Garden of Eternity

[Saurav]

This is great. Looking forward to the end results.

[FrankB]

woah, a whole "park" full of all sorts of things. I love the paths, and the whole composition!

[Henry Blewer]

Animated correctly, this could be a contest winner.

[Dune]

Yeah, but the problem is that I had to populate small areas with grass and flowers to get good close ups. The pops would be huge if you'd animate the whole park. My pc cannot handle that, at least. Unless it would be possible to use a distance shader and populate every frame again. But I wouldn't want to give that job to Oshyan...

[FrankB]

that said, I don't think it's necessary to high-speed fly through the whole park. A slower pace along one of the paths, with interesting things to see along the way would be cool, too.

Cheers,
Frank

[otakar]

Wow, how much time do you spend with TG to keep cranking out such complex renders? The placement of object alone would take me an eternity! I am really impressed how fast some people here can keep producing high quality images... It certainly can't be computing power alone.

[Dune]

The Garden of Eternity (10 images to be delivered) is about getting into its final stages. Redid the entrance porch/wall to give it a softer look (and grew some 'Clematis' on it using the Ivy Generator), more Zwerfkeien (Glacial stones) in the Glacial Wood part of the garden, and another monument (spiral of standing stones) in another specific area. It's going to be  a very cool place to wander around in, and hopefully it will be reality one day.
I also hope to get green light for these second concepts real soon, so I can finish the storyboard for the NWDA contest in time

---Dune

ps. I do the concepts with GI 1/1/8 and a fill light, but the final things would be done with GI 2/2/8 I think. And also with soft shadows on, which are off here.

[domdib]

I love the entranceway - the stone wall looks as if it's been there forever.

[inkydigit]

super images, as always...love the arch/entrance and the clematis, and the moraine debris boulders are excellent...did you use power fractals for the lichen?

[Henry Blewer]

I can't wait to see this done with greater detail settings.

[Dune]

@inkydigit: Yes, some high contrast billows, very simple. I could have added some more fractals to give them some crrrrrispy displacement, we'll see. The whole rock is procedural and simple, they might be nicer with a photo texture... have to check that, now that you mention them.

[inkydigit]

thanks Dune, it is a good result on it's own, some added texture/displacement would make it perfect!

[choronr]

Dune, this entire project is a magnificent work.

[Dune]

I had to leave for a couple of hours, so I let one of the views for the storyboard render a bit larger. Took longer than expected; 5.15 hours at 2000px wide, detail=0.5, AA=4, GI 2/2/8, and soft shadows (be it with 5 samples instead of 9 to reduce rendertime). Grass and flowers are procedural, by the way, as is the green stuff creeping up the walls. That turned out fine in the distance, but close-up you clearly see it's dependent upon the way the wall is mapped (I'm still not satisfied with my mapping, but ok, I'm only doing that for a few months now). I might add some 'real' creepers, like on the entrance wall/porch.

---Dune

[Hannes]

This looks really great! Talking about rendertimes: have you tried enabling ray trace shadows for the cloud layer that represents the mist? I know that takes a lot longer to render, but it adds a lot to realism.