Not me, thanks.
WIP of a shallow depression in ancient times. I will need to make a giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus) for this and add specific greenery.
Looks great.
Looks convincing, very similar to low country in the north of Michigan.
Looks quite good. I always love your marsh regions. And I also always love real populations of objects. :D
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on September 06, 2015, 03:10:17 PM
Looks quite good. I always love your marsh regions. And I also always love real populations of objects. :D
- Oshyan
Ditto
Quote from: bobbystahr on September 06, 2015, 04:26:47 PM
Quote from: Oshyan on September 06, 2015, 03:10:17 PM
Looks quite good. I always love your marsh regions. And I also always love real populations of objects. :D
- Oshyan
Ditto
DittoDitto ;D
The Dune Fan Club will now come to order...order what I'm not sure....hee hee hee
Quote from: Dune on September 06, 2015, 10:42:56 AM
Not me, thanks.
WIP of a shallow depression in ancient times. I will need to make a giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus) for this and add specific greenery.
Heh heh...I've had shallow depressions, and mostly in my ancient times but caused by average sized Dears...sorry Ulco...couldn't resist...you'll notice I've tried till I got on my whim-cycle again today
Something more to ditto...
I am not satisfied with some trees AT ALL, so I have to work on those; Scotch pine, and junipers. Very hard to get the needles to work just right. Changed the needles in 5 for the pine, but still....
Pretty nice, Ulco.
I like the addition of the fog/mist.
Thanks, Michael.
Made some pretty nice new junipers in the meantime. I wonder if the shadows are influenced by the translucency of the leaves(?). It is quite hard to get rid of very dark interiors of shrub like that, due to the shadows. Too much translucency doesn't help very much but gives leaves on sunlit edges too much light. More GI helps a bit, but works overall. I even tried fractional luminosity of the leaf, which works nicely, but may give strange effects in deeply shadowed areas.
Quote from: Dune on September 09, 2015, 02:17:21 AM
Something more to ditto...
I am not satisfied with some trees AT ALL, so I have to work on those; Scotch pine, and junipers. Very hard to get the needles to work just right. Changed the needles in 5 for the pine, but still....
Conifer foliage of any kind is a pain and they're generally only as good as the resolution of the original photo and it's Alpha map
I think the texture needs enough open spaces, no solid green mass of needles (nice as it may be). I make my own textures (gathering branches and photographing them in front of a white board), so have to take care about that. A PF to lessen opacity would work for distance, but not for close up.
I was also thinking about TIF+alpha channel (which was my principal way of saving) and PNG files; the latter is smaller and looks like it's working just as good. Interesting to see it has no alpha channel, but in TG you still have to check 'use alpha channel' or it won't work.
Also; when importing a TIF+alpha you have to load it twice (for color and alpha); cheaper is to have a greyscale tif for the opacity, and a TIF without alpha for color.
So, what do you guys use, and think about this?
Well if this is your new method it seems to be working great. I as well like the size of the .png and when I've gotten images in .tga(also quite large) I find they often have bright spots in the Alpha that disappear when the object is saved in Deep Exploration as it saves all maps as .png and corrects I think the Alpha channel.
PNG does have an alpha channel (or at least the capability to have one). Your most recent image looks quite good to me...
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on September 10, 2015, 03:17:38 PM
PNG does have an alpha channel (or at least the capability to have one). Your most recent image looks quite good to me...
- Oshyan
You can actually create one in irfanview when saving .png It prompts to select the transparent colour. I've used it a bit.
Quote from: Dune on September 10, 2015, 02:57:13 AM
I make my own textures (gathering branches and photographing them in front of a white board),
First, the image seems fine. Interestingly , I use a black background for the same purpose
In Photoshop I don't see an alpha layer in the png's I made, so I still wonder why I need to tick that box in TG for it to work.
Or whether it's wise to make the alpha layer. In the latter case, the file is just as big as the tif, so I might as well stick to that. Not really important, though, it works.
Here's my setup (I just had this white board). Never mind the title, it's not a birch branch.
Quote from: Dune on September 11, 2015, 03:10:18 AM
In Photoshop I don't see an alpha layer in the png's I made, so I still wonder why I need to tick that box in TG for it to work.
The "use alpha" checkbox affects how it interprets the file you put into the opacity slot (whether to use the RGB as opacity or the alpha channel as opacity). Is that where your PNG is?
Matt
Yes, it is. See screendumps. But in PS there's only the RGB layers, no alpha. And I would have expected the transparent PNG in the color tab to be sufficient, but it's not apparently.
There must be an alpha channel in that image, otherwise you wouldn't be able to get a clean edge from just the RGB information that I can see in the screenshot (or maybe you could, but it would be inverted anyway). So, whatever Photoshop is telling you isn't the whole story.
Matt
TG's image preview also says it's only RGB, but it must be getting that matte from somewhere.
Matt
Have you had a look at it in Irfanview...sometimes it will show stuff PS won't but this is most curious.
I'll check it out, or zip the file for you to scrutinize.
Quote from: Dune on September 12, 2015, 11:16:30 AM
I'll check it out, or zip the file for you to scrutinize.
feel free...I have time....lots of time, heh heh heh
In the meantime... lessened the number of leaves on the juniperus, so they get more light inside.
Quote from: Dune on September 12, 2015, 03:32:21 AM
Yes, it is. See screendumps. But in PS there's only the RGB layers, no alpha. And I would have expected the transparent PNG in the color tab to be sufficient, but it's not apparently.
Great. :D
I certainly see a visual improvement concerning how the light interacts with the vegetation.
Quote from: Dune on September 13, 2015, 03:58:52 AM
In the meantime... lessened the number of leaves on the juniperus, so they get more light inside.
smart idea...looking really good Ulco.
Wasn't really my idea, but Doug's (Zaxxon). TG needs FBX, so it seems. I probably agree ;)
There's no alpha channel in the png, period. So it eludes me. But I'll use TIF+alpha from now on, just as easy.
Quote from: Dune on September 13, 2015, 11:26:13 AM
Wasn't really my idea, but Doug's (Zaxxon). TG needs FBX, so it seems. I probably agree ;)
There's no alpha channel in the png, period. So it eludes me. But I'll use TIF+alpha from now on, just as easy.
when I've had a problem with an Alpha channel in either .tif or most commonly .tga, I load it into Irfan and re-save as a .png selecting the background colour as transparency, and an image saved like that always shows an Alpha in TG. But that's just my work around. I have had a few .png images over time that had Alpha functionality but did not show the Alpha in the preview image...guess that is what you ran into.
As it looks you have transparancy in your image Ulco.
Maybe it is this? :
" Transparency control is also possible without the storage cost of a full alpha channel.
In an indexed-color image, an alpha value can be defined for each palette entry.
In grayscale and truecolor images, a single pixel value can be identified as being "transparent".
These techniques are controlled by the tRNS ancillary chunk type.
If no alpha channel nor tRNS chunk is present, all pixels in the image are to be treated as fully opaque. "
From here :
http://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-DataRep.html
2.4. Alpha channel
Quote from: Kadri on September 13, 2015, 02:08:45 PM
As it looks you have transparancy in your image Ulco.
Maybe it it this? :
" Transparency control is also possible without the storage cost of a full alpha channel.
In an indexed-color image, an alpha value can be defined for each palette entry.
In grayscale and truecolor images, a single pixel value can be identified as being "transparent".
These techniques are controlled by the tRNS ancillary chunk type.
If no alpha channel nor tRNS chunk is present, all pixels in the image are to be treated as fully opaque. "
From here :
http://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-DataRep.html
2.4. Alpha channel
that quite possibly explains the .png...thanks for the info.
Kadri, that's probably it. And in the screenshot it shows the checkerboard denoting a transparent area. Terragen just sees an alpha channel after loading the image, but it doesn't really care whether it was read from an actual alpha channel or generated from some other representation of transparency.
Matt
Thanks a lot, Kadri. Why didn't I think to search for this information? Good lesson, and good to know.
By the way, great image, Ulco!! I don't know, how often I wrote this, but I would have recognised your image as an original "Ulco", even without knowing it. You have a very unique style!
:)
This will be a sequence of 5 over 10.000 years or so, exactly from this point, so it'll be nice to fade them over.
Quote from: Dune on September 14, 2015, 05:43:46 AM
:)
This will be a sequence of 5 over 10.000 years or so, exactly from this point, so it'll be nice to fade them over.
whew...lotta time to travel...have a great trip hee hee hee