I've not posted in a while, a lot of my work nowadays is covered by NDA's so never gets to see the light of day. This is a personal peice using a lot of image maps for texture and displacement.
The name is blatantly ripped from Tolkien but that is as far as the reference goes:)
The castle models are by Luca Rodolfi. Check out his site here:
http://rodluc2001.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/welcome-again.html
Pretty sweet, Richard.
Would not mind seeing a render of the mountains from down in the town too.
A sense of grandeur and scale with a lovely romanticism. Beautiful!
Hey Richard, good to see some new work by you. You always have this wonderful light, and again this time. I love it, really do!
But there are some things that are a pity, IM(very)HO; the shine of the rocks and grass makes it a bit too much CGI. I suppose it's wet rock and grass, but it looks like too much. Also, the clouds are a bit rough; very much small displacements make them 'restless'. And I think the village should have a dirtier color, they 'jump out' too much.
But I did copy it to my favorites folder, as reference for my future work. Love the light!
Hehe, yes you're right about the clouds and thank you. :) I'm re-doing the scene now with better clouds and different models, I'll post an update tomorrow probably ...
Agree with Dune. Also there are no streets roads or paths in the town. Shouldn't there be some signs of cultivation?
Great image! You should do a tutorial on how to use image maps in such a way.
Very nice. I like the lights.
For such a town, it would need a river or a lake not so far.
They usually built cities near water.
David
Yes, and while you're at it; castles were mostly not built under high rocks where the enemy could comfortably sit and throw stones, whatnot and fire into the castle. Maybe build a small SSS hill away from rocks for the castle to sit on?
In south of France, they are building a castle with middle-aged tools
http://www.guedelon.fr/en/the-guedelon-adventure/an-introduction_01_01.html
Could give you ideas
I've been there, taken hundreds of photo's. It's amazing!
A captivating piece of work Richard.
Version 2
Yes I agree about the town and castle, they have been removed!
I think the hardest part of any procedural software is to integrate man made elements in to a random environment.
The small castle is also by Luco (http://rodluc2001.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/welcome-again.html). Trees from Xfrog of course.
I used the surface depth mask not for lens blur (as is usual) but for slight desaturation of the distant hills. Also curves have been applies to both surface and cloud to remove a little red.
Great atmoshere, a significant improvement.
Indeed. Great render!
Nice Richard
The atmo of this picture is outstanding :D Beautiful render.
Much better!
The castle seems to be a bit out of size (too large),but that might be just me
don't liking the rodluc models generally.
A very pleasing scene. This is much better.
I like image 2 better also.
I like both renders a lot! ;)
A nice enhancement, even more beautiful.
I guess that's a "no" to a tutorial, then. That's okay, I'll figure it out...
Hehe, sorry :)
What do you want to know?
There's not very much to it really, they're just textures screen captured from Google Earth (so sue me!) and stitched together to make something high resolution.
I take each image and set it to tile in x and y and plug it into the child input of a surface layer and then break them up with a power fractal. Set the PF (breakup shader) scale to something reasonably big so you have a black and white mask with large enough areas of black and white so it hides the repeat pattern of the tile.
That really is pretty much it. The more layers you add in the more detailed it gets. You can also use the images to break up PF textures and of course visa versa.
The rock face texture is from CGTextures and is mapped to lateral projection.
Hope this points you in the right direction.
Agree w/Dune re: castle placement in the first...like it in the 2nd. Also have a dim view of those models close up as the mapping is often screwed up and even PoseRay doesn't help much...but they're great distance models.
Your control of a MASSIVE scene amazes me always...saved this for future enjoyment and study as well.