Hi All,
Made this for Frank :)
Stepped out of my comfort zone and made a contrasty image ;) hope you like it dude ;D
The basic scene layout is made by Ulco, like masks for roads and farmland and he also made the hills.
Cheers for that Ulco!
Vegetation, some surfacing, field rows and clouds were done by me.
Cheers,
Martin
Where's the tank? ;) Really nice, Martin.
This has some great details! I really like the way the crop field is separated, but the best part of this image is the tree line on the hill, and all of it under those clouds. I swear it looks like home. But I am a little put off by the plants in the very foreground, not by the nature of them, but the render, I think everything is so real that it should look more like a photograph but it is a clearly a render. Is it because of lower settings, or a low light level? It seems TG2 does much much better in brightly lit shots. Anyway, this image is clearly well thought out Martin, and your attention to detail is impressive!
I really like this !!
Excellent work
Thank you everyone.
Quote from: TheBadger on October 06, 2011, 04:04:22 AM
This has some great details! I really like the way the crop field is separated, but the best part of this image is the tree line on the hill, and all of it under those clouds. I swear it looks like home. But I am a little put off by the plants in the very foreground, not by the nature of them, but the render, I think everything is so real that it should look more like a photograph but it is a clearly a render. Is it because of lower settings, or a low light level? It seems TG2 does much much better in brightly lit shots. Anyway, this image is clearly well thought out Martin, and your attention to detail is impressive!
Thanks again, especially for the constructive comment.
Actually I'm not very keen on the distant trees, as they appear a bit flat because the texture settings aren't working very well for this type of lighting.
I think it depends on how you perceive the image and compare areas of the image with eachother.
Considering you like the background trees you'd expect less contrast and/or harsh lighting in the foreground.
I guess that's a bit how you look at it and I agree that either way you look at it there's something not entirely right with this image yet.
I agree with you that TG2 does better in more brightly lit environments. Increasing GI doesn't help and adding AO improves it a little bit.
For instance, this image is rendered with detail 0.8, GI 3/6/6 and AA32 set to 1/16 first samples and threshold to 0.15.
It rendered in 7 hours on my 2600K (stock).
What TG2 lacks in difficult lighting situation is more recursions of light-bounces so that the filling effect of the light improves.
I believe it is set to 3 bounces max hardcoded in the renderer.
Anyway, I'll see what I can improve and I admit I also added some postwork to satisfy Frank :)
Perhaps the raw output of the render will show you better how I designed the scene initially.
I say "I designed", but actually a fair amount of work on this image is done by Ulco, which I forgot to mention :(
Ulco made the masks for roads and farmland and also made the hills. Basically the complete scene layout.
I added surface details, field rows, vegetation and clouds.
So credits definitely should go to Ulco, I'll update my first post.
Cheers,
Martin
Thanks, Martin. ;D
QuoteI agree with you that TG2 does better in more brightly lit environments. Increasing GI doesn't help and adding AO improves it a little bit.
For instance, this image is rendered with detail 0.8, GI 3/6/6 and AA32 set to 1/16 first samples and threshold to 0.15.
It rendered in 7 hours on my 2600K (stock).
What TG2 lacks in difficult lighting situation is more recursions of light-bounces so that the filling effect of the light improves.
I believe it is set to 3 bounces max hardcoded in the renderer.
I actually understood everything you said here. I must be getting better!!!
In terms of the background trees I meant to praise there placement on the hill, especially the way the tree line is set higher up the hill. This looks very real. And I was also commenting on the overall compartmentalization of the different aspects of the landscape, in this regard the image is PERFECT! Just like what I see everyday in my little part of the world.
As to the technical issues in terragen2, sadly, I still can be of no help to anyone :'(
Good job TU and Dune!
Very nice image :)
I doubt that people other then in 3D would easily know that this is a 3d render.
The comments here are interesting.
I looked a long time at the image and i think for me there is some sort of HDRI to standart 8 bit converting feel .
Quote from: Kadri on October 06, 2011, 11:46:09 PM
Very nice image :)
I doubt that people other then in 3D would easily know that this is a 3d render.
The comments here are interesting.
I looked a long time at the image and i think for me there is some sort of HDRI to standart 8 bit converting feel .
Good observation Kadri :)
Here's the raw output, except for a little gamma adjustment...
Interesting. You managed to control that difficult light very well.
Thanks Ulco,
What I did was actually bloody simple and amateurish...I duplicated the raw layer. The bottom layer was for foreground and top layer for sky.
For the bottom layer I increased exposure and reduced gamma.
For the top layer I reduced the exposure and increased the gamma a tad bit.
Then I created a simple gradient mask for the top layer so that it would blend and with a soft big brush I touched it up a bit so that it would better follow the horizon.
Merged the lot and used the shadow/highlight tool a little bit for final touch up.
That's it, actually.
I quite like the result and the overall look, as it can give very atmospheric shots, so I think I'll try more of this in my next works.
Martin
That is defintely a great render Martin and very different from your usual ones ^^
My only critic would be that the bushes and trees in the foreground look a bit crispy to me, but that might just be my screen or my taste
And I prefer the raw output ;D
good job dude
I wouldn't call it amateurish, as long as you get what you want. Actually I use the same method for a lot of my work (not necessarily TG2), duplicating layers and working them up, wiping out and blending them then. But not the raw image, but the bmp or tiff.
When I work the curves (on automatic sometimes) it's always on a duplicate, which I often blend by 50% or so into the original. I'm now rendering a larger version of the coastal railway, which I will save as a exr, and work the same way.
Good efforts Martin. I agree with Seth unfortunately, I prefer the original, I think there's too much saturation in the processed version.
In the end, we went with blue sky and GI on the NE plate, it just looked better, and I had absolutely no time to finess due to the client changing the Cad data 1 1/2 weeks before delivery. Even so, I wasn't really happy with it.
We want to go back and do a few selected shots to show the client what they could have had if they had pulled a bloody finger out and gave us more than a few weeks to turn around the project. I've had a tentative go at doing an overcast version, but it's a nightmare to balance getting any light into the scene through overcast skies. It would be incredibly helpfull to have a "cast shadow opacity" in the cloud node that didn't rely on cloud density or effect the shadow in the cloud itself. The only other way to get around this would be to render the scene twice and create a horizon mask. This is also a good example where the alpha channel which didn't include clouds in the atmosphere or the atmosphere itself would be more useful than what we have at the moment. Anyway. Rant over.
Sorry to hijack, but you maybe interested in this, which is what we used in the end before processing or grading...
Quote from: Hetzen on October 07, 2011, 09:09:53 AM
Good efforts Martin. I agree with Seth unfortunately, I prefer the original, I think there's too much saturation in the processed version.
In the end, we went with blue sky and GI on the NE plate, it just looked better, and I had absolutely no time to finess due to the client changing the Cad data 1 1/2 weeks before delivery. Even so, I wasn't really happy with it.
We want to go back and do a few selected shots to show the client what they could have had if they had pulled a bloody finger out and gave us more than a few weeks to turn around the project. I've had a tentative go at doing an overcast version, but it's a nightmare to balance getting any light into the scene through overcast skies. It would be incredibly helpfull to have a "cast shadow opacity" in the cloud node that didn't rely on cloud density or effect the shadow in the cloud itself. The only other way to get around this would be to render the scene twice and create a horizon mask. This is also a good example where the alpha channel which didn't include clouds in the atmosphere or the atmosphere itself would be more useful than what we have at the moment. Anyway. Rant over.
Ghehe, well I never thought of agreeing with Seth as being "unfortunate" ;D just kidding
Funny observation though, because I didn't touch any colour/saturation slider in the proces as far as I remember.
The raw output I posted is from the .bmp output, while I used the .exr as a base for the first posted image.
Not sure if this contributes to it.
I like that image by the way. The overcast clouds add much to the scene, they also look pretty realistic themselves and the hint of bluesky really works for me.
I terribly agree ;) with you about the cloud opacity function you described. Unfortunately, and also a bit illogical if you'd ask me or to me, the light propagation settings in the clouds don't have any effects on the casted shadows from the clouds on the surface. It is density dependant though as far as I know. What one can try is to keep density low and increase edge sharpness. This way you can still simulate dense clouds without having actual dense clouds, so keep the benefits of brighter shadows beneath.
You can play a bit with the 2D cloud map function, but the softer you make it the less accurate the shadow becomes, so not ideal.
I also agree improved alpha functionality would greatly help in these situations.
Ok back to real work again :( sigh
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on October 07, 2011, 09:36:53 AM
Ghehe, well I never thought of agreeing with Seth as being "unfortunate" ;D
huhuhu ;D
Hi Martin, I'm just now stumbling over this thread. I appreciate you named it "for Frank" :-)
... but really it is for you, as it's a good thing to go away from the comfort zone from time to time. I think you exaggerated the contrast and saturation in the first posted image so that overall, it appeared not quite right, but you figured that out yourself already.
Have Jon and you been sharing this scene and each one made their individual versions? I must say Jon nailed it with the lighting in the first two images he posted. That lighting makes everything look incredibly real. But then, it's not necessary from an artistic standpoint to aspire to making all renders look incredibly real. Some postworked scenes, for example such scenes as wetbanana likes to make, don't look real but awesome with their contrast and colors.
Anyway, keep on exploring postwork options and opportunities :)
cheers,
Frank
That's kind of you to say so Frank, but this has been a team effort. the workflow was to get Ulco to do the mask design for roads, rivers, tree lines and fields/heath, which was then passed on to Martin to populate and add detail. I had the pleasure of tweeking their efforts before rendering.
Hi Martin,
I love the composition too. To me it is a cold autumnal day somewhere in the south east (UK). I think the vegetation close to the camera needs a little more work - it does loof more fake than the rest of the escene. Another thought - would it be worth rendering with more light then darkening the result in PhotoShop / PhotoPaint? Jonathan
"Final" (?) results posted by Jon look quite realistic. Very nice detail in the road gravel, this is the kind of thing TG2 is great at, because you can keep that in the scene and zoom way out and not even see it, but it won't really slow things down much and it's there when you get your camera over there to see it. The lighting in these last images is particularly nice too. But great work by all and it's awesome to see such collaboration working so well. The end results speak for themselves.
Jon, if you can share any more details, before/after (final) images, etc. on this we'd love to put together a case study or other feature, if you're interested.
- Oshyan