Canyon River V4

[Gannaingh]

Here is my latest pet project. The canyon is TU's NWDA procedural canyon and the river is just a displaced painted shader. The trees are the xfrog sweet birch and Klass' excellent oak. I think this an ok starting point, I'm going to change the pov to try and get more detail in the trees. Also I think I should add more vegitation on the canyon walls to make them a bit less bland.

Rendertime: 25 hours and some odd minutes (I was away for the weekend so I just decided to go big on the render settings)
Detail: 1
AA: 8
GI: 1/3
Soft Shadows enabled

http://gannaingh32.deviantart.com/art/Canyon-River-WIP-131897002

[FrankB]

Wow, this is an amazing render!! Fantastic sense of scale here!

Regards,
Frank

[Tangled-Universe]

I'm glad to see some work with my canyon. Very good use of it!
Like Frank said the sense of scale is amazing because of the trees especially.
Very simple and effective work on creating the river, it really works here.
Did you use the painted canyon or the standard-canyon?

I'd suggest to indeed add some vegatation to the canyon walls and perhaps some fake stones as well.
If you need help where and how to place them in the shader-network then just let me know.
Furthermore you could add a second tree-population for variation.
Don't forget to use enough size-variation on populations in any case, in this image it could use a bit more of it.

Looking forward to see your next iteration

Cheers,
Martin

[Gannaingh]

Thanks guys! Now that I look back at the file it appears that i forgot to enable my second (and smaller) tree population so that should add a bit more variety.

@ TU this is your standard canyon with random seed hit a couple dozen times on just about every displacement node. Also I would love some pointers on where to put the fake stones in the shader network

[Gannaingh]

A bit of an update, I increased the variation in the sizes of the trees and added some smaller vegitation along the canyon walls. The river at the bottom could use some improvements.

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[FrankB]

Is this a crop render?

The smaller vegetation is looking good, adding to the image. As for the river, I think a smaller wave scale and roughness would do good.

Otherwise, still (and even more) a stunning image!

Frank

[Volker Harun]

I prefer the second render. The field of view is more exciting. The variation in the pops is fine - some colour changes would make the vegetation very convincable.

Volker

[Falcon]

I very much like the canyon walls. What kind of shaders are you using for them? They're very convincing.

[littlecannon]

darthvader1... superb sense of scale.... I agree about the water displacement, other than that, I think it is a fantastic image. TU's canyon displacements are pretty awesome.
cheers,
Simon.

[Tangled-Universe]

Very nice work!
It has been said already about the water so that's of no use anymore, but I'd like to add one "little" suggestion:
For nicer coloring and shadows and also better accuracy in lighting on the populations you could render with GI 2/4.
This takes quite some time with water, but it will surely pay off.

A suggestion to reduce rendertime is to use a plane with a watershader instead of the lakeobject.
You river is almost straight on with a little twist here and there.
I'd set up a plane covering the bottom of the canyon and apply a watershader to it.
This way TG doesn't have to render water over the entire image and this saves lots of rendertime.
Perhaps you already did this

Martin

[aymenk2003]

Really a very good image... so the TU canyon pack can do all that

[Tangled-Universe]

Really a very good image... so the TU canyon pack can do all that

Yes, the terrain/displacements are made using my Canyon Tech Pack.
I don't know what darth changed to it, to me it seems he left almost everything untouched.

[Gannaingh]

Yes Frank, this is a crop render just cut out of the middle the the scene. For anybody interested in getting it this is straight out of TU's NWDA canyon pack with only some alterations to shader coloring and  pair of small scale power fractals for some detail that it appears isn't visible from this distance. I never thought of putting a water shader on a plane, I'll have to try that in a future edition, although the one currently rendering is from a perspective that completely eliminates the water altogether.

[Gannaingh]

An update! In this one I've completely changed the POV; the sense of an epic scale canyon is a bit less but I like the increased detail in the vegitation that comes with a closer point of view. The canyon wall needs some work on coloring (especially those light voronoi lines, those gotta go) and texturing to make things a bit less jagged, most noticably on the right side of the image.

Also, Im going to fiddle with the render settings a bit (as per TU's suggestion) but that will probably be held off until my final render.

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[FrankB]

looks awesome! I would leave the faint white lines. They add to the impression of complexity in the rock. You will miss them when they're gone
Alternatively, though, you could negatively displace these lines, without adding color.
I would also recommend to add contrast and a little bit saturation.

Cheers,
Frank