I have a confession to make. I think I'm in love with this DEM of the Columbia River gorge in Washington State. It's found its way into my last 2 pictures and it'll probably make it in to the 3rd on since I've already found a nice POV. I feel better now that that's off my chest ;)
I've been trying to make a generic scene setup to recreate the pacific northwest sort of look that I love so much. Essentially I just want to be able to pull a DEM off of the usgs site, stick it in a scene, make a few adjustments, and hit the render button. How very lazy of me.
I'm not happy with the rock surfacing yet. I want more color variation both on small and large scales. I also want to work on the tree distribution. Usually the deciduous trees are clumped together in more grove-like structures and not as evenly distributed.
Looks good!
Great start.
Impressive terrain. Looking forward to your progress.
Nice image and terrain. Are you using the Geog heightfield load node?
Regards,
Jo
Which DEM is it...............I kinda like it myself. :)
Thanks everybody. I'm making progress on creating a nice looking granite surface. I'm building it from individual grains all the way up to 100 meter color variations so it looks good on all scales.
Jo, I am using a regular heightfield load node since the terrain is just a ter. file.
Yossam, I got it from the usgs seamless website a couple years ago. The file is in south east Washington State along the Columbia River.
Very nice and promising. I love the colors and light. The image exudes a impresseion of cold weather. I very like this one !!!
Here is my progress on the rock surfacing. Although you can't tell from this distance, the grey is made up of centimeter scale blobs of color trying to replicate the grain structure in granite. On top of the grains I've layered several color adjust shaders to give color variation within the rock without the need for long chains of other shaders.
On another note, I've somehow killed the color variation within the evergreen trees without even touching them. I might be a wizard.
I like the progress so far, but I'm not satisfied yet so I'll keep working.
Looking very good. Like your treatment of the upper rock. Maybe try the color variance of the tree pop?
This is looking awesome already... Looking forward to the next one!
:)
J
Superb rock
really good surface here !
great
Thank you everybody for your kind words.
This is the same crop as last time. I think I'm finished messing with the tree populations. I added some more color variety but it takes A LOT to get it noticeable so I'm going to leave it subtle. I thinned out the pine trees and made them less bushy to give more of an alpine feel. I want to add some ground cover along the near shoreline to give some more depth to the forest.
After that I just want to work on the atmosphere to make the scene feel bigger and bolder.
Excellent. Adding some ground at this distance would make it hard to see them - depending upon their color.
You need some dead/dying trees, otherwise great, rock faces look very nice.
It's looking awesome darth and realistic, I'm jealous!
Don't know/get exactly what do you mean if you say you want to "making atmosphere bigger and bolder" I have to admit.
Maybe my Panels aren't set/showing things "right", but for my taste, the upper shadows are
just showing too much blue atmo/haze for it's viewers range, also the water looks great but also a bit too blueish.
Maybe there's also a need for tuning down highlights surface wise (bright parts)..
Alex
I like the idea of adding some dead trees. Consider it done ;)
Bjur, to me the ridge just seems a bit "smaller" than I want it to. I know in my head that the top of the ridge is over a kilometer above the water, and the scale of all the vegetation is correct, but it just looks small to me. I'm going to play with the atmospheric haze to see if I can get a bigger feel to the image. It sounds like your monitor might have a higher gamma or contrast setting than mine. I know that has happened in the past when I've made images.
A very nice and promising image. Glad to see someone trying to develop a ground-up granite shading system with a baseline granular structure. This is something I've wanted to do for Yosemite for ages, but it's in the closet of my long-time TG goals, along with a complete top-to-bottom, strata/color correct Grand Canyon setup. :D
So far your granite is looking pretty good. A bit more of the dark gray than I had in mind for my own, but that's based more on Yosemite than Pacific Northwest so much. Maybe it's the size of the patches, not sure, or how they blend with the lighter areas. Very curious to see how it holds up closer-up, too.
I do see what you mean about the uncertain sense of scale, but I don't have any good suggestions for how to remedy it. You've done a superb job with scale in the past so I trust you'll nail it.
- Oshyan
I've taken to messing with the aspect ratio of the image in an effort to give a better sense of scale. I like the upper half of this latest version. It looks...nice to me, for some reason that I can't quite explain. I think it might be because that part has the sense of scale I'm looking for.
I also am going to up the saturation of the trees. The more I look at them the more 'dull' they look so I'll try to remedy that. Also, more dead trees to come, once I figure out the best models to use for them.
Hot damn this is looking better and better. I think you're doing well with sense of scale across the image now, though the upper parts definitely communicate great height and scale the best. I also really like the variation in coloring in the screen and open meadow areas. It's probably just simple surface color variation between greens and browns, but it's quite effective at this distance. The granite also seems to be more well balanced and nuanced, unless I'm imagining things. ;) The water is a bit dark to my eye, but may be realistic, I don't know.
Again, really looking forward to where this one ends up.
- Oshyan
The surface work here is truly jaw-dropping... wow!
Not much has changed. I played with the rock surfacing to make the color variation a little smoother and I made the water less choppy. This is probably going to be what the final version looks like (i might give the water a different seed), except the final will be bigger. Thanks for taking a peek.
Stunning! Great variety. Now add some undergrowth :)
As suggested I've added some undergrowth. Apparently I also changed the sun's position. I'm going to undo that since I think the shadows are too prominent. I'm also going to play with the POV some, since I like the POV I had back in V2 the best.
Wow, I gotta look into using some DEM terrains if this is what's possible. Very nice images.
Quote from: darthvader1 on August 31, 2013, 11:14:56 AM
I've been trying to make a generic scene setup to recreate the pacific northwest sort of look that I love so much. Essentially I just want to be able to pull a DEM off of the usgs site, stick it in a scene, make a few adjustments, and hit the render button. How very lazy of me.
THIS is the kind of tree distribution I wanted in Terragen from day 1, and also for a lot of the same reason. I live near Seattle and spend a lot of time in the mountains. I've recently started back with Terragen 3 after several years off. I'm very curious about how you distribute the trees, and whether the full version is needed to support all that. So far I've been able to place individual objects and render them, but I need tens, or hundreds of thousands of objects to reproduce the tree density in the Cascades - much like your renders in this thread
Any recommendations you might have are greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Tim O
Here is the final. I'll probably render it bigger at some point in the future, but right now I want to move onto other projects. Overall, I'm pleased with how it all turned out. Thank you all for your comments along the way.
Tim, it's good to see another person from the PNW on here, cheers. The tree distribution is entirely doable in the free version of Terragen. The placement of the tree populations is controlled by a Surface layer shader which is limited by both slope, so the rock will show up, and altitude, so there are not tree sticking out of the water. The "tricky part" is setting fractal breakup fort he surface layer to something that looks reasonable, but that just requires some time messing with the fractal scale and a generous helping of hitting the random seed button. I'd be happy to give you a hand, just send me a PM and I'll do what I can to help.
Quote from: darthvader1 on September 16, 2013, 06:43:13 PM
The "tricky part" is setting fractal breakup fort he surface layer to something that looks reasonable, but that just requires some time messing with the fractal scale and a generous helping of hitting the random seed button.
I got the first bit, but you lost me in the fractals. :) I'm still trying to pick up the basics for TG3 (last I used was .8-something,) so I'll work my way up to this. and send a PM after that.
Thanks,
Tim O
This is one of the best TG3s I have seen!
Quote from: darthvader1 on August 31, 2013, 11:14:56 AM
I have a confession to make. I think I'm in love with this DEM of the Columbia River gorge in Washington State.
This is a bit off topic. I took this photo from Boardman, on the Oregon side of the Columbia River a few years ago. Obviously the vegetation is different, but you DEMs could be from a different area too. http://www.pbase.com/tjod/image/63504407/original http://www.pbase.com/tjod/image/63504407/original (http://www.pbase.com/tjod/image/63504407/original)
Excellent !!!
Personnaly I prefer the POV of the post 25 and the dark blue water with foam from the first.
Absolutely fantastic end result! I'd love to see it bigger some time. :)
- Oshyan
Stunning visual!
Hi
Very very nice !
but I agree about the foam, we miss it
Luc
very nice shot
Congratulations! Nice result.
Thank you, everybody, for the kind words.
At some point in the near future I'll render a bigger version, and seeing how the foam was popular, i'll put that back in.
Here is the link to the Large render. The foam doesn't look as good as it did before, but I'm not going to complain. To get to the full 1820 x 2560 image you'll have to click on the download button.
http://gannaingh32.deviantart.com/art/Ridgeline-400728342
Outstanding!
this is AWESOME!
I am with Bob, this is one of the best TG3 renders I have seen yet too!
great work!
well done!
:)
Jason
Thank you! I;m glad you like it.
Very nice stone work.