Yosemite Valley - V2 on page 2

[Kadri]

Guys Ok this is subjective but come on !
Try putting this on a photo site . I think nearly no one would think that this is 3d .
You are picking things up because you know it is 3d . I have seen 2 times more saturated photos or weird ones .
And i was going to put some links here. But there is no need to be to be more royalist than the king 

Cheers.

Kadri.

[Seth]

hehehe
I guess that Martin wouldn't appreciate any hypocrit comments from me (or from anyone), so I always post honest critics
If it is an artistic choice, I don't see anything to say but as Martin usually never does high contrasted and satured renders, I think it migt be a good idea to write that I truely find it "oversaturated" on my screen
oh and i just re-calibrated my screen to check if it didn't come from here and it looks the same as before.

[domdib]

Great realism Martin - I love the grass populations.

I think I agree a little with those who find the tree species unusually bright and saturated - I guess the model could be toned down quite easily though.

The one *tiny* fly in the ointment is that, given the coverage of the grass pops, the background grass shader coverage looks a little sparse to me.

Look forward to seeing more details on this.

[Henry Blewer]

Well, when I use Mr.Lamppost's grasses, everyone points out that they are 'really green'. I think this is a really well done render. But that was the only thing which I found to be an issue. If I had done this, I would have been very happy with it.

[Jack]

this is a very cool scene martin!
great work all round i love the colours though i think its a little dark.
i Ran it quickly through PS I hope you don't mind just to brighten it up and bring out more of the exquisite detail


and a sharper version

[Henry Blewer]

The sharper version seems better.  I would like to see if and what martin may try.

[Linda McCarthy]

Hi Martin,
What an awesome and beautiful render..and an excellent piece of work.
One small quibble; the shade of green on the trees takes away somewhat from the realism for me.
If you feel the same way, you might consider taking it into Photoshop..or wwhatever your image-enhancing program..and reduce the saturation just a tad- certainly not much at all and apply two 25% doses of unsharp mask.  Rather like the result below.
I feel like I've been artistically and technically fed by yours and njeneb's renders.
Linda

[otakar]

First of all, I think the bottom third is an absolute stunner. The rocks are superb. The trees  - their distribution, similarity and color uniformity - do take something away from the entire picture, but it's still beautiful. A yes, I agree, post this one on a photo sharing site and nobody would suspect it's computer generated. 

A couple of populations of less than healthy trees would go a long way, IMHO.

[Walli]

very good render and the cobble stones together with grass are stunning. I second the color critique, for my taste the trees and the sky are to saturated. I think you probably would find something like that on broad leaves, but not on pine/fir trees. Even if they grow out there fresh branches, it´s usually only the tips that are so colorful.

But if i was an artistique choice, then it is up to you where you want to go!

Great work!

[Hannes]

I think this is a great image. It looks very natural but I'd like to see this one with a less saturated texture on the fir trees. To me this is the only thing that makes it look less real. Maybe a little color variation in the rock texture would be fine. The rest is fantastic!

[EoinArmstrong]

Ah yes - I like Linda's post-pro best.  Still an awesome pic!

[RArcher]

Great work Martin.  As others have said the colours are definitely too saturated to my tastes.  The image itself and the setup is fantastic.  I really like the clouds as well.

Here would be my post-pro attempt.

[Tangled-Universe]

Thank you all for the extensive crits and feedback How one image can lead to such an interesting discussion with a variety of solutions, I really like this

Thank you Banana(?), Linda and Ryan for posting your suggestions
I find Linda's suggestion the most appealing so far. I don't like post-sharpening images, I barely do that.
Ryan, I always like your photographic approach for postworking TG2 work, but I think the one you suggested has a too much sepia-look.
Looks good, definitely, but also not what I had in mind or was aiming for.

During development of this scene I aimed for a more saturated look, so basically this was intentional.
For anyone thinking I upped the saturation of my textures: I didn't
I basically increased the diffuse color of the textures and gave them some translucency and reflectivity.
If I look at the renders which come along with the Xfrog-documentation of the models; these were as even saturated, so one might also say that the species I used in these images have colorful leafs/needles and are meant to look this way.
Of course, one can debate about this in both technical and artistic ways and neither of them will be wrong.

In retrospect it might have been a bit too much, so after seeing some suggestions I have attempted a little color-correction myself.
I kept some of the saturation because I just simply like it this time
I'll "abuse" this tgd for rendering some more POV's and will see how I approach colors then.

@Dombib: it's hard to really asses the coverage of the foreground grasses (because of perspective) and thereby compare them with the grasses in the background. Especially when these are mostly covered by trees. I hope you can see better now that the coverage is very similar to the eye. In technical terms, by slope restriction, the coverage of the background-grass is even more than the actual grass-models.

I've made 3 small renders showing the breakdown of the image and one crop of a 3000px image of the upper right, showing the displacements somewhat closer up, see 2 posts below.

Thank you all so far

Cheers,
Martin

[Tangled-Universe]

A crop from a 3000+ px render showing some of the displacements and fake-grass shader.
The fake grass shader uses intersect underlying as a base, which also has the darkest green color.
On top are 2 other colors layered, all with 5 degrees less slope than its parent.

[Tangled-Universe]

3 renders showing the buildup of the scene:

I started with a very very simple WM2 generated terrain, kindly provided by Frank which started with this idea
The POV for this image is straight from the tgd he sent me.

In the second image you can see the fractal detail added, some additional displacements as well as fake grasses and fake stones rubble.
The rubble is from the Fake Stone Bed & Hero Rock Pack from NWDA.

The third image shows the addition of water and a "double-distance-restricted" clouds.
The clouds are restricted from the first couple of 1000m away from the camera, then "allowed" for the second couple of 1000m and then restricted for the rest of the distance up to the horizon.
This way I created a narrow band of clouds which will save lots of rendertime because the rasteriser would otherwise render them first and then the terrain, all up to the horizon.