Recent posts

#31
Image Sharing / Re: coastal cliffs
Last post by Upon Infinity - March 25, 2024, 04:37:04 AM
Interesting technique. Great results! I could never get cliffs to work right in TG.
#32
Image Sharing / Re: Nice place for R&R
Last post by Dune - March 25, 2024, 02:25:50 AM
Nice POV. If I may make some suggestions; if you have a property like that with a view like that, the gardener must be a bit loony to place a row of trees to obscure that view ???  I'd rather put some small shrub and perhaps one or two 'thin-leaved' trees in the corners, like birches or so.
About the chalet, it's very dark and not too welcoming; I'd lighten up the wood and roof, give the roof (shingles?) a 0.3 of reflection, in fact perhaps the wood too, so it reflects a bit more light in dark areas.
If you do this in PT, don't forget to change the specular roughness in the glass shader. The default 0.01 will blur the reflections a bit (unless you want it to). But what do you mean by 'a bit transparent'?
#33
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by Dune - March 25, 2024, 02:16:30 AM
That is very weird indeed, something you'd never think of (not me anyway, never use EXR). I'm curious what staff will say about the rendering itself, if they know.

Especially good that you found the culprit by yourself!
#34
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Dune - March 25, 2024, 02:10:30 AM
Extremely cool, especially the last POV, with the great variation in hues and darks. Very subtle. Did you use (a.o) the water shader for sand displacement? I actually never thought of using a lambert shader for surfaces like this. I guess the translucency and the PT light reflections give it such a subtle 'gloom'.
#35
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Doug - March 24, 2024, 07:59:31 PM
really good pics

i could put some petroglyphs all over those walls
#36
Image Sharing / Canyon series 1
Last post by Tangled-Universe - March 24, 2024, 07:15:05 PM
A series of canyon's I've been working on...

Little fun fact; there's only one lambert shader as surface shader (w/o translucency and w/o masks).
The sand has the same colour, though ever slightly lighter with fake stones (which uses built-in RGB colour variation) as sand grains.
#37
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by sboerner - March 24, 2024, 03:19:52 PM
OK, I think I've found the problem and it's strange.  ::)

But first, it's important to know that these invaders (which is what I'm calling them -- they remind me of old Space Invaders sprites) didn't appear until the foliage was added to the scene. Then they showed up in every render, but in different locations each time. Sometimes over foliage, sometimes over water or elsewhere. (I even rendered the same file on both machines last night and yep, they showed up in both.)

While loading the file I finally noticed this error. It was getting thrown each time TG attempted to load a displacement file associated with one of the trees:

FreeImage error: Warning: loading color model R as Y color model

So I looked at the file, which came with a Megascans bark shader. It was an EXR file and had a single channel (which appears in Photoshop's layers panel) named "[R]". All other EXR files in the scene have a single channel named "RGB".

FreeImage must be the library module that TG uses for EXR support. This page explains the problem: https://sourceforge.net/p/freeimage/bugs/283/. More detail here: https://github.com/imageio/imageio/issues/356.

Anyway. I just changed the channel name in Photoshop from "[R]" to "RGB" and resaved it. The error went away and (fingers crossed) the render currently running looks fine so far. Why this would have anything to do with the renderer is beyond me. But the problem seems to be fixed: No more invaders. I'll be doing nightly renderings so if it hasn't been fixed, it will show up again soon enough. 



#38
Image Sharing / Nice place for R&R
Last post by pclavett - March 24, 2024, 07:27:18 AM
Hi all ! I changed the camera to get a closer look at the chalet from the previous post with everything else kept the same. This was an exercise in precision placing of plants for the rocky base, the wall, the flowerbed on the wall as well as border trees. One spruce was a bit too close to the camera on the left but saw it only well into the render. The fireweed was made from scratch in XFrogs years ago and turned out fairly well for this image. The render was done with the standard renderer and eager to see if the RT gives better vegetation. The chalet was purchased in CG Trader if I remember correctly. I made the windows are a bit too transparent and in some areas show an empty house with wooden wall..... will tone that down and put more reflections..... or maybe buy furniture ! Take care and have a great weekend !
#39
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by Dune - March 24, 2024, 02:24:17 AM
They will see it, and respond. Perhaps (if it takes too long) state the same question at the discord forum.

Looking forward to see anything you're working on, always a treat! And knowing more about your new way, if you care to share.
#40
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by sboerner - March 23, 2024, 05:19:57 PM
I'm hoping someone from Planetside might see this and let me know what these are. I wonder if they might indicate a hardware problem, though I've run across them on two very different systems. I'm running a memory check now on the system that I used to render this, just to see.

And thanks re: the trees. This is the top part of a new scene I'm working on. Once I have something more presentable I might post it here. I'm testing a new way to create historically accurate landscapes . . . seems promising. As far as the forest goes, it's still too tidy. Needs some windfalls and dead trees, more undergrowth.