credits go to Floraworks alone:
* Slender grass
* Dense grass
* Razor grass
* Douglas Fir
* Eastern Hemlock
* Norway Spruce

A few image stats:
* Quality 0.8
* 1200x 723
* AA 6
* Soft Shadows
* AA bloom + Narrow Cubic filter
* 7 Painted Shaders (what a blessing this is)
* Render time: ~14 hrs (with just 50Mb subdivision cache per core)

Bye,
Frank

[RogueNZ]

Wow! Sweet! 

[rcallicotte]

This is perfect, except for those white dots on the right shore.  EXCELLENT work.