After some weeks (only partially successful) render time for my canyon animations, I tackled the thing differently.
The terrain with 100 km² is just too big to get one perfect flight through the canyon.
Too much populations and detail work necessary and even my core i7 feels sick while working on the terrain ;)
Last week a friend asked, why I don't play batman anymore with the new PC and I told him "I planted 5 million grass"
- yes - in this grammatically wrong way ... sounds sooo funny - even in German language 8) ;D
I will need to do smaller areas and shorter scenes.
... and so I found nice new details, new solutions --- and this nice little mountain lake on the tableau above the river:
[attach=1]
Here is the view when you have almost arrived at the lake:
[attach=2]
And here you can get a little imagination how big the terrain is:
This weekend I will modify some of the pop-rocks. I don't like direction size and the look of some of them and learned last days that you can modify single objects of a population...
[attach=3]
Here is what I did the last 3 weeks... i like the sunrise but I will have to work on it... still not satisfied. And I am little proud on the water movement but I will change some details.
This looks very promising. I am personally a fan of having more cuts and shorter pieces rather than one big, long flight, so this works in my favor. ;) And you're right, it's also just difficult to really make a super long camera move work well throughout.
Regarding the new scene, it looks nice. I think just some of the vegetation looks a bit oddly colored, too much yellow perhaps, but definitely too much saturation on some of the trees/bushes. Otherwise looking pretty good though. I look forward to seeing it animated. :)
- Oshyan
Awesome animation! :D
I'm no expert Oshyan, but cant one take down specific color saturations in After Effect like in Photoshop? Or do you have to rerender?
Doing color adjustment for a specific tree or species might be tricky on a still image, but certainly possible. On an animation it'd be harder, but possible do-able with more advanced composing or video editing software like Nuke or After Effects.
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan & Marty :)
I think that you mean the "Umbrella_Magnolia" in the forground of the second picture?
[attach=1]
I have already started to set back the diffuse color to the original "grey"
For most of objects and plants I set it to almost white, because I didn't like the dusty colorless grey look.
But you're right - especially the yellow is too much.
Here I damped the saturation of the "yellow trees":
[attach=2]
In the first picture this "Umbrella_Magnolia" doesn't appear.
The pictures show two different scenes:
01 scene rising from the grass up into sky for a look over the small lake
02 & 03 scene flying from the river towards the lake.
I hope in the next months I will understand some more about Hannes mesh displacer:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,19028.0.html.
Then I could try the scene 01 with slightly moving grass... ;)
For the water animation I found a great starting point for my experiments:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,16104.0.html
Great WIP, the water flow is indeed remarkable.
Yes, that updated version is better with the saturation. Still seems a bit yellow to me (would be interesting to see a real-life photo example of that tree). But maybe some color variation would help.
- Oshyan
Very cool. Hope you take this as far as you can.
Agree with Oshyan. Color variation would be great. And as far as I can see you used only two species for this image. Maybe some more would make it look a bit more natural and "chaotic".
Thanks for the suggestions :)
I'll improve the mixture of trees a bit, once I know my collection of objects better. I have used a couple of magnolia, a few elm trees, bushes and bare bushes. The rest are two variants grass, some ferns and sporadically prairieroses. I hope with this jumble of plants I don't offend any botanist.
But now I first must wait again some days because yesterday I started my next... lets call it "feasibility study" ;)
After that I want to do more changes:
In my animation I am proud of the first little success with fakestones on one side but on the other side I think I will change the riverside completely.
I want to change the riverside into the look of the lakeside (in the first pic on the top of this topic).
E.g. in the animation I don't like the single tufts of tall grass together with the rice leaves in the water.
Does somebody agree with me to go in this direction?
Last days I worked on the complete redesign of the canyon scenery... This is the result. Smoothing shader on the terrain, 30.000.000 instances of plants... will be funny to animate it ;)
But I am in good mood and I like this river course with some hills much more than my older concept of the canyon.
I needed many tryouts until the trees had a uniform size ratio. I used mostly xfrog-plants: Sweet Birch, Umbrella Magnolia, OC06_5 (Bare bushes), Sessile Oak, an three types of grass. Also I changed the remains of the fence to a texture bleached and weathered by the sun. The balloons are unchanged.. even same place :)
I think an animation with the sun rising between the hills (direct under the two balloons will look nice). At the moment I do some experiments with the sun-disc and some clouds.
But the late morning scene is quite OK in my eyes.
Hope the redesign is the right way?
[attach=1]
It's getting better and better.