Dreadnought

[PorcupineFloyd]

I haven't posted anything for a while, so here's something new.

I'm still trying to master the clouds and to make a decent looking, procedural only sand. I've also found out that tone mapping the .exr file does wonders in fat-cumulus-like scenes.

Sand consists of two fractal nodes. One makes bigger waves (warped perlin mix) while the second (billows) is only for the detail. There is also a twist and shear shader attached to main sand shader.
I'm still struggling to get rid of those sharp ridges out of displacements. Any suggestions?

Render settings:
Q: 0.715
AA: 9 @ Narrow Cubic
GI: 1/3/8 SS:on
Cloud/Atmo: 318/48 (jitter: 0.95)
Res: 3600x2400
Render time: ~14H on Q6600 (@ 3.2GHz)

Picture License:
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Edit: Removed "No Derivative" from license due to .tgd posting.

[Seth]

marvelous sky ^^

[Hannes]

The whole picture seems to be 3dimensional! Insane. Those clouds are incredible!

[Naoo]

Hi

Amazing Clouds!


ciao
Naoo

[Tangled-Universe]

Very good work, love the cloudscape! Did you use any of the NWDA presets for it? Just curious
Nonetheless, it looks awesome!

For those sharp edges you might try play a bit with the contrast of the powerfractal.
Another tip would be to add a couple of layers of rocks and then add a thick sand-layer as last shader.
Would look very realistic.

Is this also a WIP for...ehh....something?

Martin

[RArcher]

Very powerful image!

Reducing the contrast should help with the sharp edges somewhat.

*edit*  Martin beat me to it, follow his advice 

[PorcupineFloyd]

Thanks for all your comments.

No, I haven't used any NWDA presets
And I also consider this picture finished. It's a bit plain in the foreground but I really wanted to focus on displacements.

I've tried lowering the contrast but it can't be too low as it won't displace the surface noticeably. I've also considered adding some rocks but then it would look kinda weird on this picture as I would have to add some kind of "distractor" - a dead tree or something similar.

Isn't there a way to filter (add blur perhaps?) some sections of grayscale maps generated by fractals? For example - from 0.8 to 1.0? To have 0 to 0.8 sharp and 0.8 to 1.0 blurred?

[rcallicotte]

Oh, very nice.  This reminds me of some extreme photos I've seen in the really old photograph books from some of the brilliant professional photographers of years gone by.

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks for all your comments.

No, I haven't used any NWDA presets
And I also consider this picture finished. It's a bit plain in the foreground but I really wanted to focus on displacements.

I've tried lowering the contrast but it can't be too low as it won't displace the surface noticeably. I've also considered adding some rocks but then it would look kinda weird on this picture as I would have to add some kind of "distractor" - a dead tree or something similar.

Isn't there a way to filter (add blur perhaps?) some sections of grayscale maps generated by fractals? For example - from 0.8 to 1.0? To have 0 to 0.8 sharp and 0.8 to 1.0 blurred?

You can "select" grayscale ranges from fractals using the clamp function (use 2 constant functions as inputs) or the color adjust shader (reduce white point to 0.8 will "stretch" the color range from 0 - 0.8 to 0 - 1)

[Jack]

sick lighting!

[otakar]

The lower clouds are some of the best I've seen out of TG2.

[domdib]

Very striking image. One question - how have you achieved the strong contrast between atmo and clouds? Was this post-work (the tone-mapping you mentioned), or the result of manipulating bluesky values in TG2?

[soup4you2]

stunning...

[freelancah]

Amazing!

[PorcupineFloyd]

Very striking image. One question - how have you achieved the strong contrast between atmo and clouds? Was this post-work (the tone-mapping you mentioned), or the result of manipulating bluesky values in TG2?

Tone mapping is mostly helpful in bringing out details in the darker parts of clouds, especially the base.
You can find a comparison between a regular image with adjusted levels and the same image, but tone-mapped and then with adjusted levels - Regular and Tone mapped

My technique in TG2 is to use rather desaturated colours and then to dig them out of the image in post-processing by using levels and saturation. This image was almost black and white after I took it out of Photomatix but I didn't paint it manually - it's just levels and saturation adjustments, so the colour was actually there.