I really need to make a library of procedural vegetations for more distant viewing, so I started out doing some wet heathland with lots of low grass and some patches of blooming heather.
Not perfect yet, but good enough to post, I think.
Update...
Update...
Idyllic atmosphere. Great Ulco!
Wow, I love it so much! It looks very real!
All looking very good. Really like the last one .
If only I wasn't colour blind...odd thing is I see it very much like y'all but trying to do subtle colouring like this is and likely always will be, beyond me. Bloody lovely Ulco....your painting background is showing...good stuff.
Good stuff :D
The third one looks most real but the broken up water in the first gives a better impression of "Marshy"
The impression of various grasses looks fairly good there. Everything but the trees is fully procedural?
Quote from: Mr_Lamppost on August 22, 2016, 06:38:58 PM
The third one looks most real but the broken up water in the first gives a better impression of "Marshy"
Kind of thinking the same thing
I agree with you. In that render I raised the 'dry parts' a bit, and as that's a soft fractal, it also raised part of the wet area, producing the little humps. Not a very good way of handling the masking, but the result was nice.
The really far back is procedural trees, just a humpy rise and some dark greenish color, masked by distance shader, before that about 6 tree pops of 4 species and one grass pop inthe last render, taking the color of the ground. All displacements and colors are done after a base color node, so no compute terrain, easy in these kinds of renders.
Grass pop in the last one, I wondered but thought you may have done something clever with very tall thin fake stones. I remember getting passable procedural grass that way years ago but didn't save the file and was never able to reproduce the good result. All later attempts had noticeable black displacement artefacts.
Quote from: Mr_Lamppost on August 23, 2016, 01:21:21 PM
Grass pop in the last one, I wondered but thought you may have done something clever with very tall thin fake stones. I remember getting passable procedural grass that way years ago but didn't save the file and was never able to reproduce the good result. All later attempts had noticeable black displacement artefacts.
I find the procedural grass preset to be very adjustable and handy for distant veggies....
Lovely trees and light! The last one (as you might expect) with the grass population is my preference. Was there any hit on render time?
I think render times were about the same; about 25 minutes, at 0.6 and AA6, soft shadows 0.5 and 5 samples.
@ Mr.Lamppost: I did use some 'procedural grass' effect also, just one, dense (2), no color fake stones layer of size 0.005 and height 1 or so. I too find that if you increase height to 10, you also get more nasty black artifacts, and it's really important to have high detail settings to have a proper grass effect then. I might try it again with more extreme settings or a double layer of 'fake grass', see what happens. Adding a Lambert shader for some translucency (or a default shader as base) may get you some softer light 'through' that grass.
A comparison between different sets op fake stone grass. All crop took 2min each, the detail 0.8 crop 25 seconds longer.
Low and sparse meaning 5 high and 0.8 density, 2xhigh meaning 2 shaders in line, each 10 high, high20sparst meaning height 20 :P and 0.5 density....
good tests, 2xfakegrasshigh.jpg (95.81 kB, 3 works best to my colourblind eyes
I agree with bobby. 2xfakegrasshigh.jpg looks most convincing.
But still, that obliterates the subtle voronoi displacements of the vegetation and gives more artifacts. I myself preferred the sparser single, lower one.
I find the 1X examples very convincing and a little more varied. Even though these are tests of procedural ground covers (and excellent tests indeed), the images also show some excellent treework. Looks like your tree model library is growing very nicely. :)
Indeed it does. The problem is arising that I have so many trees and grass and stuff, that the folders are bulging and I can't decide what old (bad) stuff to throw out. It may have been used in a render. Organizing a library is a tedious job :(
I agree with Zaxxon, 2nd and 4th look the better of the four examples. That texture looks great, nice and clumpy giving you some good shadows.
If I was to point something out, it would be that the water edges give the depth of long grass away (probably not an issue for distance work). 0.3m offset?
The tree branches look quite high off the ground too if this is long grass, you could raise the tree anchor point so they sit lower in the ground and the canopy is closer to the grass. The trunk would sink lower as well. The heather looks very good, maybe it could 'clump' further out of the grass to add some more height variation.
It's a great go-to texture you've got there Ulco.
Thanks Jon. I like input/feedback like that. The offset is indeed about that much, very shallow, boggy depressions. Thery're not supposed to be very deep, but I agree that the grass isn't coming out very well. It needs far more variety in height and structure as well. I try to do as much with as little as possible, but it needs some more pops, I guess.
With grazing in the area the canopies would not be very low, but I will have a look at that again as well. Maybe make some new trees with lower canopies. And I agree about the heather, played with the height, but have to adjust.
These are some photo's of that type of terrain.
When I watch the photos correctly I guess you will spend much time on creating many random "break ups" in the shores.
I have mostly the feeling that it's quite ornate to create not too straight and artificial looking shores in TG. Especially shallow beaches are a challenge to me.
The fractal warp shader (amongst others) is your friend for breaking up stuff.