A return to TG2 - Blue waters

[Bluefinger]

It's been a while since I've started to really do proper renders in Terragen 2, and seeing that it has been properly released and with me wanting to build up a general portfolio of work (including Terragen 2 stuff), I've stated to hone my rusty skills again to try to achieve something I can display amongst a good solid portfolio. This one took over 49 hours to render once fully tweaked, though I'm posting on here to get ideas on potential improvements as I'm not quite satisfied with the result. I like the atmosphere and the water, but fake stones and the background cliffs feel like that could with a little... more to them. Pointers on potential improvements are appreciated, as I'm scouring through the forums again to pick up on a bunch of techniques I want to implement for future renders. Also, the pic has had some post-work done in GIMP, contrast and brightness tweaking, colour correction (slight blue filter on the image) and a soft-glow effect.

[rcallicotte]

Everything is perfect, but the hills look somewhat fake for two reasons -

1.  Your trees are not to scale with the size of your mountain
2.  The mountain needs some detail

The front part of your render (the rocks and water) is amazingly realistic.  Good lighting, too.

[FrankB]

Hi,

in my opinion you have a little to little of everything in here
What that is supposed to mean is that:
- there are not enough distinctly sized and shaped and colored fake stones
- there are not enough trees distributed, that would be of different sizes and possibly species
- there are not any other types of vegetation, that one would expect in this scenery
- there is not enougg variation in the surface texturing and detail displacement of the terrain

The clouds are great though.
All in all I would say that this scene is a start of a potentially great scene, it just needs much more variation, complexity and detail. If you take care about that, you can make that a fantastic render.
For other examples, look at the "Explorers" image thread, or the "Riverbend" image thread, that show very clearly how great scenes usually start at a comparable level of complexity and variation, and then get refined step by step. Yours could be the next in that row.

Cheers,
Frank

[Bluefinger]

Thanks, though just to note a few things:

1. The trees are more or less to the original scale (with a little variation of course), but otherwise the scene is not as expansive as it might seem. Maybe this could be worked around if I add more visible detail to the cliff rocks, as to establish a better sense of depth and detail resolution. The landscape I produced in World Machine wasn't that high of a terrain, so I think I need to establish a more visible means of defining the depth of the image.

2. As for additional variation on things, I'll see what I'll come up with, but I'll have to see what I can manage in terms of vegetation. I'll look into the examples provided in terms of images, but also I'll be trying to find similar real-world terrain photos in order to get a good idea  of what I need to aim for.

Anyways, thanks for the pointers!

[Henry Blewer]

I think the re-direct shader with lateral displacement power fractals in the x and z channels would help break up the hillside surface. This may add some realism.

[Bluefinger]

I think the re-direct shader with lateral displacement power fractals in the x and z channels would help break up the hillside surface. This may add some realism.

Funnily enough, that's what I did! I guess I need to make the effect more pronounced. 

[domdib]

Frank's advice is, as usual, pretty good. I would be inclined to add a surface layer or two to the hills - I guess it's possible to have hills that are bare rock, but quite unusual, and the tree population is going to need some soil.

[Bluefinger]

Well, I've stuck the scene back into tweak mode, so a couple of things have been changed so to allow me to work better with the background rocks and also to render much more quickly. No water or reflective shaders, and direction of light modified so to highlight the background rock structure better.

I figured out why the redirect shader didn't work as planned, but now that has been sorted out. Changed the noise type to normal Perlin as opposed to Perlin billows, and increased the displacement size, but otherwise, I'm preferring the result. The grass texture shader layer now has a smoothing effect on it.

So, any improvement at least with regards to the background cliffs?

[Henry Blewer]

Better. You can get the cloud tops and sunlit areas to 'glow' more by making the high color more white. I think the trees on the slopes are distributed well, but they're too large. It's hard to really judge the size they will be in the preview, but I think scaling them down by 1/4 would do it.

[domdib]

I'd say much better, although you could probably afford to spread your soil layer a bit further.

[inkydigit]

I like where this is going!

[Bluefinger]

Alright, returning with a few more tweaks, this time with the tree population, grassy soil shader layer and tweaks to the clouds. The trees I reduced at first to 1/4 of the size, but for it didn't quite seem right, considering the size of the foreground rocks and relation to the depth of the image, so I kept things around 1/2 the size with some variation. The grass now extends over a larger slope area, and the clouds now are whiter, in suggestion to what a few here have made.

Honestly, I think things are improving, so now I'll be working on the foreground rocks a little more.

[FrankB]

the background is looking very good now

[rcallicotte]

I agree about the background.  This looks much better.

[domdib]

Likewise!