Mountain Dew

[old_blaggard]

I've been really busy with school, my jobs, and applying for internships over the summer and I haven't had nearly enough time to play with Terragen. However, this scene was perfect for me: I set it up in only a couple of hours and let it render. The only tricky part was getting the distribution of the drop objects right, which I eventually solved with a set of cameras projecting different masks around in 3D space.

Ryan's recent work inspired the depth of field, lightning made the grass, and Matt wrote a raytracer that rendered thousands of transparent and reflective dew drops over the course of five days without ever crashing.

EDIT: Apparently the color profile I set wasn't conserved when uploading, as the image looks different in my browser than in the image editor. I'll try to fix that later.

EDIT 2: It was actually my browser. Time to switch from my weird off-brand Firefox 2-based setup and get with the game .

[Tangled-Universe]

Five days? Holy sh*t man

BUT,...it is really worth the wait! Great work! The grasses still look quite realistic, even so close-up!
I guess you've used your own custom textures and I also guess you used populated spheres for the drops?

Martin

[FrankB]

great stuff, Paul! The DOF is a must in this, and it's well excuted!

Cheers,
Frank

[buzzzzz1]

Damn! Amazing what this software can do in the right hands. And with Matt's help.

[Tangled-Universe]

Damn! Amazing what this software can do in the right hands. And with Matt's help.

I think he meant to say that the current state of the TG-renderer is so stable that it can run for 5 days, non-stop.
Not that Matt has written/updated the raytracer for this image.
At least, that's what I think

[rcallicotte]

o_b, would you explain what you mean about Matt and the 5 days?  I'm wanting what you've got here.

[reck]

He means "Matt wrote a raytracer that rendered thousands of transparent and reflective dew drops" which allowed him to create this image and it took him 5 days to render.

[Seth]

good job !
well done !

[moodflow]

o_b, would you explain what you mean about Matt and the 5 days?  I'm wanting what you've got here.

The raytracer Matt wrote = TG2 

[Mohawk20]

Well, I'm used to renders that take weeks (and not only animations), so the five days part is nice.
But I really like the DOF, which adds all the realism. Aside from the water drops of course...
So how did you manage the distribution exactly?

[Volker Harun]

I would like to give you a hug! I love this render ,-)

[dandelO]

Fantastic job. Great distribution and DOF.
Definately an image for the PS gallery!

[old_blaggard]

Wow, thanks for the comments, guys . A couple more notes:

- Yes, I meant good old TG2 when I said Matt's raytracer .

- 5 days was a little long, but when you consider all of the complex ray-tracing that had to be done and the fact that I do all of my work on a 1.5 year old Macbook Pro, the time starts to make more sense.

- The distribution was a little complicated. The sphere object wasn't working properly, so I created a sphere in Blender and applied the proper shaders. I then created a distance shader and used that as a color mask on both the droplets and the grass so that I could get a depth mask, and then I created a new camera, slightly higher than the main one and tilted downwards to give a different perspective, and did the same thing. The intersection of the two masks is exactly where in 3D space the droplets should appear, and then I just populate normally.

[Saurav]

A beauty, the DOF works a treat here and looks very natural. Definitely one for the official PS gallery.