Anxious to hear what do you think!
The whole scene is build around the puddles in the cart trail. There are some flaws i.e. the leaves of the trees don't look like leaves but more like colored planes.
How the puddles are done you can find here: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=13818.0 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=13818.0)
Credits:
dandelO - masked water shader clip and daffodils.
Bobby Stahr - reeds
:o
I like this a lot Andy...
the track is excellent and the vegetation fits well, I especially like the 'pollarded' willow!
:)
Overall this is a really nice pic. But you're right about the leaves - can you turn the transparency down?.
The daffodils look very 2dimensional and hence false. Look forward to further iterations.
Very nice, good composition and a sweet concept. The landscape is very similar to my local area, Somerset, so I recognise the pollarded willow :) My boots are covered with this mud too!
If you feel like developing it further maybe some boot, paw, hoof and vehicle tracks mixed in with the mud.
I agree about the leaves, this close you would normally use textured and opacity masked leaves, is this not a possibility for you? What program did you make the willow in? The same would be true of the daffs, you'll get a better result, less saturated if you use a texture on the flowers and a translucency map on the flowers.
Cheers
Richard
the bad object quality aside, you've nailed something photorealistic here! You're spot on with the lighting, the colors and the mud and puddles, and the sky. If you would just replace the trees with better ones, and use better flowers, .... honestly when I saw the thumbnail, I thought you'd uploaded a reference photo and not a render. Congratulations!
Frank
This is cool. The tyre tracks look great. There are some CG looking parts but this is OK in my opinion. It has a slightly cartoon like unreal look to it that works. It has atmosphere. The setup is very good. You are led into the background.
Hi, these are thing that jump out to me.
First thing that i notice to stand out is the highlight in the right puddle.
The wetness just goes up way too high which makes the reflection from wet mud too noticable.
I think if you make it more subtle it will look lot better.
another thing that i noticed are those two plants on the banks of the river.
They seem lonely over there, either populate few more of just get ridge of them.
Those flowers look too synthetic, see how the road look like without them., they look great in the distance, and maybe that's where they belong.
Grass looks great.
Trees, hmm.
I'm not a tree expert but all those trees seem funny to me.
Usually there is a main stem and then they branch out, but not this one.
Seems like it's missing lots of splits before reaches final branch that the leafs are attached to.
Also the size of the tree closest to the camera is off.
If you took this "photo" from 6' this tree is only about 4' taller.
again the trunk is too wide and tree is too short.
In the distance they seem to work.
Final advice, reevaluate your foreground.
Good luck.
I guess i am wrong, those trees look like that.
One problem solved.
This has a lot of potential, Andy.
1. Like I said in the other post; some more clumps in the clay would benefit the scene.
2. The daffodils are too large. I'd reduce them to 1/2 size and add a PF over their default shaders for some variation.
3. The knotwilgen don't have a leave texture but planes as leaves. I think you should add an image of a leaf in the opacity tab of the leaves default shader. And also add a PF for variation. And their trunks are really big, a bit too fat I'd say.
4. I agree about the reeds. I'd add some patchy rows of (different) reeds in the 'sloten', covering quite a bit of the slootranden. Not wishing to advertise myself here, but I got some nice reeds at NWDA, and there are probably more to be found for free.
Quote from: efflux on January 17, 2012, 09:10:27 PM
This is cool. The tyre tracks look great. There are some CG looking parts but this is OK in my opinion. It has a slightly cartoon like unreal look to it that works. It has atmosphere. The setup is very good. You are led into the background.
I think this comes closest to my opinion. I really like this render and despite it looks a bit CG'ish/cartoonish in some way it does work!
One thing is really off to me though:
Quote from: Derek Tokarzewski on January 17, 2012, 11:18:37 PM
Trees, hmm.
I'm not a tree expert but all those trees seem funny to me.
Usually there is a main stem and then they branch out, but not this one.
Seems like it's missing lots of splits before reaches final branch that the leafs are attached to.
Also the size of the tree closest to the camera is off.
If you took this "photo" from 6' this tree is only about 4' taller.
again the trunk is too wide and tree is too short.
In the distance they seem to work.
Final advice, reevaluate your foreground.
Good luck.
I think Derek is right.
I normally see these trees sometimes slightly taller and especially a lot thinner here in The Netherlands.
See HERE (http://www.google.nl/search?q=knotwilgen&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=nl&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=FIYWT9TBEsKaOsH00IIE&biw=1440&bih=781&sei=IoYWT9bEB4btOcfl_f8D#um=1&hl=nl&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=knotwilgen&pbx=1&oq=knotwilgen&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=0l0l0l16366l0l0l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=dc3705df22db38f6&biw=1440&bih=781)
I have trees exactly like this in my area ... so I guess there is some variance..
Richard
pollarded willow come in many similary forms and variations...
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=pollarded+willow&hl=en&cr=countryUK|countryGB&tbs=ctr:countryUK|countryGB&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=5p8WT6ivJIewtAa8vOVT&ved=0CEAQsAQ&biw=1672&bih=835 (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=pollarded+willow&hl=en&cr=countryUK%7CcountryGB&tbs=ctr:countryUK%7CcountryGB&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=5p8WT6ivJIewtAa8vOVT&ved=0CEAQsAQ&biw=1672&bih=835)
Ah I see...it's funny to see the different results you get with google, purely based on language ;)
So it depends on what Andy tried to achieve I suppose.
;)
oops forgot that!
:)
Thank you all for your positive comments, much appreciated!
In retrospect I think it would have been better if the willows would have been positioned more in the background. Because I did create them in Arbaro I was too eager to show them off (That's the right expression, isn't it?) and neglected the impact of the faulty leaves. The same goes for the daffodils though these were created by dandelO: I misjudged the impact they had on the scene. Longing for the colors of spring after all these weeks of gray, miserable weather clouded my judgment.
One thing about those willows however: That part of Eindhoven that gave me the inspiration has some very old and well maintained pollarded willows and their trunks are really massive with diameters of over one meter... Too bad I couldn't figure out how to create cavities in these trunks because in reality most of the trunks have hollow parts.
I will start working on those leaves and daffodils with your suggestions for improvement in mind, they are very helpful!
@ dune: NWDA does not accept payments with IDeal so that's a no-go. ;D
That is looking great Andy. I agree with some of the suggestions made. Looking forward to your future iterations.
Interesting about the pollard (pruned down to the nub of the trunk) willow. Some do this also with the 'Catalpa' tree. The results after re-growth yield a beautiful headed tree. Another tree I wish there was a model of is the 'Navajo Willow' which grows such nice rounded heads without having to pollard the tree. These are seen in the 'Four Corners' area of the U.S.
1 down, another one almost.
The willows now have "real" leaves, not just some colored planes for leaves! The method described by Ulco was what I did use in an earlier stage but produced weird results; that's why I gave up on that and did not use any images. Stubborn as I am and encouraged by the advice however I did return to the drawing board and started fiddling around with different leaf images and that gave me a clue finally:The images were pasted on to the leaves under a wrong angle... I rotated a leave image 90° (though it wasn't even a willow leaf) and got something that actually resembled a willow leaf. See "Detail Knotwilg".
The daffodils however are a different story. The object has five individual shaders for the petals and one for the trumpet so, following the same method as used with the willow leaves, I did assign an image shader to both the color and opacity image ports of those shaders. Also I gave them slightly different shades of yellow. The result was disappointing.
So I moved into unknown territory: I did attach a PF to the color function port of the petal shaders and used very small values for "feature", "lead-in" and "smallest" scale and unchecked the "Apply displacement" box guessing this was what Ulco meant. It made the petals look like they had a disease. Setting bigger values didn't help either, I could not see a difference except the spots on the petals grew larger.
So I removed the PF and used more stronger color variations on the petals; the result can be seen in the "Knotwilgspoor-LenteREV_RfDetail" image.
I don't give up on the daffodil, will experiment some more, even though the next version of the image will have the daffodils more in the background.
.
@Andy: De narcissen zijn misschien niet de beste bloemen om veel PF variatie in toe te passen, vandaar die 'ziekte'. Maar met een laag contrast (0.3 of lager) en waarden van 0.1/2/0.01 of zo geef je gras en boombladeren/schors net een soort subtiele variatie. Die waarden hangen een beetje af van hoe groot de planten/bomen zijn. Hele bossen hebben wat hogere waarden (1/50/0.1) nodig om verschillen te zien. En veel planten hebben ook wel dorre stukjes of vlekjes, het moet alleen niet teveel worden.
The final render, for now. This one took twice as long to render thanks to the fact there's more sky visible and the tire tracks in the mud. In fact the latter ones took a ridiculous long time to render: It took almost six hour for the parts with the tire tracks in them to complete.....
I found some decent looking reeds, in fact they were on my hard drive already, but uncatalogued, so I have no clue where they came from.
The next project I'm thinking of will be a summer variation from a different POV and with poppies and hawkweed (created in PlantStudio)
Really great work Andy, very convincing!
Cheers,
Martin
I like the painterly clean look. Nice :)
love the mud, man. Helps me a lot as I was adding puddles to something of mine. Thanks man!
This is one super creation/render Andy, we need to see more of this kind of work.
Great update, Andy.
very nice work!
Very nice and complex work. I like the light.