I've been really busy with school, my jobs, and applying for internships over the summer and I haven't had nearly enough time to play with Terragen. However, this scene was perfect for me: I set it up in only a couple of hours and let it render. The only tricky part was getting the distribution of the drop objects right, which I eventually solved with a set of cameras projecting different masks around in 3D space.
Ryan's recent work inspired the depth of field, lightning made the grass, and Matt wrote a raytracer that rendered thousands of transparent and reflective dew drops over the course of five days without ever crashing.
EDIT: Apparently the color profile I set wasn't conserved when uploading, as the image looks different in my browser than in the image editor. I'll try to fix that later.
EDIT 2: It was actually my browser. Time to switch from my weird off-brand Firefox 2-based setup and get with the game :P.
Five days? Holy sh*t man ;D
BUT,...it is really worth the wait! Great work! The grasses still look quite realistic, even so close-up!
I guess you've used your own custom textures and I also guess you used populated spheres for the drops? :)
Martin
great stuff, Paul! The DOF is a must in this, and it's well excuted!
Cheers,
Frank
Damn! Amazing what this software can do in the right hands. And with Matt's help.
Quote from: buzzzzz1 on February 10, 2009, 04:18:30 PM
Damn! Amazing what this software can do in the right hands. And with Matt's help.
I think he meant to say that the current state of the TG-renderer is so stable that it can run for 5 days, non-stop.
Not that Matt has written/updated the raytracer for this image.
At least, that's what I think :)
o_b, would you explain what you mean about Matt and the 5 days? I'm wanting what you've got here.
He means "Matt wrote a raytracer that rendered thousands of transparent and reflective dew drops" which allowed him to create this image and it took him 5 days to render.
good job !
well done !
Quote from: calico on February 10, 2009, 04:29:16 PM
o_b, would you explain what you mean about Matt and the 5 days? I'm wanting what you've got here.
The raytracer Matt wrote = TG2 ;D
Well, I'm used to renders that take weeks (and not only animations), so the five days part is nice.
But I really like the DOF, which adds all the realism. Aside from the water drops of course...
So how did you manage the distribution exactly?
I would like to give you a hug! I love this render ,-)
Fantastic job. Great distribution and DOF.
Definately an image for the PS gallery!
Wow, thanks for the comments, guys :). A couple more notes:
- Yes, I meant good old TG2 when I said Matt's raytracer ;).
- 5 days was a little long, but when you consider all of the complex ray-tracing that had to be done and the fact that I do all of my work on a 1.5 year old Macbook Pro, the time starts to make more sense.
- The distribution was a little complicated. The sphere object wasn't working properly, so I created a sphere in Blender and applied the proper shaders. I then created a distance shader and used that as a color mask on both the droplets and the grass so that I could get a depth mask, and then I created a new camera, slightly higher than the main one and tilted downwards to give a different perspective, and did the same thing. The intersection of the two masks is exactly where in 3D space the droplets should appear, and then I just populate normally.
A beauty, the DOF works a treat here and looks very natural. Definitely one for the official PS gallery. ;)