Hi guys,
a new one from me, albeit a quick one. Actually I wanted to make these clouds in the first place, and then needed a terrain for it not to look too boring.
If you forgive me the only half-finished shore on the right, I hope the rest of the render is pleasant to watch.
Cheers,
Frank
Good start but what about those shear mountain sides on right hand side - too much displacement/cutoff?
Wow, this looks really appealing already! Really love the sky.
Like you said yourself the shore is a bit unfinished and the mountains could use some work too.
Cheers,
Martin
Oh yes, the cut-off mountain top in the background...
It's just an alpine fractal anomaly, but here is the story: you notice that the file name is "new 16", so it's the 16th iteration of the image. I saw this cut-off piece early on, an quickly moved to a different POV where it wasn't visible anymore. 10 or so iterations later I forgot about the cut-off part and move the POV near the previous location .... and here are we again :)
Other than that I like the mountains as they are. Just the tree distribution isn't quite right yet. :-\
Oh yeah those mountains, didn't see it actually...too much drooling on that blistering cold looking atmosphere :)
I think you can easily fix that by positioning a spherical distance shader at that position and to use that for blending in a different alpine fractal seed.
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on November 17, 2011, 06:25:44 AM
Oh yeah those mountains, didn't see it actually...too much drooling on that blistering cold looking atmosphere :)
I think you can easily fix that by positioning a spherical distance shader at that position and to use that for blending in a different alpine fractal seed.
Also a good idea, but I fixed it by changing the Alpine itself. I wanted the mountains to be wider, so I increased the feature size and decreased the scale step a bit to add some steepness, and I'm rendering another version soon. No work on the shores yet, though.
wickedly good start on the clouds!
Great pic, clouds are amazing.
I'll do one more iteration and then I'll hand it over to TU to make the terrain look even prettier :)
... I tend to loose interest once I've got the sky right anyway :D
Ghehe, yeah sky/clouds is really your thing! :) looking forward to it :)
naaaah, the second iteration wasn't ideal. I need a little more time, but getting there.
Here is the second, but not the last iteration:
the light and colour are really good on the first one !
you're all in for a surprise as soon as you see what TU has done to the mountains!!! Just saw a preview and it's awesome!
Looks good Frank :)
...
For anyone interested, we're still working on this scene to make it a nice one :)
Hints so far: 5 or 6 cloud layers and millions of instances ;)
Looking forward to it ;)
Hey guys, what's up? Done yet?
Quote from: Dune on January 12, 2012, 09:35:58 AM
Hey guys, what's up? Done yet?
funny timing. Martin has started the final, big-ass render. This will probably render until Friday night or so. Keep your finders crossed it won't bail.
Yes, an Oregon render.
let us know your render settings when finished please
Rendering now @ 7150x5000 ;D
Render settings are:
detail 0.75
AA6 (full sampling)
GI 2/6/8
16 atmosphere samples
5 cloud layers, most of them at detail 0.8
12 populations
It's now rendering for 33 hours and just started at the 2 bottom row buckets.
Memory consumption is a steady 14.5GB
I'll send the final render as EXR to Frank to apply postwork on, as he's generally much better at that than me.
Cheers,
Martin
I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys have come up with ;D
A Frank's Cloud Show it will be for certain :)
Hi guys, here is Martin's and my Crater Lake final (http://www.basinski-net.de/cl2.jpg) version. Enjoy getting lost in this huge seventhousandsomething pixel wide picture :)
Regards,
Frank
That is big! That is pretty! And I am most definitely lost poking around at all the details ;D
"Jawdropping" describes it best. Bravo!!
Outstanding! Well done, you two!
:o It looks more realistic than my baby picture!
stunned! amazing render
Pretty neat, guys.
Amazing details, guys! I especially love that HUGE ice-shelf round the entire mountain, and how it reflects beautifully in the water. The built-up snow following the terrain channels is a lovely effect, too! :)
Edit; Nice filler-forests in the bg, Frank! ;)
Simply Beautiful :)
The rock faces are stunning, the fractured detail is very effective. Great cloud work too, especially the drifting snow in the gullies!
Animated avalanche next! ;D
Cheers
Richard
Impressionnant! The sky is beautifull!
Hi,
I like a lot about this image. The clouds are great, I like the scale, the quality of the reflection, I also like the the distribution of objects and the blending of ground cover and tree areas. But I also have some questions.
I downloaded the image and cropped it to post here for illustration purposes. If doing so is a no no, please tell me.
As you can see in the crop, the trees look like blotches. Is this part of the painterly aesthetic, or did it come out of TG2 like this? I have run into these blotches in some of my renders, but it was not intentional or desired. I don't know why it happens to me or how to make sure I don't see it again.
The render is gigantic! There is another thread about what I'm asking now, but relative to this image... were you able to lower the detail level because the image is so large? So if you had rendered the image at half the size, would you have raised the settings?
Is the painterly feel of the image, post, or native to the render? If its post can we also see the non-post render.
Thanks guys, great image!
Most of these questions are really for Martin to answer, as I don't know what settings he rendered this at or how he came to decide these were the settings to choose.
Some of those trees seem like relatively undistinguished painterly blotches, that is right. I think it's a bit of an unlucky combination of lighting conditions, distance-based level of detail management from TG2, the render detail settings used, and the tree model itself.
The more I look at the render, the more I realize how many opportunties for detail we haven't used, yet. For example, there is Walli's hut that we had planned to include at the shore, and we'll probably crop render that back in later. However there are so many more things that come to my mind that could be embedded in this image, or made differently, that I have the feeling this may probably not be the last render we'll see - IF Martin and I both feel like getting at it again. You know, after you've been working on an image for so long, it's hard to resist the urge to go on to something else, but it's possible I could bring myself to it.
Anyway, thanks for liking the image, everyone! It was a pleasure creating it, that's for certain.
Frank
Quote from: dandelO on January 14, 2012, 12:45:06 PM
Edit; Nice filler-forests in the bg, Frank! ;)
Ah! I typed that ^^ because I thought you'd painted-in those distant forests! :D
Stunning... Great work, congrats!!
Great image and great rock details.
The ice on the top and the clouds are tops. :)
Quote from: FrankB on January 15, 2012, 07:31:52 PM
Most of these questions are really for Martin to answer, as I don't know what settings he rendered this at or how he came to decide these were the settings to choose.
Some of those trees seem like relatively undistinguished painterly blotches, that is right. I think it's a bit of an unlucky combination of lighting conditions, distance-based level of detail management from TG2, the render detail settings used, and the tree model itself.
The more I look at the render, the more I realize how many opportunties for detail we haven't used, yet. For example, there is Walli's hut that we had planned to include at the shore, and we'll probably crop render that back in later. However there are so many more things that come to my mind that could be embedded in this image, or made differently, that I have the feeling this may probably not be the last render we'll see - IF Martin and I both feel like getting at it again. You know, after you've been working on an image for so long, it's hard to resist the urge to go on to something else, but it's possible I could bring myself to it.
Anyway, thanks for liking the image, everyone! It was a pleasure creating it, that's for certain.
Frank
I'm curious what more you have in mind :)
I agree that some things are subject for improvement.
As might be expected the flaws of the scene become apparent at this extreme resolution.
The way the trees came out are indeed a combination of lighting, texture-settings, render settings and perhaps the way TG2 handles detail.
The latter is not sure at all, as with this much screenspace to render this shouldn't matter I'd think, although you would expect a bit better results.
@Badger
The potential most time-consuming elements in this render are obviously the water and vegetation.
Generally terrain rendering is much faster than vegetation, unless you have an unsurpassed complex displacement going on, which is definitely not the case here.
Since we render this at very high resolution you could image that is basically the same render, only extremely magnified.
As with microscopy, a good lens resolves a lot of detail at great magnification. In CG this is no concern, so the only thing you need to be concerned about is to tell the renderer to generate enough detail.
So, if you do a crop render @ final resolution and watch it in photoshop then you can decide to render out the final at a certain detail level.
In this case I could have rendered it @ detail 0.6-0.65 instead of 0.75, probably shaving of 20% of rendertime, maybe more/less, when I'd only render rasterized elements like terrain/water.
However, I do know that the dense vegetation will be the most time-consuming, so a bit longer rendering of terrain in favor of good detail won't skew rendertimes too much.
That's why I decided to render it with AA6@max sampling. This provides similar results as AA8@1/4th, but is a lot faster.
Later more...duty calls...
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on January 16, 2012, 07:38:45 AM
I'm curious what more you have in mind :)
...
Rocks, birds, reeds, the hut, some man made clutter, a boat with a fisherman perhaps, maybe even some foreground elements like a tiny island... and more :)
If you decide to dive into this again, my advice would be to add a little (more) population variation into the trees. Did you render the water with full transparency? It might not be needed, which saves render time as well. Or only a short close-by distance with transparency, the rest without.
ps. I'd love to see some reeds in this ;)
I'm not sure yet whether Martin had used a true alpine for the left side mountain and the background mountains, or replaced them with heightfields. I have rendered a crop of the left hill with a) Alpine in 30 minutes and b) Heightfield in 8 minutes.
So I would defo replace the left foreground mountain with a heigtfield, and the background with a normal fractal terrain.
I think we had transparency turned off completely, as there wouldn't be anything visible under the water anyway, particularly from this view angle.
Secondly I agree that the image would benefit from more variation in the trees, and maybe some "hero trees" here and there.
BTW, I couldn't render that image this large. I think Martin reported some "steady memory consumption of around 14 Gig" or so, in any case more than the 8 GB I have in my machine.
But I guess a 4000 px wide render would probably still be awesome. :)
All that stuff I'm dreaming out loud here is a lot of work to set up and get right. So don't expect too much too soon :)
Ì'm setting up the upload now Frank, so you should have the most recent project soon...
Quote from: Dune on January 16, 2012, 11:37:13 AM
If you decide to dive into this again, my advice would be to add a little (more) population variation into the trees. Did you render the water with full transparency? It might not be needed, which saves render time as well. Or only a short close-by distance with transparency, the rest without.
ps. I'd love to see some reeds in this ;)
Thanks Ulco :)
As Frank pointed out after you we indeed did not use transparency.
We may do so in the next iteration and likely will resolve to crop rendering the transparent part.
Good point about the population variation. The left foreground and future (secret;)) plans will provide nice spots for some reeds :)
Quote from: FrankB on January 16, 2012, 11:49:42 AM
I'm not sure yet whether Martin had used a true alpine for the left side mountain and the background mountains, or replaced them with heightfields. I have rendered a crop of the left hill with a) Alpine in 30 minutes and b) Heightfield in 8 minutes.
So I would defo replace the left foreground mountain with a heigtfield, and the background with a normal fractal terrain.
I think we had transparency turned off completely, as there wouldn't be anything visible under the water anyway, particularly from this view angle.
Secondly I agree that the image would benefit from more variation in the trees, and maybe some "hero trees" here and there.
BTW, I couldn't render that image this large. I think Martin reported some "steady memory consumption of around 14 Gig" or so, in any case more than the 8 GB I have in my machine.
But I guess a 4000 px wide render would probably still be awesome. :)
All that stuff I'm dreaming out loud here is a lot of work to set up and get right. So don't expect too much too soon :)
The base of the terrain was created by Frank.
I exported it to a .ter file and eroded it in WM2.
The erosion filter allows for export of various masks which some of them I used for the snow layer.
Besides that I also used the snow filter in WM2 and used the texture output, but NOT the heightfield.
These masks combined give the results you see now.
Later the left-foreground was also replaced by a heightfield.
This all rendered a lot faster, because there was no procedural base terrain anymore.
Yeah the highest memory consumption I noticed for a while was 14.5GB and most of the time it was 14GB ;D
QuoteWe may do so in the next iteration and likely will resolve to crop rendering the transparent part.
No need to do that, just add a water node with transparency, but no waves (or they would come on top of the first water node), and blend by distance shader. But you'd probably know that.
thats a crackin render, but that bare patch of terrain on the left niggles me a bit, perhaps bushes or other to cover that green surface layer, the huge mountain is most definitly realistic, top marks :)))
Quote from: Dune on January 17, 2012, 02:37:29 AM
QuoteWe may do so in the next iteration and likely will resolve to crop rendering the transparent part.
No need to do that, just add a water node with transparency, but no waves (or they would come on top of the first water node), and blend by distance shader. But you'd probably know that.
True. I'm not sure if it will be faster than doing it in a separate crop, since you still have 2 watershaders which constantly need to be 'tested' in texturespace for mixing. It may not make much of a difference. I'll try :)
Thanks for the answers guys.