A misty, swampy morning. All vegetation once again modeled in Speedtree, Mitchell-Netravali pixel filter. Comments are always welcomed and appreciated.
Awesome render!
Those dead? trees are scary. I would like to see them in a night picture with the moon behind...
Yeah, good work. I actually feel hot looking at this picture.
That's what it looks like around my area about now, everything that survived winter is thriving. Very nice job.
Very well done!!!
Excellent realism here. Nice position for the sun also. Although I would not want to be here in early evening when the mosquitoes come out.
Great coloration of all the vegetation also.
Thanks to all for the comments.
Archonforest: They are scary, I had thought of a subtitle of the "the Three Witches" as I put it together, thanks!
Fleetwood: I'm envious, here in Northern California we are in the midst of a serious drought.
Choronr: No doubt, home to some serious stinging creatures! I thought about rendering a swarm or two, but even the thought started me to itch... ;)
Excellent render, Doug! Can you tell us the specs for rendering, like detail and AA? You managed to keep the reflections of the grasses nice and soft, despite the small wavelets.
The render settings were: detail 1.2, AA 18. I tried .8/8 but the water area was just not defined enough. 1/18 was actually fine in a test render, but I was away for a couple of days and decided to bump the detail a bit. There is a slight post adjustment to the contrast values and a small gaussian blur. About 30 hours to render, so not too bad.
Really nice! Looks great! My only crit is that I think the dead trees are a little much. "Snags" like here would be outstanding in this scene, in MO. http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/old-weathered-tree-snag-2266826.jpg But I like it anyway.
Very cool! :)
If I may chime in on the render settings in relation to the water reflections...
I think in this particular case it would be interesting to try the following settings:
Detail 0.8, AA12 @ 1/16th and pixel noise threshold @ 0.025 (default of AA12 anyway).
For the water reflections you disable the reflections in the water shader, by setting master reflectivity to 0.
Then connect a "reflective shader" in between the water shader and the lake object and let that shader do the reflections for you.
Enable raytraced reflectionsin the reflective shader and set the reflection roughness to a very small value, like 0.001.
The default 4 rays for reflections is usually sufficient, so no need to increase that.
The reflections take quite a while longer now, but detail 0.8 and AA12 with adaptive sampling may compensate a bit for it.
I'm curious to see a vertical crop of the centre 1/3rd of the image or so :)
Cheers,
Martin
Just beautiful. Love the quality of render and very nice trees
David
Another beautiful render. Great trees and atmosphere.
TheBadger: I had the same thought about the three 'dead' trees, (I prefer the term 'habitat' trees because of their value in the ecolosystem :)) but at some point the composition had been more or less built around them and they had formed a 'story' in my mind.
Kaerdog and mhaze: Thanks guys!
TU: thanks for chiming in! I did a simple crop of the existing image leaving the mid-third and I think that may work as the basis for a re-render with your suggested settings (if I can build the setup as described). I have a number of 'wetland' trees that I'm working to place in similar environments and appreciate your sharing your expertise with the TG renderer.
You're welcome,
If you like I can post a clip file for the water set up in the way I proposed.
Cheers,
Martin
TU, I'd appreciate that, thank you!
Here you go, just copy/paste the code below in your TG project and it should show up.
I have left the other water shader settings like wave size and transparency untouched.
As a matter of fact it's most easy to just connect your water shader to it instead and to set master reflectivity to 0.
<terragen_clip>
<water_shader
name = "Water shader 01"
gui_use_node_pos = "1"
gui_node_pos = "0 660 0"
gui_group = "Water"
enable = "1"
input_node = ""
gui_use_preview_patch_size = "0"
gui_preview_patch_size = "1000 1000"
roughness = "0.02"
wave_scale = "10"
smallest_scale = "0.1"
wind_patch_effect = "1"
wind_patch_size = "100"
wind_patch_sharpness = "5"
master_reflectivity = "0"
index_of_refraction = "1.33"
horizon_shift = "0.5"
highlight_intensity = "0.5"
min_highlight_spread = "0.01"
transparency = "0.75"
decay_distance = "10"
decay_tint = "0.75 1 0.5"
volume_1_density = "0"
volume_1_colour = "0.5 0.5 0.5"
volume_1_density_function = ""
volume_1_colour_function = ""
seed = "36702"
>
</water_shader>
<reflective_shader
name = "Reflective shader 01"
gui_use_node_pos = "1"
gui_node_pos = "0 600 0"
gui_group = ""
enable = "1"
input_node = "Water shader 01"
gui_use_preview_patch_size = "0"
gui_preview_patch_size = "1000 1000"
reflectivity = "1 1 1"
reflection_tint = "1 1 1"
transparency = "0 0 0"
index_of_refraction = "1.33"
specular_highlights = "1"
highlight_model = "1"
highlight_intensity = "0.5"
specular_roughness = "0.01"
specular_tweak = "0.5"
ray_traced_reflections = "1"
reflection_softness = "0.001"
number_of_samples = "4"
>
</reflective_shader>
<lake
name = "Lake 01"
gui_use_node_pos = "1"
gui_node_pos = "0 540 0"
gui_group = "Water"
enable = "1"
handle_in_preview = "1"
visible_to_camera = "1"
visibility = "2"
visible_to_other_rays = "1"
cast_shadows = "0"
sorting_bias = "0"
water_level = "1"
centre = "0 1 0"
max_radius = "100000"
rotate = "0 0 0"
planet = "Planet 01"
surface_shader = "Reflective shader 01"
displacement_tolerance = "0.5"
import_offset = "0 0 0"
import_scale = "1"
import_motion_filename = ""
>
</lake>
</terragen_clip>
Excellent image !
How is it coming along?
Thanks for the setup TU. I rendered the scene inserting the reflective shader as suggested and I think that there is a noticeable difference in how the light is spread as well as the contrast being a bit 'deeper'. I did however after rendering at detail .8/ AA12 feel that a little extra AA made a difference, so there is a crop at two settings, probably a matter of individual taste, because both work imo.
Also, while not a large image, I did follow your idea of a cropped vertical re-render, and used detail 1.0/ AA 18 with the sample at 1/16th. I think it's probably a better composition overall, thanks for the idea! I was going to test this, but perhaps you could address the 'transparency' aspect of adding the reflective shader: are the water shader 'sub-surface' settings affected by the intervening reflective shader to any degree,? It seems to me that some elements of the underwater textures were diminished, but maybe that is the 'reflective' percentage of the reflective shader at work? At any rate this has been very good learning study, thanks again for your interest and help.
Bizarre... I just tried viewing the images posted minutes ago on two separate machines and both .png's displayed as very washed out, but if downloaded display just fine. What? I converted both from png to jpeg and am re-posting. Curious.
I think either way these are already an improvement, isn't it :)
The water reflections are still a bit too sharp and reflective to my personal taste.
Perhaps a reflection softness of 0.002 may look a bit better.
On top of that you can add some colour to the water by using a surface layer.
If so, connect the surface layer before the reflective shader and give it a coverage of ~0.2 with a deep green colour like ~130, 40, 30
Then set the reflectivity of the reflective shader to 0.7-0.8
The water should now look a bit more murky and I think the softer reflections will aid in that murky swamp feel.
You can also make the water murky by using the volume density shading in the transparency tab of the water shader, but unfortunately that doesn't go well when shadows from surfaces are being casted into that volume.
As usual, if you're going to try some tests, then do it in little crop renders as rendering the water this way takes pretty long.
How did they compare by the way?
Cheers,
Martin
Clever stuff Martin - needs to go on your website as a tut!
And if you want to fake seeing underwater, give that murky surface shader's color some spunk by PF, or just load mainland surface colors into it.
very nice picture and inspiring work! Also thank's to TU for priceless suggestions! :)
Really like this render. The swamp scenery is very special and you made it very realistic.
Very nice, the dead trees in the water add a lot of realism I think. Being from the southern US though all I can think about looking at this image is all the mosquitoes there would be :-\