I started this one as a test for some image map shaders. There are two of them with planar mapping for the flat surfaces and another one with camera mapping for the vertical part of the terrain. I used another camera for the projection which I placed at a 4 o'clock position to make the projection less obvious.
Additionally I used some procedural layers for the green, a broken up strata and outcrops shader and two fake stones shaders.
I upped the GI relative detail in the render settings to 3, which makes the indirect lighting of the trees especially in the darker areas much much better.
(...and the rendertime much much longer!)
Hope you like it.
Very nice rock structure and beautiful water ! But trees look "flat"...
Cool rocktexturing. I kinda like everything in this image except for two things: the subsurface color of the water is very green, bit too saturated if you ask me and the clouds could use some more work. Perhaps you should also lower their coverage a bit because the image looks a bit "busy" this way.
Great work nonetheless, definitely!
Martin
I like this image very much. The cracked rock texture is excellent, and I like the tree deployment (don't look flat to me). Apart from increasing the samples to get rid of the noise in them, the clouds are good. I agree about the over-saturated green in the reflection of the trees in the water, but overall, great work.
John
Personally I like the water, clouds could do with some work (imho) but the image mapped rocks really err "rock" ! :)
Image mapped textures can give you very, very realistic results. How big were the images you used by the way?
:)
richard
Thank you all.
I used 128 samples for the clouds. Maybe not enough, but I also increased the roughness in the noise settings.
The green colour of the water seems to be a matter of taste (apart from the wave settings it was just out of the box). I personally like it too.
I used some textures from here:
http://www.cgtextures.com/
3008 to 2000px.
Hi Hannes,
you certainly have some nice rock structure in the image. I think the most part is a little bit too rough or sharp. The render would have benefited from higher AA.
Overall it's a very pleasant scene. I like the green water :-)
Cheers,
Frank
I agree Frank, higher AA or a different AA filter perhaps, but otherwise the rock is superb. Water color doesn't bother me either. Trees look pretty good. Just the clouds need a little something, but they're already looking good too. Great scene!
- Oshyan
Thanks again guys. Yes, more AA would be nice, but I'm still stitching :)
Btw I think the roughness is caused by the displacement of the image map shader.
Right now I am rendering some images with the same clouds with 256 samples. If you have some suggestions how I could change the clouds, let me know.
For some of you I rendered the water with a little less greener colour. When everything is put together I'll show you the results.
What AA filter are you using? You may not have to increase AA but just change the filter for smoother results.
- Oshyan
Well, this is embarrassing :-[
I've just been searching for the AA filters and realized that I forgot to install the latest version.
OK, first I'll finish the renders with a lower displacement setting and if this doesn't help, I'll try the filters.
I think the displacement level is good, I wouldn't want to see the fine details lost from lesser displacement. I do think a different AA filter might be just the trick though.
- Oshyan
Which one do you suggest?
I like Mitchell-Netravali or Catmull-Rom, but since you've got sharpness issues the "soft" Cubic B-spline *might* be useful. You should try with a crop render in that area I think. Here are some examples on a different scene:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5142.msg53401#msg53401
- Oshyan
Thank you. Rendering now.
Looks promising (Cubic B-Spline soft):
looking very promising, so far...look forward tothe update!
I wish I could make rocks like those!
Great work!
I agree with all of the praise here. EXCELLENT work. And I too wish I could make rocks like those - fabulous.
That looks good so far Hannes.
You might also compare it with mitchell-netravalli, since I personally like that filter the most. To me it has a very nice balance suitable for images with surfacedetails and objects.
Quote from: calico on February 23, 2009, 07:49:00 AM
I agree with all of the praise here. EXCELLENT work. And I too wish I could make rocks like those - fabulous.
Absolutely good rocks, but also keep in mind that it is 'just' a phototexture (don't get me wrong here) and not any kind of TG-displacement, besides that there is some extra surfacing on top of it of course. Being a TG-purist myself I would try that at all times, though I have to admit similar results are very hard to get. The tiling-size, placement and prevention of tiling-effect is done very well in the first version.
What I mean to say that however this is very good it is relatively "easy" compared to doing this procedural.
You're absolutely right, TU. Before I used the texture mapping I tried to create some natural looking cracked rock surfaces. Didn't really work, so I thought why not using texture maps?
So I started to use two or three different textures, each one on top of the other, broken up by some power fractals to make the tiling more or less invisible. Then I realized that the textures are distorted at the vertical parts of the terrain.
And I thought why not using the "through camera" mapping, when it looks natural. What I REALLY did NOT want to see is this projection through the render camera because this always looks fake. So I created another camera at the 4 o'clock position relative to the render camera, as I already mentioned.
In the image map shaders I applied the displacement with a low value of 0.15. The first version had 0.3, but as you can see it was too much.
Even if it's not as pure as procedurals, there's still a lot of things that can be wrong. So for me it's a challenge.
Quote from: Hannes on February 23, 2009, 09:41:40 AM
You're absolutely right, TU. Before I used the texture mapping I tried to create some natural looking cracked rock surfaces. Didn't really work, so I thought why not using texture maps?
So I started to use two or three different textures, each one on top of the other, broken up by some power fractals to make the tiling more or less invisible. Then I realized that the textures are distorted at the vertical parts of the terrain.
And I thought why not using the "through camera" mapping, when it looks natural. What I REALLY did NOT want to see is this projection through the render camera because this always looks fake. So I created another camera at the 4 o'clock position relative to the render camera, as I already mentioned.
In the image map shaders I applied the displacement with a low value of 0.15. The first version had 0.3, but as you can see it was too much.
Even if it's not as pure as procedurals, there's still a lot of things that can be wrong. So for me it's a challenge.
Thanks for sharing insight on this. The through camera projection is a very good way of preventing that fake look. Projection through the rendercamera also results in scale-issues for example.
(I'm working on a quite realistic rockstructure with voronoi-cracks etc. It looks quite convincing and is very easy to adjust in terms of scales and displacement. I've already posted some images of it (it's one of my latest). I'm planning to make it available soon, so maybe you're interested.)
YES, I am!!
Thanks for sharing your technique, Hannes.
Just great! :o
This is FANTASTIC! Nothing wrong with using image maps as needed. I've used similar techniques in the past. Personally, I'd love to pull of techniques procedurally, but sometimes, there just isn't a way with known techniques. Excellent work! :o
I was thinking about the camera projection techniques Hannes used in this scene and realized something.
If one uses camera projection from the render camera itself for the image maps (as I have been doing), then animating the scene would not effectively work since the image map would slide with the moving/panning render camera as the scene animated. This would look highly unrealistic and strange. So I had wrote off this technique for animations originally.
But if the projections are through other stationary cameras (as Hannes did), the scene could likely be animated without the image map sliding effect, especially for smaller movements. Larger movements would require more cameras and image map projections as the render camera panned or moved off the current screen, but that shouldn't be hard to implement.
So this is indeed great work here Hannes! 8)
Hi,
Ah, it's a photo texture! When I saw that latest image with the soft filter I couldn't help feeling it looked an awful lot like a surface out a game, albeit a detailed one. Not that I have anything against using photo textures mind you, sometimes it's the best way to get something photorealistic :-).
Regards,
Jo
I like the greenish water...
"Here" there is a lake more deep green...
(http://farm1.static.flickr.com/106/314105011_b76949512f.jpg?v=0)
OK, here is the update. It took a long time to put this together.
I reduced the green of the water. As already mentioned I used the Cubic B-spline AA filter (really great!). I then increased the displacement in the rock shader again after applying the AA filter, because it was too smooth.
I added a little bit more grass and created new clouds.
The value of the GI relative detail was set to 4 to make the trees look more realistic (a great difference in my eyes).
Little postwork to make the colours of the single images suit together.
Great improvements, I really like this work! :)
Martin
Hannes, this is so good. This is worthy of a setting in a movie. I've wondered how that would work, but if it would be possible to have this sort of realistic render in an animation it could change everything.
Kudos!
Really outstanding!!! :o
very very good render !
love it :D
good job Hannes !!!
Superbly lit scene. Love the new clouds.
Great Hannes, well done! The clouds have also benefitted from the high GI quality, it's clearly visible.
Cheers,
Frank
Superb Creation, you should be proud. :) Looks like IOTW to me.
Excellent rock surfacing.