Clouds

[FrankB]

Henry! You're definitely getting up to speed now

[Dune]

Great image. Nothing to add. Thanks for showing!

[Tangled-Universe]

Definitely best work so far Henry!

Besides the clouds you also have a nice terrain and populations.
I use almost the exact same technique for setting up my populations and breakup, it works very well for trees indeed.
For grasses I barely use breakup, only slope/height restrictions.

Anyhow, I think this render could be even nicer when you would have more white-ish clouds and with less coverage of the sky to get more direct lighting.

If you ever intend to do these type of images again, and you will! lol , then use the new raytrace function for objects together with at least AA6. AA8 even better.
In case you don't know, the quality of raytraced objects is determined by the AA-setting. The higher the better, but you'll soon find out that AA6 gives very nice results and AA8 probably most bang for buck.

Speaking about bang for buck: to get rid of odd lighting conditions on your objects in shadow areas you might try rendering this with GI 2/4.

Keep up the improvements and good work


Cheers,
Martin

[Henry Blewer]

I have been playing with the new release. There are some real changes to get to know. But the speedier render time is huge on my machine!
When I was ready to do the render, I thought about the GI settings in the render section. I decided that they did not really add much, except render time. I did think of using ambient occlusion when I saw the shadow areas. That was 20+ hours into the render.

The new render settings will take some experiments to get the 'how' of them. I am playing with clouds now.

[Tangled-Universe]

Of course upping GI adds rendertime, but it are these type of situations where using higher GI settings is justified/required when aiming for more realistic lighting.

[Henry Blewer]

There is an issue I have with GI in the lighting settings. I am never sure how much to add to the surface. I have been experimenting, but the settings I have tried wash out the image, even when very small increases are used.

[Tangled-Universe]

There is an issue I have with GI in the lighting settings. I am never sure how much to add to the surface. I have been experimenting, but the settings I have tried wash out the image, even when very small increases are used.

I made many mistakes too with the strength on surface settings, but I learned that in the majority of cases you don't need to increase it and if so I never had to go beyond 1.5.
In some cases, with very bright direct lighting you might even reduce the strength on surface < 1 in order to avoid washed out colors/contrasts.

I'd make 2 enviro lights, one GI (untouched settings) and one with AO and set colours and strength in atmosphere < 0.5 and colours and strength on surfaces around 0.5 for starters.
Most of the times this gives me very good results, however, if I use this technique I render with higher GI quality/sampling

[Zairyn Arsyn]

I agree with all of the above,
this is the best render i have seen from you, njeneb; very good work.

the trees really caught my eye 
definitely worth the time to render.

[Henry Blewer]

Thanks for the tips, I am trying them out now.

It's really all Marc's fault. They are his trees....

[Gforce]

I can't say anything that people haven't said but it's an excellent render.

[Henry Blewer]

Thanks for all the replies and encouragement. This is my first 'hot' topic.

[MGebhart]

Very nice Henry.

Oh, the rocky surfaces are really sweet.

Marc

[tempaccount]

Great colors on the clouds. I would've cropped about ~20-25% off from the bottom of the image, then it would be perfect!

[Zairyn Arsyn]

Peter Jackson-esque Very good!

if the tree cover was really dense it could be mirkwood like.....

[aymenk2003]

...How did I missed this one njeneb ?? may be I was too busy...
Great work you've done here njeneb...
I have saved this one on my machine credited to you and use it as a wallpaper...

N.KAID