Just trying to learn and Re-familiarize myself with Terragen challenging myself with ideas that come to mind.
Aside from a few oddities, this exercise in shading/texturing didn't turn out too terrible, so I thought I'd share. :D
Very nice, and good that you share here. One small suggestion would be to make some sort of waterline, where the stagnant water has influenced the shore. Either by being wet or having grown algae and plants like rushes. A mask with final alitude constraints would do, a max with a few centimeters of fuzzy zone in a surface shader with a color adjust as child set to gamma 0.7-0.8, perhgaps a slight greener, but be careful not to overdo the green. And an added surface shader between those to, with minimum altitude of water level, with a non-RT reflective shader for wet waterline rock.
You can use a similar mask for some rushes, min and max altitude slightly under and above waterlevel, final position.
I like the sky and the overall composition. The water area is probably not 100% realistic like Ulco mentioned, but I actually like it as well! Gives an impression of a small area flooded by a larger body of water and really benefits the image as a whole.
I would, however, enhance the plant diversity and mask the trees off the rock area (is it rock?).
Overall a very nice picture. :)
Looks like a great start. Some short work could definitely be had.
I also agree with the plant diversity, but also some slight colour variation via PFs in World Space (with a Transform Input Shader) could help a lot too.
I like the landscape here though, so a good scene to evolve.
Good start!
A little bit sand here and there, more bushes, flowers, plants and differences in colour but overall a good beginning.
STORMLORD
I appreciate all the advice and kind words. This scene definitely needs work but Terragen amazes me so much with how little effort you can put into something and it always picks up the slack.
On the flip side of the coin Terragen has endless possibilities and capabilities making it incredibly difficult at times. Thankfully this amazing community exists. Without it, I would have given up by now. I'm going to digest this advice and put it to use. Thanks again folks!
A few culverts were put in up stream and a lot of the flooding has been taken care of which is a shame. It gave the landscape some character. I will have to do something about that. I added a waterline with reflective shader and I was getting some odd flashes in places so I turned the reflective tint to a very bright tan color and now the overall reflection is nearly gone. I don't have any rushes which is a shame. I think they would look great along the banks but I might be able to improvise. Much work to be done and the wheels move slowly with limited time.
That looks great! I specially like that little stone boulder building a bridge into the water :)
I miss the ungrown areas from the first attempt a little. The current grassy area needs a little more variety. But all in all a great landscape!
I would certainly diversify the greenery. The carpet on the ground looks like a carpet, so perhaps a more scattered (mask by PF billows) distribution would look nicer. And some color diversity.
There are certainly (free) rushes about, either at XFrog, or here at file sharing, or elsewhere on the web. You can also use the internal grass population. make them small into patches (of max 1m), and stretch the obj by Y, or set height in the input above. Best to decrease with (X/Z) of the object too (0.7/0.7). Give them a varied color through transform shader set to world.
Same grass can be used to intersperse with the heather(?) carpet.
Ah, with the reflective shores, I'd set the roughness to 0.2 or so, so the pinpoints of light are less hard.
The water area still looks good if you ask me. ;)
But if you want to have more control over reflectivity, I urge you to add a very small (on the 0.001 magnitude) and grainy displacements. This will essentially give you the look of a wet, rough sand, which reflects light in many different directions at the same time, unlike a mirror. You may also try to use miniscule, colorless "fake stone shader" while there, to achieve the same effect. Actually, a technique that Ulco himself taught me in the past.
If you wish to gather up more veggies, I strongly suggest to check the following sites, unless you already did:
http://xfrog.com/category/samples.html (it seems it's temporarily down as I'm writing this, but keep trying)
And some grass and bush sets that never fail me, provided by one of the Terragen legends :):
http://www.mrlamppost.com/tg2/downloads/objects.htm
Please allow me to give my 50cents to add some tips and hints here...
In a former thread I had made some true life colour charts for greens and grasses
This could help you tremendeously to find your perfect colours for your scenery which looks very natural.
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,28215.msg280624.html#msg280624
Thread True Life Grass Colours
If you like to create fake grass as well, then maybe you would like to use this screenshot as a good starter.
SCREENSHOT - Gras Function Based by dhavalmistry.jpg
Screenshot Shader
Fake Grass by dhavalmistry
If you use many colour variations in grass, greens, earth and clouds, then you will receive a more lively result.
Here is one example of an older creation. Take notice of the colour variations in the greens here. -> it looks appealing and liveley!
The plants here are from XFrog but I retouched their original leafs and trunk textures. As originals they look often very dark and sometimes poor in color.
A little bit Photoshop here will give often a much better effect in your image. Forget their originals... retouche them and end up with amazing differences!
(Execute auto contrast, do some brightening corrections and improving the color dynamics here is mostly the key.)
Vegetation Sample by Stormlord.jpg
Lake Tahoe
Pay attention to the colour variations in greens and bushes, the different water colours including the small wet sand stripe and the different clouds
Another point to pay attention is lightning. Often others display pictures here which are very dark. It is important to find out a good lightning to brighten the picture.
If you don't pay attention here, the result is often poor and looks somehow dark. A good lightning is truly essential !
I guess, its better to place the sun position slightly behind of your camera position. This causes the sun to brighten up the scene in front of you.
A Good Sun Position.jpg
A good sun position for my Lake Tahoe scene
Please notice the bright trees because they're lit from the front (as seen in the picture Lake Tahoe above)
If you place the sun ahead of you then the shadow of trees, bushes, obstacles ect. darkens the scenery which lies ahead the camera. It darkens the scene, you look at shadows ahead of you.
Just do it in the other way round. Place the sun behind you (to illuminate the scene ahead of you) and set it in a way, that it will cast a slight shadow left or right of your greens/landscape.
Try different sun positions and altitudes and maybe setting a secound light or just increasing your Environment lightning in the scene can be very helpful.
Just try out what's best. I often do first some small renders with very low settings, just to find the correct lightning. Followed by a bigger and better rendering to crasp more details.
I did a little bit poposhop retouche to show up the difference in your scene.
Retouched.jpg
Lightning up dark shadows and brighten the colours
By changing the sun position and lightning you can also give a try increasing the contrast setting in the tonemap tab.
Rendering ocean scenes where you see much water and sky, the difference is very dramatic and much better than rendering the picture with it's original 0.2 contrast setting.
I earned great results in poor skies by only changing the value from original 0.2 up to 0.5-0.6. It's sometimes really worth to try it but it depends on the scene and view.
Contrast.jpg
Often overlooked / contrast settings in the render tab
Tonemap Settings (Contrast).jpg
Editing contrast can give you a much more natural or lively result in a sky or water rendering
STORMLORD
and once again this community shines through with some helpful advice and reference materials!
What started out as a simple exercise in shading the landscape (a single tree pop) looks like I'm going to have to get serious with this. As Marsellus Wallace would say. "Go through it with a pipe and a blow torch".
@Stormlord those grass swatch charts will prove to be an extremely valuable resource to turn to everytime. Thank you for that very much. Also, in earlier versions of Photoslop I would have gasped at seeing your type of "Auto" anything but nowadays it's not as critical. I was going to mention some lesser known panel in photoshop but decided to find a Google reference to do the work (https://industrydev.com/exploring-auto-color-correction-options-in-adobe-photoshop/). In any event I thank you all for your help.
@Dune @N-drju @DocCharly65 your wisdom and advice is not unnoticed. I'm off to do more work on this!
@Dune "Give them a varied color through transform shader set to world." WAS mentioned this in his first post. I didn't understand it then or now. I know how to add one in the network but that's it, I can make a best guess where it plugs into or where but the settings inside the shader itself are an enigma.
Quote from: pixelpusher636 on April 28, 2021, 07:52:17 PM@Dune "Give them a varied color through transform shader set to world." WAS mentioned this in his first post. I didn't understand it then or now. I know how to add one in the network but that's it, I can make a best guess where it plugs into or where but the settings inside the shader itself are an enigma.
I'll be happy to answer that.
The "Power Fractal" shader can be used as an "instruction" that will guide the coloration of an object, but "Transform Input" is a mandatory element as well. We'll come down to that shortly.
If you'd like to, for example, make some of your tree's leaves greener, or darker, you can apply a power fractal to guide these variations.
In this situation; white = full green, black = no green (effectively, black).
Your setup should look like this:
diagram.jpg
There is a typo in there, sorry...
While the "Power Fractal" can have great and positive impact on the diversity of the colors of your veggies, the result will be stretched or erratic.
And that's where "Transform Input" shader comes in. Tick the "Use world space (final position)" box, and you're done!
What it does is that it basically corrects the input's representation on vertical and near vertical surfaces. Without it, the coloration is stretched, resulting in weird "scratches" and rough lines. Good luck. :)
My lengthy answer was literally crushed by Andrzej's, crashing my firefox page when I hit 'post', so here's a new post, shorter this time, as he explained it already. Check out these screenshots, and you'll get there.
Quote from: Dune on April 29, 2021, 01:55:43 AMMy lengthy answer was literally crushed by Andrzej's, crashing my firefox page when I hit 'post'
Ahhh, sorry about that. :-X I did have the feeling that we have both been writing at the same time.
Not your doing, but it's funny that the website responds like that when 2 clicks at the same time occur.
Thank you to you both!
So I don't need to know anything inside the shader except "use world space". This is a little like how I texture with surface shaders by adding a PF to the color function. Now it all makes sense.
I think I might have pulled this off last night but did not render to be sure. I wanted to find out the correct way first.
Thank You !
@N-drju I noticed you're from Poland. Which part? Anywhere near the Baltic in the North by chance? Beautiful Country you live in.
Thank you @pixelpusher636, for such kind words. :)Not too romantic I guess... I live in the capital. But most of the year I am actually "affiliated" with the Skierniewice region which is much greener and, not coincidentally, inspiring and friendlier for artists. ;)
N-drju Warsaw is quite amazing and I love the architecture! Poland is definitely on the bucket list.
In other news.. Some progress with the veggies, not the trees yet just the grasses and added a wild flower. Rushes and more to come.
I think it's worth mentioning that while fiddling with my shoreline layer to break the odd light bursts, I somehow have the fuzzy zone to big maybe. Unfortunately this was noticed after render.
That's already better, but I'd patch up both populations more/harder, like there are clumps of grass and clumps of the other groundcover (small bush, heather?). Yes, it seems you have highlights under the water surface now, so the lower limit of the reflective shader should be set narrower, just under water level. Fuzzy zone maybe 0.05 or so.
Yes Sir Dune, diversifying the ground cover and trees are definitely happening.
And ah ha! I think I know where I went wrong. I think I might have 0.5 as a fuzzy which would certainly cause this!
This scene is going to start coming together more rapidly now thanks to everyone's help.
Also Dune. I'd never even thought about using the procedural grasses before, thinking it would probably be outside my wheelhouse of knowledge to do what was necessary to make them look convincing. You have opened my eyes to new possibilities for sure!
While this once shading exercise turned into more and could definitely go further with much improvement. I think I'm going to take all the knowledge provided to me from you fellow TG users and put it to bed. I'm posting of what I've finished so far and I've learned so much. I'm still floored by the flexibility of the built in grass clumps.
For such a small and calm stream the upper altitude limit of the shiny shore needs to be lower, perhaps only a few centimeters above waterline, so values like 0.1-0.2 with fuzzy zone of 0.05-0.2 or so (if water is at zero). Now you get too big highlights from rocks in the water.
But the vegetation looks way better.
Quote from: Dune on May 01, 2021, 02:04:55 AMFor such a small and calm stream the upper altitude limit of the shiny shore needs to be lower, perhaps only a few centimeters above waterline, so values like 0.1-0.2 with fuzzy zone of 0.05-0.2 or so (if water is at zero). Now you get too big highlights from rocks in the water.
But the vegetation looks way better.
indeed. This has been a challenging part for me. The water level is at like 286 I believe but fiddling this far has yielded nothing at all to under water too far, and now too far above water. More fiddling needed. Did not try with extra "0" I was afraid it might yield yet another null reflection. However if the man who speaks multiple languages including TG suggests this then that's probably what needs to be done. 😀
"CE3205DF-2A0D-4C56-85DA-BD178FD21942.jpeg"
Cool name for such a nice picture...
Looks better than the version before, more details and more liveley.
Maybe some clouds?
STORMLORD
Really nice !