Hi - my first post to the Image forum
Rio Celeste Waterfall in Costa Rica - Terragen 3 with a bit of help from Realflow :-)
Graham
I like this, especially the waterfall. The only thing I see, would maybe lower the specularity on the rocks. I think you would see more of the color variation. ;)
That is simply a spectacular result. I assume you used the ivy generator for some of the plants? I love the way you got the rocks stacked up, looks terrific. The only issue I have with it is some of the background shadow areas are really soft/smudgy which is probably a downsizing/compression issue as the foreground and brighter areas are sharp.
I agree with Ryan, could use a bit more overall sharpness but....WOW....it is cool! Looking forward to more but, you must share your technique...:)
Looks nice!
It could be great with just little more details like our friends above said :)
Nice!
Really great fall, and I do like the rocks (though there's one 'off', the flattish one, that sometimes happens, strangely). So how did you go about making the fall, export the terrain and import in realflow, then make an object of the fall? I don't know anything about realflow, but it sure is interesting.
This is spectacular; not only the fine work on the rocks/boulders, but also that waterfall. It reminds me of the Havasu Falls in the Grand Canyon.
WOW! The lighting is perfect, I thought the thumbnail was your reference pic! What did you use real flow for? (Obviously the waterfall but in what way?)
Cheers
Richard
Very impressive! I'd like to know as well, how you brought this waterfall into TG.
There's something about the lighting. Did you use any additional lightsources?
Incredible! would really like to know how this was done.
I'm with the above... excellent results!
:)
Thanks for all your comments!
Yossam - agree with you about the spec on the rocks - think it needs to be broken up a little bit - the texture gets lost there.
Ryan - yes, used the Ivy generator, really impressed with how much geometry you can bring into Terragen and it doesn't complain at all, The rocks were three sizes of fake stones merged with Choose by Altitude to get them to stack up properly. There are a few "pancake" rocks in there annoyingly, but after going through quite a few seeds to find a good variation, it was a case of finding the least offensive one :-)
Lighting in Terragen was mainly a sunlight, but also used an HDR of a similar scene brought into a Background node. Rendered out to Render Elements and comped it in Nuke. As well as the main color passes, I rendered ID passes to tag major elements like the foreground rocks, ivy, shrubs, etc. Then I could boost the global illumination of the back rock walls of the terrain for example - which I might have slightly overdone, hence the background shadow areas Ryan mentioned. But that's easily tweaked in comp now - it was nearly a 5 hour render!
I also used the relighting trick in Nuke to get a kind bloom of light around the waterfall, where the foamy water is almost casting a kind of ambient light. Doing it in the comp meant I could very quickly experiment with the placement of the lights. It does however have to be fairly subtle and the extra lights don't shadow the area they are illuminating, so a bit of contrast is lost in those areas.
The main part of the exercise was getting Terragen and Realflow to work together. It mainly involved exporting the final terrain via the Micro exporter, importing it into Maya, to setup a scene and then exporting that out into Realflow. I only needed the immediate area around the waterfall, so the geometry wasn't that huge, but it did need a lot of cleaning up.
It took a few tries to get a good waterfall simulation, as what seemed like a nice terrain, but didn't affect the Realflow sim in a very "waterfally" way at all. First sim looked like a curtain of water. So it was a bit of a mission going backwards and forwards to find a terrain that look right and perturbed the fluid particles in the right way.
Just to note, the obj mesh that gets exported via the micro exporter contained a lot of duplicate vertices - which makes it impossible to edit in programs like Maya, not to mention huge in file size, found a free prog called Meshlab which does a great job of removing the duplicates and optimizing the mesh too.
The waterfall was rendered out as particles in Maya, and added to the main comp in Nuke. To get the reflection of the waterfall in Terragen, I made a simple bit of geometry and placed in the position of the waterfall, projected the render of the waterfall onto it and set it to be invisible to camera in the final render.
Thanks for the explanation, DG. Is such a waterfall object file large? I mean, the particles will be small globules and so on? Or how should I see that?
Sadly not a technique I'll ever be able to use, as, as a pensioner I'll not be able to afford realflow.... oh well back to the drawing board.
mhaze - you can actually get a full copy of Realflow for $99! It's an educational version, so all they ask is that you don't use it commercially - but yes I appreciate that some of these techniques are not accessible to Terragen users, I did this more in the spirit that Terragen is being increasingly aimed at the the professional community as well as hobbyists and to explore how that could be realised.
Dune, I think you mean the waterfall particles from Realflow? I split the particles into a few passes - main body, splash, foam etc - these are just contain the information about the position and velocity of the particle and have to be rendered in a compatible 3d app like Maya - they were about 12GB added together. These can't be rendered in Terragen so have to be composited over. To get the reflection in the water of the mesh I made a mesh of the particle volume in Realflow and, imported that into Maya. Took the rendered element of the particles from the comp and projected that onto the mesh object and brought it into Terragen. As it wasn't directly visible in the Terragen render it didn't have to be very hi-rez.
Thanks for your detailed explanation. A great render!
Anyway I'd love to see how this scene would look without the additional lights. Just sunlight and Enviro light. To my taste the additional lighting looks a bit artificial.
Hannes,
try this - I took out some of the more synthetic elements out of the comp
Thanks for the extra information but even with realflow I haven't a app that will handle that data. Never mind.
Thank you, digitalguru. I know it's a matter of taste, but I prefer the second one, although there are very dark areas. I think it looks more natural.
Thanks again, DG. Didn't know it was such a lot of work and such heavy files. Hopefully one day things like this can be done in TG, or at least 'faked'. For a still like yours, it might be much easier to mask the falls and do something procedural, or even project a painted mask. For animation you'd need the real works though.
well the orginal plan was to do an animation, but the more I got into it and realised to the cost in disk space and render time meant I might get it finished some time next year :-)
besides, the fun part was taking a real environment and trying to recreate it - it really ups your skills and I learnt a lot from it.
I like the second one more too!
Superb work with a very nice result !!!
Excellent composition; the water is really something else!
Superb image and fascinating process. I agree that the 2nd, darker image is preferable for me, but both are great, and the really nice thing is how easily adjusted it is in post now. :)
- Oshyan