TG Classic Remake ¤ NWDA Contest WIP ¤

[domdib]

I rather like Erwan's grass+mud/soil available here: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5948.msg62428#msg62428

In fact, I'm using it in my entry. But don't worry, our lighting is quite different 

[littlecannon]

That's looking better again. I think half of it is the lighting, the mountain looked too small, i.e. the image didn't have depth before and I kinda like the clouds. Maybe reduce the coverage a bit to give a little more light or not. I wouldn't stray too much from your original path though...

[SpaceMaker]

Lighter grass version is better - Top-notch picture for foreground

[Mohawk20]

So I tried to get a natural opening in the clouds for the sun to shine through. Didn't work, so I used the painted shader on the ground and made a huge square. That did the trick!
But I kept the new clouds and now it looks more like a painting...

I think I might go back to the previous clouds.

[MacGyver]

I like the new look and I also like paintings What about the square? Did you cut out the cloud covering with a painted shader?

[Mohawk20]

Did you cut out the cloud covering with a painted shader?

Yep! Paint a big square on the surface just out of camera range, set it to Plan Y Projection, plug into the cloud's density fractal as inverted blend shader, et voilla, a big hole in the clouds for the sun to shine through, leaving enough space to shove the sun around a bit without it hitting the clouds any place soon.

[MacGyver]

You explained that really nice, thank you!

[Tangled-Universe]

You improved it quite much already. Regarding the light angle etc. I wouldn't change much more, think you've squeezed out the best options.
I like the foreground grasses, but the bushes still don't really work for me. Perhaps you can try to find some better looking? I know it's difficult, because I don't know any (free) high quality bush-models. If I remember correctly you have the Xfrog megabundle, don't you?
Lastly, the background steep mountain would be a lot cooler with some nice displacements to make it look more rocky. Some powerfractal blended strata would be nice as well.
Also, you could "fake" depth by reducing the size of the trees in the background to make the mountain look huge. This can work nicely when using proper haze densities.
My "Brand New Day"-image has completely faked sense of scales and depths. As long nobody knows nobody will mention it, when doing properly of course

Martin

[Mohawk20]

Well, testing some displacements now...
The trees are already 0.75 size, so there is some fakery at work. I could look for some other plants, though I like these.

[FrankB]

as you like to experiment and seem to have a lot of patience, the following suggestion might not be "wasted" :
I think you have already optimized the foreground, vegetation and lighting. What I would like to see you try is take these already tuned elements to a different terrain. The one remaining issue I have with the image is that the big mountain somehow looks almost 2D. I am really sorry that I can't put my finger on it as to why that is so. It's hard to explain. But maybe you give it a shot and see if that helps improving things even further.
But again, very nice image so far!

best regards,
Frank

[Tangled-Universe]

Well, testing some displacements now...
The trees are already 0.75 size, so there is some fakery at work. I could look for some other plants, though I like these.

0.75? hmmm...so you work with real-world scales etc.? I always find that way too time-consuming etc.
I always do stuff by eye, not by number. Anyhow, this isn't really useful, but perhaps something to try sometime.

as you like to experiment and seem to have a lot of patience, the following suggestion might not be "wasted" :
I think you have already optimized the foreground, vegetation and lighting. What I would like to see you try is take these already tuned elements to a different terrain. The one remaining issue I have with the image is that the big mountain somehow looks almost 2D. I am really sorry that I can't put my finger on it as to why that is so. It's hard to explain. But maybe you give it a shot and see if that helps improving things even further.
But again, very nice image so far!

best regards,
Frank

Agree, this would give the image more power. If you'd like to keep the current foreground I'd then create a distance shader to mask your current terrain. Or the other way around. You know what I mean

[Mohawk20]

Well, I was thinking of playing with the terrain...
The problem might be that this particular mountain is at the very edge of the heightfield. So behind the peak there is a straight drop and a 90 degree corner (as it's the corner of the heightfield as well).

I had to turn border blending off entirely or else this mountain wouldn't have been visible at all, it would have been blended down almost completely. So if I turn border blending on again, and put a big heightfield behind it, this would give more depth perhaps.

[Mohawk20]

The last test with sky and displacements before changing the terrain came out pretty good.
But I'm getting really frustrated by these Errors in the Render Threads!!!

As you can see below, one bucket was skipped, the one next to it doesn't have sky behind the tree, and lower the other render thread crashed. Trying to crop render the single bucket by the tree, I still get these thread errors, even with very small pre-allocated sub div caches!

[edit]I noticed my virtual memory use was getting quite big: 1.4 Gb. So I saved, exited and started up again. So render thread errors so far... But it seems the memory still culminates and doesn't get dumped, or not enough anyway. Can that be fixed?[/edit]

[domdib]

The lighting is now really good - hope you can sort the render issues!

[Hetzen]

I understand how people think your mountain looks 2D, tbh, I can't fault it, I just think it needs to be softened up a little, and maybe post is the answer, or maybe a thicker atmosphere (although I've not really played with this too much myself). Mucking about with exagerated scale may also help.

The latest render gives me a good 'just before the rain' feel. I'd suggest putting in some slightly lower clouds with a different density and maybe cloud colour and lower coverage, to subtely break up the flat grey.