I'm attempting to recreate a scene from a dream (although I'll leave out the bear and the alien...).
A hilly landscape with a pine forest and ground cover of needles and leaves mostly.
The dream was very realistic in the surroundings, and luckily pretty vivid in memory.
Shame I can't show you what the 'original' looks like :-\
For the current ground cover I only used 3 surface layers with different images of needles and leaves, plugged in as colour and displacement. Works pretty well...
I'll add the needles and fallen leaves objects from the downloads section here in the next version, and some small bushes.
I also need pine trees that have no low branches and s thick stem. A sequoia comes to mind.
In this first attempt I used the free xfrog Grand Fir, but reduced the opacity of the foliage objects to zero. That results in some strange shadows I want to get rid of...
looks pretty good...I can imagine a dream here...real and surreal at the same time!
great start!
Excellent beginning. The back part (from about halfway up) is shear beauty and looks realistic.
Really like this,it has a great surreal, dreamlike quality, I particularly like the long distorted shadows :)
richard
So if you all like it so much like this, what should I improve? I thought more shrubbery...
I agree with everyone else and I would add a small stream in the low part behind the 2 trees on the left side
Do a little for the foreground, but not too much. LOL Probably not especially helpful advice. But, a little can go a long way.
So I got the second render finished...
Added Terrade's fallen leaf object for detail (had to scale it down to a size of 0.03 though, while the trees are scaled up to 5). Couldn't put more on the ground because of memory size (object spacing is at 0.3, 0.2 doesn't fit in my 2 Gb RAM).
Also turned on soft shadows, forgot about that in the first render. Foreground shadows look much more realistic now...
I don't know what happened with the tree on the left, seems it didn't render in the top bucket. But I like the trunk so I'll leave it in this time.
You need greater variety of colour in the leaves and possibly more of them and a much higher quality render! so we can see them clearly