Lemme introduce you to "Frost", my latest WIP:
I know, it's probably not the most beautiful weather conditions to have, but I always wanted to make a realistic-looking, bad weather, ice cold landscape image, that features a sky completely covered with nasty clouds full of snow.
Now, this is my first shot at it. Yeah, true, it probably needs some more work, but for the first time, it "feels" about right, so I guess I'm on the right path ;-)
I forgot to mention that what I struggled with most was the lighting of the scene. Getting decent lighting with a fully covered sky required some serious tweaking.
But before I got to the lighting, the snow was the most difficult part. I had a clear vision of how it should look like, but have been lucky to find a way to make it look just so.
Cheers,
Frank
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Throw your coat on, it looks darn cold there. ;)
@Sethren: You bet! ;)
Hi Frank,
Looking excellent so far. The clouds are phenomenal.
what happen to the shadows???
Quote from: dhavalmistry on December 17, 2007, 10:10:55 PM
what happen to the shadows???
Good observation!
Well, I figured that when the sky is all covered, the environment is still very bright. Yes you still have shadows, but these are barely visible. It's like light is coming from everywhere with the same intensities, so in TG2 terms, you've got to up the Ambient color of the atmosphere from black to something brighter.
That's a similair effect to old TG's shadow lightness, although it's not the same.
Regards,
Frank
Quote from: FrankB on December 18, 2007, 03:10:32 AM
Quote from: dhavalmistry on December 17, 2007, 10:10:55 PM
what happen to the shadows???
Good observation!
Well, I figured that when the sky is all covered, the environment is still very bright. Yes you still have shadows, but these are barely visible. It's like light is coming from everywhere with the same intensities, so in TG2 terms, you've got to up the Ambient color of the atmosphere from black to something brighter.
That's a similair effect to old TG's shadow lightness, although it's not the same.
Regards,
Frank
In a certain way you could say this is in fact very realistic!
Here's an updated version: essentially denser vegetation, a little bit of the trees in the foreground and a differently postworked exposure/levels etc... to make the weather look even nastier ;-)
Cheers,
Frank
Cool. ;D
Oh shit I've uploaded the wrong version.
Here's the right one:
Outstanding image Frank!
The texturing on the trees is great and the atmo/clouds are almost perfect!
This must have been a hell of a rendertime?
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on December 18, 2007, 11:17:52 AM
Outstanding image Frank!
The texturing on the trees is great and the atmo/clouds are almost perfect!
This must have been a hell of a rendertime?
Thank you :-)
The render time was 2 hours in total, 1 hour per core. It's a pretty simple scene, the key is in the right lighting, and on getting the right look for the snow, and the right distribution for the vegetation. Actually the shader tree has just 4 shaders and a little function for the luminosity of the snow ;-)
The trees have been simple, too. I just photoshoped the texture (rendered clouds, whitish colors).
Cheers,
Frank
Nice, Frank. I like the trees. These are realistic.
The latest version with the tree in the foreground looks very good Frank.
The latest version looks pretty good. I like the distribution of the vegetation and where you have placed your camera. Although so does the mistake for that matter.
actually...to be honest...I prefer the one without the trees....love the contrast on the surfacing....I wonder if you could balance out the contrast with clouds...;)
Quote from: dhavalmistry on December 18, 2007, 10:47:07 PM
actually...to be honest...I prefer the one without the trees....love the contrast on the surfacing....I wonder if you could balance out the contrast with clouds...;)
Yeah, the contrast is pretty cool on that unintentionally uploaded test image, but that was not the goal for the scene. I really wanted to have this particular weather impression you get from the latest version, but also I wanted to create the correct impression of scale, hence I need objects to help with that.
Cheers,
Frank
Quote from: FrankB on December 18, 2007, 01:16:32 PM
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on December 18, 2007, 11:17:52 AM
Outstanding image Frank!
The texturing on the trees is great and the atmo/clouds are almost perfect!
This must have been a hell of a rendertime?
Thank you :-)
The render time was 2 hours in total, 1 hour per core. It's a pretty simple scene, the key is in the right lighting, and on getting the right look for the snow, and the right distribution for the vegetation. Actually the shader tree has just 4 shaders and a little function for the luminosity of the snow ;-)
The trees have been simple, too. I just photoshoped the texture (rendered clouds, whitish colors).
Cheers,
Frank
You're welcome ;-)
I totally don't get it how this could be rendered in 2 hours. Yes, without the populations I could easily imagine a 2h rendertime.
Always when I render populations it takes ages and ages to render because the lack of culling/clipping in the current renderer.
I understand you've split-rendered this image? Did you use GI then?
What were the settings? Just wondering, hope you don't mind all these questions.
Regards, Martin
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on December 19, 2007, 03:53:55 AM
You're welcome ;-)
I totally don't get it how this could be rendered in 2 hours. Yes, without the populations I could easily imagine a 2h rendertime.
Always when I render populations it takes ages and ages to render because the lack of culling/clipping in the current renderer.
I understand you've split-rendered this image? Did you use GI then?
What were the settings? Just wondering, hope you don't mind all these questions.
Regards, Martin
I don't mind at all. Here are the answers:
- The render detail was 0.8
- Gi was 1/1
- the atmosphere had cloud 2 layer, but you can effectively see only one. It had a 2D cirrus and then the low hanging 3D. The density was just 0.002 and the accelaration cache was set to "more acceleration" - which is ok for those type of clouds. Effectively the layer needed just 25 samples for quality 1.
- The trees have been simplified: I removed all leaves and also quite a few branches. Still the object quality was set to "very high" in the populator.
- The scene has effectively very few trees in the foregound. Most tree instances are very far away, hence render very fast.
- As I mentioned before, I have very few shaders, no displacements, no reflections
- And yes, I've cropped the render in two halfs, rendered each half with one instance of terragen and 1 core each, and assembled the results afterwards. I usually let the two halfs overlap. So one render (from left to right) is set to [0;0.55] and the other half to [0.45;1]. In general this is enough for the GI not to mess up. But now that you mention it, the overlap for this image wasn't quite enough, so I had to do a little postwork to make the line between the two halfs disappear.
Hope that helps,
Frank
Very pretty.
Quote from: Saurav on December 18, 2007, 05:38:44 PM
The latest version with the tree in the foreground looks very good Frank.
I agree... nice work. Can't wait for the GI crop issue to be ironed out, I'll try the overlap trick too. Love those trees :)