Another picture from my current experiments in mountains. I'm pretty happy with the shaders in this one, not perfectly happy with the forest:
Perhaps it's the scale of the trees that makes you not perfectly happy with them. I think they're too big. The rest looks fine to me.
Yes, shrinking the trees a little would improve the sense of scale - and perhaps a grass population in the near foreground would be nice.
Maybe using the paint shader to make a creek or small stream in the valley's center. If it's the top (Bottom) layer, it should mask out the trees. The trees are too big, and adding another type, like the birch would help break up the uniformity.
I do like the shader work. The mountain sides are great.
Hi
WOW the mountain-Shader has great colors!
The trees are a bit to uniform.
ciao
Naoo
New version, I've added a river as was suggested, and modified the tree distribution to be less uniform. Also minor changes almost everywhere else. Enjoy:
nice, but I would say that the trees are way to big for the scene.
Indeed, they are. Scaled up considerably. I didn't want a billion triangles, so I tried with fewer trees. :-)
I've also planned to set up some closer shots. Here's the first one. I added a ruin for that, to have something to see. It's the same scene, shot from what would be the lower right in the above shots. This one just finished rendering, no post-processing done. And yes, I just noticed that the ruin is hovering above the terrain. :-)
These both are great. I would have used smaller trees no matter the pixel/polygon count. Both are worth the time to render.
I also think your PC can handle the additional instances. As for the ruin, it might be haunted ;)
Here's the most recent shot. I fixed the ruins, added mud to the river and a fake stones shader. Unfortunately, I get the dreaded exploded stones. I'm now working on solving that issue.
Hi, I think this is coming on nicely... have you thought about adding some more grass and ground cover populations in the foreground? It would add some realism to the scene. Also are you distributing the fake stones with a mask, if so is the blend as density ticked? I have heard that this can cause exploded stones.
Simon.
I think the clouds need to be more diffuse. The stratus (highest) layer is not bad. The lower level look cartoonish. The trees have a nice size to them. At the top of the forum is a sticky from Frank about Fantasy Cloud Tech Pack. They are free from the NWDA site. The pack may give you some help using shaders of all sorts. It did me.
I think the grass and mountain shaders are good, but I would add a couple of different grass objects to make the landscape look more realistic.
Thanks for the feedback.
I've fixed the exploding stones, added a little more ground cover and improved the clouds. I'll post the new render when it's done, this time I'm going to do a highres one and that takes about 7 hours to render, I guess (last one took 6 and I've since added 2 more populations for the ground cover).
This is starting to become my most complicated scene so far. But I really like it.
Here's the latest shot, render time just over 7 hours, from the original perspective again:
Looks good. I have seen the shear effect on the mountain top before. (Top left corner) What causes it? If used correctly it can be a feature, but most of the time it's not.
Yes, I only noticed that in the final render. It's not intentional. It won't be visible from the other perspective, so I've left it in for now, but if I continue work on this scene, I'll try to find out what causes it.
Is there a way to get TG2 to display fractals (terrain power fractal, etc.) at a specific location? Then I could try to find out what causes it, otherwise it'll be a lot of "disable this, render, check if it changes anything" work. And I had enough of that with getting the tree populations set up in an acceptable way. :-(
Here's the second viewpoint again. I'm quite happy with that, but still looking for feedback. I know the clouds can be improved, but aside from that - what do you think I need to work on?
This is on the wonderful cusp of almost real and yet CG. Good work.
You ask what you need to work on - well, it depends what you're trying to achieve. If you are going for "full-on" realism, then most things in your scene could be tweaked - I've been working on a file for over a month for the NWDA competition, and I'm still tweaking my grass shaders, for example; and because you have quite a close foreground, you could think about that too, and perhaps consider adding a grass population. But if you are trying to achieve a scene that you would like to look at, then you may not want to go to those lengths. As calico says, you have a scene that has both realistic elements (the rocks are good) and a definite CG feel too.
Incidentally, you wonder about confining fractal effects to specific regions - that can be done, usually by density or blending shaders - do a search on blending shaders.
I think the POV is wonderful, for me the lighting could be more dramatic, the image looks a bit flat because everything is lit very much the same everywhere.