Trees xfrog, gulls Poser (noggins) boat modelled in Rhino3D.
Wow. I feel like the image is a bit "rough", like a very sharp pixel filter was used, or post sharpening, and the sense of scale and distance seems off. BUT it is a beautiful and evocative scene nonetheless, and I particularly like the rock shapes and texture, as well as the surf. The entire foreground, particularly the peninsula on the right, is excellent.
- Oshyan
Mick, this is very pleasing. The work on the water is excellent as is the colors and textures on the rock faces. I like this ration format as well.
Hmm... interesting, scales are measurably correct! I think that it's possible that reducing atmospheric haze may have something to do with that. I wanted that clarity that comes after showers on as cold front. But I see what you mean about the roughness. I guess I'm used to Wales and Scotland's west coast where this would be normal. There's also a lot of detail that adds to the noise. I also think the .jpg compression didn't help I'll look into that. I'll also look into pixel filters
Great render and the view is spectacular :D
Looks very good Mick and I agree with Oshyan on pretty much all aspects.
I don't have much to add, other than I have different ideas about a Fjord may be?
Looking forward to your next iteration :)
Cheers,
Martin
Your're probably thinking more of the Norwegian ones! These are based on images of N. western America/Canada where I was surprised to read that this sort of landscape is also called fjords.
I'm trying one with smaller birds and a softer pixel filter we shall see....
Yes that's exactly why I said that I have different ideas instead of boldly stating "it doesn't look like a Fjord" :)
I guess Fjords can be created by different processes or that these types of Fjords are much older than the Norwegian ones?
Just thinking out loud, honestly have no idea.
Nor Do I ;)
Interesting just looked at it on another monitor and it looks far worse :(
The water nodes.
Love the 'wildness' of the image, the choppy sea and the rugged coastlines all add up to a visual delight. The water nodes look daunting, but that's the lure and the challenge of TG I guess. Thanks for posting the jpg. Looks like it's time to sacrifice more brain cells in the pursuit of blue node madness, maybe :-\. This is definitely inspirational, thanks Mick.
I very like the water. Excellent wave and foam for me !
I agree with Oshyan too here. I have seen similar effect in lots of images. If you are going to do the hard work of isolating it, then there should be a do's and DONT do list in a sticky, so that everyone can avoid the problem.
Probably there should be a name for this visual effect too. Something singular and specific, is there one?.. Other than just too sharp or whatever?
Anyway, I do like the image as well. Like the subject composition and detail. And each part of it could be its own image POF.
HMMMM...
Now that I posted and looked again, the thumb looks really nice... Maybe render 2*Large, and then scale it down by half in post?.. Tighten up those pixels? works well with photoshop paintings.
Thanks for the comments. I'm going to render it with a soft pixel filter And another twice as large!
These are very troubled waters. Hope the skipper can survive this. ;)
Killer image maze, bit sharp looking as mentioned, still a looker
Cheers - still waiting for a large experimenta render to finish
I think this is much , much better.
Rendered at 3600 x 1200 and then reduced to half that size - same .jpg compression.
I 'm rendering another with some changes to the bird populations, a simplified texture for the background rocks and .8 haze. We'll see if that adds further improvement.
Quote from: mhaze on June 05, 2014, 09:38:51 AM
Rendered at 3600 x 1200 and then reduced to half that size - same .jpg compression.
Why did u do this? Is this doing something with the quality?
BTW render looks killer!
That looks really good Mick :)
Very interesting that it worked better at high res.
Oshyan, remember I complained a couple of days ago about TG's propensity to render more high frequency details over distance?
I think this situation is also about this.
To exaggerate for the sake of this example: if I'd make a square image map of 50% grey and 101x101 pixels with the centre pixel pure white, map entire planet with it, then TG would render the terrain with noisy white specks over distance, despite that 0.01% of that texture actually *is* white.
Why does TG tend to "prioritize" the bright parts of (procedural) textures over neutral/dark parts? Especially over distance.
It's an issue and I remember when TG2 was advertised as a renderer which didn't need the TG0.9 "render huge and resize trick" anymore.
This particular render shows that it at least isn't entirely true. (it is true in other ways of course)
As a matter of fact, I do the same for my vegetation, although usually max 50% bigger as rendering vegetation already takes way too long.
Haha, this almost sounds like a rant, but isn't one. This is an issue though if you'd ask me?
Very good Mick, this is much better.
Hmm, interesting. The re-render *certainly* looks better, but I am seeing what I think T-U is seeing - this "crunchy" detail in the distance that doesn't seem appropriate. The foreground looks great, but the background doesn't seem to be improving as much with the downsample trick you're using. I'm curious what this looks like 1:1, i.e. at the original size.
T-U, your question would be best answered by Matt of course. I'd be interested to see some basic tests of the issue though, like you describe.
- Oshyan
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on June 05, 2014, 10:37:02 AM
That looks really good Mick :)
Very interesting that it worked better at high res.
Oshyan, remember I complained a couple of days ago about TG's propensity to render more high frequency details over distance?
I think this situation is also about this.
Isn't it just a matter of anti-aliasing? I mean in a broad sense of the word, not just TG's "anti-aliasing" parameter. To anti-alias high frequency details in the terrain you might also need to set Detail higher than 1. Usually we don't do this because of the cost, but it can make a noticeable difference. If you don't mind spending extra render time to render a higher resolution and then downsample the result, you should prefer to render higher quality at the target size instead.
Quote
To exaggerate for the sake of this example: if I'd make a square image map of 50% grey and 101x101 pixels with the centre pixel pure white, map entire planet with it, then TG would render the terrain with noisy white specks over distance, despite that 0.01% of that texture actually *is* white.
Why does TG tend to "prioritize" the bright parts of (procedural) textures over neutral/dark parts? Especially over distance.
Yes, it will produce white specks all over the place because Terragen doesn't prefilter textures, so to anti-alias this well you'd need high Detail and high AA (or just high AA if the surface is being ray traced). The example you gave is a difficult case. But it doesn't "prioritize" bright parts over dark parts. The total energy reflected should be correct, in the aggregate. It's an anti-aliasing problem. If Terragen were to prefiltering image-based textures, that would help in this case, but it can't do this for procedural textures.
Quote
It's an issue and I remember when TG2 was advertised as a renderer which didn't need the TG0.9 "render huge and resize trick" anymore.
This particular render shows that it at least isn't entirely true. (it is true in other ways of course)
We haven't seen a render at 1800px with double the detail and double the AA, so this is far from conclusive.
Quote
As a matter of fact, I do the same for my vegetation, although usually max 50% bigger as rendering vegetation already takes way too long.
It should be more efficient to do the anti-aliasing in Terragen. If this isn't the case, I'd like to see examples. What you need to do is render with a higher detail as well as higher AA, and use a high quality pixel filter. I'd usually recommend the Mitchell-Netravali filter, but perhaps the Cubic B-Spline (soft) filter might work better in some cases. Enable "anti-aliasing bloom" so that super-bright pixels don't alias badly. Another problem with downsampling a larger image that has clipped pixels is that the bright pixels can be hue-shifted and desaturated in an unrealistic way when clipped pixels are averaged with non-clipped pixels. Although if you work with EXRs and take care to soften the over-bright pixels then this isn't a problem.
Matt
^^ Hello,
Apart from the software specific and heavy tech stuff, why is the answer not the same as the answer for matte painting? What I mean is, regardless of the cause, doesn't resizing work here for the same reason it works in matt painting and photoshop painting?
I realize you guys are zeroing in on software specific cause, but I just want to be clear that the result is the same. I mean, there is no reason to talk about the resizing in different terminology from how matt painters talk about it, even though we are looking at a render and not a painting, it that correct? O,r is it different, simply because its a render and not a painting?.. Just want to be sure is all.
And then for clarity, apart from the renderers way of working, we are still just talking about pixels right?
^^
QuoteIsn't it just a matter of anti-aliasing? I mean in a broad sense of the word, not just TG's "anti-aliasing" parameter. To anti-alias high frequency details in the terrain you might also need to set Detail higher than 1. Usually we don't do this because of the cost, but it can make a noticeable difference. If you don't mind spending extra render time to render a higher resolution and then downsample the result, you should prefer to render higher quality at the target size instead.
So what would be the difference in render time (if any) between the larger resize, and the on target size higher quality? I have trouble believing that it would be equal in any example or even just a few cases. But I really never did a 1:1 test of anything... Would like to know!
OK I'm going to try a render with detail set at 1 and AA at 12 the x2 image took 40hrs at detail .5 and AA 5. There will will be diferences aas I've changed the lighting and added haze. If the render doesn't take too many years I'll also do one with the old lighting and no haze,
In the meantime here's one with the new lighting, simplified distant texture haze and enviromental lighting
Here's a crop of the background at 3600 x 1200
Part of the problem is the texture - two colours scaled at just the right size to cause issues!!!! Also rendered at detail.5 aa5 there is not enough resolution to render the texture nicely.
Mick, I'm seeing some nice improvements here. Your perseverance is paying off.
This is a very fine image, and a very insightful discussion. It's always appreciated when the Chief Architect weighs in to clarify and correct some prevalent concepts of TG's renderer. That the level of detail can be set above .8 to enhance high frequency areas is most useful, as the consensus is usually .8 is more than adequate (in "most instances" to be fairly stated). That Matt advises settings above 1.0 and high settings for AA in certain renderings, and casts a dubious eye on over-size/down-sample technique is very interesting. The "clipped pixel" "hue shifting" consequences of 'down-sampling' are new concepts to me and I'm looking forward to the comparison image you're rendering now. Great job Mick!
The high res image hit the water and stopped dead! so I'm going to do a series of tests on a cropped area of the background. I'll start on that tomorrow.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your elaborate response. It's interesting matter.
I wasn't claiming TG does prioritize things, but that it looks like that it does.
It seems that it is dependent on some settings of which I was aware, but didn't know I had to crank them up that high to solve this particular problem.
So thanks for sharing this with us.
Honestly I don't think rendering 1800px twice the detail and twice AA is what one is willing to do if 3600px at the normal settings is faster.
So that was why I was refering to the old TG0.9x trick.
But you're right, to proof this you would need to perform that test.
At the moment I'm trying to create nice procedural granite textures with a very low coverage brighter grain. It's way too bright to my taste, despite using superdark colours. I'll give your principles a bunch of tries and see how it works!