Here's a view of a scene I'm putting together that will be used in a game environment. There are still a couple of things that need correcting for the artwork. First, there is a circular dashed breakup in the sand in the lower left - a side effect of the noise used to vary the ripple pattern. I thought I'd gotten rid of that but it showed up again at this level of resolution. The second is the mosque dome. I tried to cheat and use the same low-poly version of the model I intend to use in real-time. I guess I need to do a separate version with a higher poly count for the artwork.
;)
C&C appreciated.
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Plant credits - the trees are the HB Palms I did with Arbaro, along with the XFrog Palmettos. The bushes are fmtoffolos, the ground cover is a mix of BigBen's long grass, Ogre's vinca and rosemary, and a modified weeds from Planit3d.
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Great surfacing and scene setup Harvey. Soft shadows are really good looking, and sand is very convincing too. I would suggest more color balance over the palms and the other vegetation to integrate them better in the scene, pushing the work over the edge :)
Thanks, Lucio!
By giving the plants more 'color balance', do you mean making their shades of green more similar? That has sort of been an ongoing debate - whether they were too different or not.
I think that the small plants (the grass especially) should be a little less saturated. The trees look nice, though. Your sand looks very realistic - I almost want to pick some up and let it sift through my fingers :).
This is very good. Your sand particularly. I agree with old_blaggard about the small plants could be a little less saturated.
Quote from: Harvey Birdman on October 06, 2007, 01:24:16 PM
Thanks, Lucio!
By giving the plants more 'color balance', do you mean making their shades of green more similar? That has sort of been an ongoing debate - whether they were too different or not.
As said by o_b and sjefen I think that all the green in the scene can be desatured a little. I also think that (but this is only a personal opinion) adding a little noise to the small sand dunes would be great, making them be a bit more irregular and realistic.
Thanks for the input, guys. Back to the drawing board for a couple of days, I guess... it'll be nice to get this scene set up so I can turn the rendering machines loose and get back to writing code.
:)
Lucio - man, if you knew how much time I'd spent on those stupid sand ripples! I have 2 different clip setups for them at this point. With this version, if I increase the noise I get artifacts like the dashed circular pattern at the lower left in this image. I guess I'll go back to the earlier version. I thought this would be better but it doesn't seem to be working out.
Nice dunes. Great background terrain and I like the coloring on the mountains, though the grass could be a different shade and I wish I could tell you how to do that. I'm still learning.
since there is a Mosque...there has to be a pathway leading to it...
great render!!
*****
Thanks, guys.
Dhavalminstry - After I make the changes suggested here I'm going to run a whole series of renders from this scene. You'll like one from in front of the mosque - there's really pretty tile work on the front around the doors.
Calico - If you're talking about Ben's long grass, here's what ya do. Add a single object of the long_grass.tgo. Right-click on it in the node view and select 'Internal Network'. You should see a rather complicated network - 2 main shaders, each with 2 additional surface layers and their fractal breakup nodes, all feeding into a mixer, which is controlled by yet another surface layer and fractal. As I mentioned elsewhere, I believe the intent was to provide a means of changing color with elevation or distance or whatever. It doesn't work, though, becuase the internal network has no knowledge of external terrain. (I think.) The thing to do is strip this network way down, say to a single main shader with a couple of highlight child layers, then connect this smaller network to the 'Surface Shader' input of the internal network. Then you can change the color of the population by changing the color of the new single main layer, with some scattering of the highlight colors as you see fit. Once you've made the desired modifications, right-click the object in the node view and save the object file. It'll retain all the changes you've made (so you may want to save it under another name).
I'm looking forward to your update, didn't comment before because it was all said. Did just notice one thing, soft shadows, I think you could sharpen them up quit a bit, the shadows in deserts can be quite harsh and its adding considerably to your render time.
Richard
I haven't played with the shadow settings much yet. Is it adjustable?
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Oh, yeaaaaahhhh.... ;D
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Thanks Harvey. I'll try this.