Here's another try at some snowy mountains with a valley. Still trying to get the hang of this thing and lots of work left to do.
The mountain displacements are all procedural (alpine shader), except for one image map used for the background mountain, scaled appropriately and placed off in the distance. There is additional minor displacement added to all the surfaces for each surface layer of colors. I used one image map for some of the rocks on the mountain. I am pretty satisfied, but it could have used some more sharp variation.
The close up granite "rock" to the right was created via a distance shader, to where an arbitrary radius from a reference camera was colored to simulate rock. This rock also features a voronoi noise stack to simulate cracks and criggles. It didn't come out the way I had hoped, but I started getting impatient and thus called it complete. It would have been better off with more detail and some foliage.
The river itself is an image map created in photoshop, then scaled to fit the scene. This was tedious. To get the river to match the TG generated terrain, I had to render a top down view, do a screen capture of the preview window, then pull this into photoshop for reference. It worked perfectly. I then used this image as negative displacement to push the river depth into the terrain. Then I added water to the appropriate height to fill in the river. The ripples were extra large for the scale, but it gave the river the semi-rapids look, so I kept it. It looks 'too' perfect at this point, but thats ok for now.
The background fortress/castle was created in Google Sketchup in about an hour or so. I then exported it to .obj, then imported it into TGTP, and then colors and surface effects set from there (ie. the semi shiny roof, and slight displacement on the walls - though most cannot be seen from this distance).
The clouds were created in 2 layers. One cirrus layer that I dialed in a while back, and a standard cumulus layer. More work to do to get it the way I want.
The populations could have been done ALOT better on this one, but I was getting impatient. In fact, it placed trees onto the main rock to the right in a way I didn't like, so I cloned one of them off the face via Photoshop. Additionally, I used low polygon trees to keep render times down. I think the image would have been way better with high poly trees. And the ground is MUCH too regular in color.
Additionally, I see some contrast "weirdness". I am still working on ways to get that dialed in, likely via light projection due to GI from the background object.
Stats:
Total render time: 16.5 hours (using 4 cores). A single core would have taken over 66 hours, ouch!
Quality: 0.8
AA: 10
GI 3/3 + surface detail
SS: 20/9
Minor postwork in photoshop, such as levels, sharpening, and saturation.
let me be the first to comment on this one and say this is looking really good!
I specially like the middle ground...
:o :o :o I love it!
straight copy/paste from RDR ;D
This is a great post, for 2 reasons: first the great image of course but second the amount of information you included about the workflow. I think you set a good example here of what many people would like to see in an imagepost.
If you take a look at CGSociety for example you see that, whether or not on request, often in the first post much information is submitted so everybody can learn from it.
About the image. I think we can better call it a WIP isn't it :p
It's great work on compositing and texturing/surfacing. As you said it's too perfect but it doesn't bother me really. For the foreground cracked rocks I'd add some fake stones for the detail and breakup. I think that would look pretty nice in combination with some really small bushes (like you mentioned yourself). The alpine fractal looks really cool!
I like the way you worked out the river, the sandbanks and the vegetation. However, I understand why you left those wave so big but I still think they're too big, sometimes as big as the rivers' width which is too unnatural I think.
I was wondering if you'd lower the sun a little bit, add a soft fill light opposite of main light (strength 0.2-0.4 or so), keep SS, GI 2/2, increase atmo-samples quite some and increase AA to 12. I think the overall lighting and detail in the shadows would greatly improve and also the quality of the foreground vegetation. I might have a nice cloud-clipfile for you if you're interested. It has those billowy thick cumulus clouds. Just let me know.
All are just suggestions and thoughts of course.
I'm really looking forward to see an update on this one, fantastic work already!
Martin
nice one mate.
Wow this is a really well done image, it appears as though you've thought of every detail. The distribution of the trees is great and the cracks on the rocks turned out really well. I like the nice touch of the Castle on that ridge line too. Good Job!
Very nice, Moodflow. Now, let's see a dragon fly out of that castle and come toward the screen...
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
Quote from: calico on January 10, 2008, 01:26:08 PM
Very nice, Moodflow. Now, let's see a dragon fly out of that castle and come toward the screen...
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
Now THAT would kick assimius!