This is a WIP that I've been working on for a while. It uses some of lightning's plants and sonshine's log as well as some flowers and stuff from Ashundar. I'm getting to a point where I'm almost satisfied with it - I'm going to be adding some moss to the rock and I'm trying to find a way to get the lighting better so that the plants look more realistic. I'd appreciate any comments you might have before I do a final render :).
wow!....no crits from me....looks great....I look forward to see the finale(and a the tutorial!!!)
very excellent!
Cool! Very ambitious, I think you're close to pulling it off.
The back wall needs a lot of work- variation in surface, mosses, etc. The lighting lacks a little depth as you said.
monks
I think Monks has said it all for me.
Maybe you can improve the lighting by lowering the sun angle (it's pretty high isn't it? 55 degrees or so?) and add a very very thin volumetric cloud all over the scene for some diffuse lighting. In addition to that you could also slightly increase the softshadow diameter, but not too much, it looks pretty so far.
In overall the image lacks shadows, except for the tree, which are in my opinion due to the high sun angle and also sun position. Maybe if you change the sun's position more to the middle of the image the rock wall will generate a shadow on the left part of the image. With that diffuse lighting I told before I think it would look a lot more interesting.
For the background wall I'd suggest to make it less noizy. The brighter grays look noizy while the dark base colors do show the displacements/shapes pretty nice.
I think you could try to increase the color-range of the base fractal and maybe increase its contrast as well. This should give some more variation already.
Then you could try to add the brighter grays again, one by one and I'd go for slightly less coverage and slightly larger scales.
And like monks said. Add some nice mosses on flatter slopes and maybe a bush here and there :)
Oh by the way, while I keep on looking at your image I noticed the following:
The waterfall, which looks great and from which I think it is a masked cloud?, creates very big waves especially where it touches the waterplane.
The water looks like vapor (because it falls from great heigth I presume) and I think it doesn't displace the watersurface that much.
Well well, enough said. It's great work and I hope some of my suggestions will help :)
Martin
Quote from: old_blaggard on April 25, 2008, 02:17:54 AM
I'm trying to find a way to get the lighting better so that the plants look more realistic. I'd appreciate any comments you might have before I do a final render :).
Try adding a reflective shader to the plants, with a high roughness on the specularity and reflections. Works wonders, and
mimicks reality anyway.
Wow, great job mate, I think the pond has a bit too much displacement but other then that its wonderful.
Wow. How did you do the waterfall?
Looking good so far! I second the suggestion about adding a bit of reflectivity to the plants. I wish I knew how to do that. I also agree with Martin's comment about the water agitation being a little strong, however if there was a way to add a object in the center of the fall (Mist) that mimics falling water with transparency applied to it would be more convincing. I think your adding moss to the rock face is a good idea especially in this wet surrounding. How about in addition to the moss, adding some bushes or plants growing out of the rock face in a few areas? I'll try and keep an eye on your progress as this is inspiring work so far.
This is a very good start, I'll be keeping an eye on this one.
Thanks a lot for the detailed comments! I'm definitely going to try some of those lighting tricks - I honestly didn't realize that the sun was at 55 (good guess, by the way ;) ) - usually I keep it somewhere between 20 and 35, but I am remembering now that I had to raise it up pretty high to help find my POV in the first place. I will definitely add moss, and I'll give it a shot with the plants, although I'm not sure how successful I'll be because of the possibility of the plants colliding with the wall and simply going through it. Finally, some people have told me to add more displacement to the wall and to the water, and some people have told me to do less. I'll keep on looking at reference pictures and try to find a happy medium :).
Very nice project! 8)
amazing love the ripples and gurgly displacement around the waterfall ;D
I'm going to give this one a break for now, but I'd still appreciate comments on how you all think it turned out just in case I want to revisit it later :).
http://www.ashundar.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-5239
Quote from: old_blaggard on May 01, 2008, 01:47:27 PM
I'm going to give this one a break for now, but I'd still appreciate comments on how you all think it turned out just in case I want to revisit it later :).
http://www.ashundar.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-5239
Beautiful ! I like it !
I like it all very, very much, o_b. One small thing that I notice frequently in just about any TG2 renders - the trees almost look plastic. There's just enough something to make them look unreal. I don't see this as anything you have done or not done. Just an observation. I like your textures a lot and the water work is great!
great one !!! Oo
o_b,
I really like this one. It looks like a nice setting to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I think the intensity of the waterfall is more in synch with the size of the waves now. I really like the slick wet appearance of the rock wall behind the fall. That looks very natural.
It took me a while but I think I figured out what didn't look quite right at the base of the fall. The big bubbly water surface needs to be roughed up a bit. There should be numerous droplets hitting the surface around the main fall so it should not look quite so glassy smooth.
IOTW \o/
How did you end up doing the waterfall?
Personally, I think the ripples are too tall and look a little like plastic, but other than that....You've got a nice one there sir 8)
The waterfall is essentially a masked cloud layer. I'm remembering that I was going to make a tutorial for it due to some requests on Ashundar... maybe I'll get able to get around to that this weekend.
And thanks for the IotW, Oshyan :).
Did you end up getting around to that tutorial? :P
At long last, I've finally gotten around to completing my waterfall tutorial. You can find it here:
http://www.ashundar.com/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=item427
If you find errors or unclear passages in it, please let me know.
thnx dude ;)!
Awesome tutorial. This was very useful. I did find that using the new shape shaders saves from having to use functions for the mask.