In-between jobs right now so I decided to do a little testing with some plant life.
Not posted for a good while either, so thought I'd share this.
Chris
Lovely Chris, some slight repartition in some of the fauna but not that noticable.
Beautiful! :) If you could change the grass in front a little thinner it would be even better. Great job
Thanks guys,
It could certainly stand a few more tweaks in the vegetation, kinda rushed it a little towards the end.
Another version, with a little more post work.
That looks very promising! Great atmosphere here and quite photorealistic in overall.
If I may I'd like to suggest to choose different grass models for the foreground. In the background they work, although they are a bit big, but in the foreground they are not up to par with the quality of the rest of the image to be honest.
I really like the layout/composition of the scene. Steep hills, some water and an imaginative path straight ahead in between the steep hills. The composition draws the viewer into it. At least, it works for me :)
Cheers,
Martin
Cheers Martin
You are right about the foreground of course, like I said, a bit rushed towards the end. I had originally planned for much more variation.
I still want to take this forward a little yet, but my main job is currently trying to find a new job:)
Hopefully I'll do an update in a day or two.
Thanks again
Chris
Very nice. I like the details like the roots sticking out of the far bank. I think the closer tree's leaves are perhaps a bit too translucent. Otherwise the feedback others have given I generally agree with. I hope you'll have more time to work on it as it's one of the more unique images I've seen lately, and one of the more realistic as well (though in a sort of dreamy way, like a well-shot/edited photo at the "magic hour").
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan,
All the feedback has been very constructive, and much appreciated.
Chris
Hi Chris, good to see you again!... I can only echo the above... a really great scene so far!
I love the light and atmo... and the veggies sticking out of and on the walls!
Good luck with the job hunting...
Cheers
Jason
:)
Lovely work Chris.
Its rather nice. Please post your final too!
Thanks guys
It's coming along, but not quite ready yet.
Cheers Jason, hopefully it won't be too long before I find something.
Chris
Here's a quick update.
Still not quite where I'd like it to be yet, but the foreground has moved forward a little.
Thanks again for all the feedback and suggestions guys.
Chris
That's quite an improvement, Chris. Those grasses make the difference! And I really like your tree objects. The only thing I wouldn't do is the bleached light, although it does give it a very photographic allure.
You can almost leave out the water now.
Cheers Ulco,
I have been playing with the light levels a lot in post. This is a part of the tests I'm currently running.
I do a lot of work in matching cg to film plates, and we often use back plates that are colour corrected to test against, whereas in this instance I'm testing levels against photographs in post, rebalancing them, and trying to replicate those levels back in the actual render in terragen. Just testing different methods to see how close and quickly I can match to actual scenarios.
It's definitely not there yet, and I keep distracting myself by creating new assets, but it's all good fun, as I don't often get much time for mucking about and testing.
Chris
Maybe shining the sun through some clouds would work. The atmosphere's haze would only be illuminated where the clouds patches let the light through, creating contrasting light.
Thanks for explaining your choices, Chris.
Chris --
must say i liked all the variations ---nice work. Just starting looking here but certainly some amazing images.
Rich
Thanks guys,
Latest update, a little softer and more balanced light and comp set up this time.
Might leave this one here for now, or maybe come back to it again later.
Thanks again for all the feedback and suggestions guys.
Chris
This is great, Chris. I like the lighting much better as well.
Last one is outstanding! What was your method for getting moss on the fallen tree on the right side of the render. Can you be specific?
Thanks guys.
Sorry to say that the moss on the fallen tree was not procedural, the whole element was sculpted and textured in Zbrush.
No doubt that it could have been done very effectively inside of terragen, Zbrush is just such a fast tool for me when creating those kind of assets.
Fibremesh was also used for generating some of the plant populations on the exported mesh, so as to avoid too much repetition.
I was amazed at just how many variations of plants and even full and very heavy imported mesh systems terragen was able to handle, and still render utilising less than 12 gigs of ram.
Like I said earlier, this was really an evaluation test scene for me, not having done much vegetation work for quite a while now.
Still not completely happy with the level of photorealism I'm able to achieve with the imported models though, and need to do some more testing to determine why, and how far I can push that.
Chris
Thanks for the info Chris.
QuoteStill not completely happy with the level of photorealism I'm able to achieve with the imported models though, and need to do some more testing to determine why, and how far I can push that.
Have you considered doing multiple passes?
What I mean is two renders. One like you have now and one using displacement; TRO off using bump. and then masking in select plants in photoshop.
I found from doing fantasy stuff that doing the two renders is effective in making plants that are obviously not real, realish. I would guess that it would work very well on plants that already are very close to photo quality. For me it was very effective.
I also wanted to ask you about what you said about working on the light in the image. What parameters are you playing with. That is, just in terms of the quality of light from the first image to the last, what settings are you adjusting to get the softness in the last image?
I suspect its not just a question of exposure, right?
Cheers Badger,
I am doing multiple passes, I think it's more a case of the way I'm used to shading and lighting in other render engines versus how terragen works with imported objects.
I work a lot with Arnold and Vray and they have far more advanced shading systems than terragen currently. This is by no means a criticism of terragen as it does a great job, and it's primary goal (I believe) is realistic terrain and atmospherics which are head and shoulders above the competition in my opinion.
But as is the case with any render engine, it takes time to learn how to get the best results, or should I say, the results you are looking for, and that's what I'm exploring in these series of tests, just trying to get as close as I can to other renderers with imported objects.
I think, for me, some of the things I miss are, indirect specular contributions, and the render time hit in ray-tracing true reflections on the leaves and fauna, none of which are particularly an issue on scenes of a large scale, but when hero elements are in shot, it's very tough to match the same level of shading and light interaction.
Still, I know some of you guys are achieving great results, so I'm sure there's more for me to get out of this yet.
Been freelancing this week, so not had any more time for testing, but hope to get back to it after this job's done in a few weeks.
Chris