After 4.5 hours @4x2.6 GHz i may present you: the (yet) unnamed mountain.
My Idea was to try to get a realistic shape of a granite mountain.
The Surface is not done so far and also the metaclouds need to be tweaked a little bit.
I hope i'll get the image done until saturday afternoon.
An ideas to improve this? :)
regards, Goms
edit: argh, wrong board. can maybe some admin move this to the image area.....? :D
sry
(http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/style_emoticons/default/jawdrop.gif)
Great PoV and contrasting colours!
The contrast is from a little bit of manual HDR-mapping.
The original had no contrast in the areas with snow cover.
In the next step i will adjust the coverage of the "icy"-parts on the rock with favor depression and give the rock itself more color variation into a light beige.
What i'm not sure about yet is if i will add some high clouds. I think it would seem a little bit strange compared to reality?
Hi Goms,
I am *very* happy to learn that you are going to participate :)
Here are my thought on how this could be improved: the light blue color on the granite looks wrong. Also it seems that you are using a texture for the granite - it looks a bit washed out. I reckon you would get crsiper result if you make the texture procedurally. Then you could also render at a higher resolution and benefit from that extra details, whereas the texture will look even more washed out.
I think that your recent procedural surface for the micro cracks could be a good texturing component for the granite (although we may not be able to see all the details, and you would probably have to adjust the colors of it somewhat to get that granite look).
However, I had good result in slightly mixing a texture into a predominantly procedurally textured scene. That's something you may want to try.
Also try intersect underlying and favour depressions for the snow coverage.
I love the simple sky with the strong blue gradient and the light cloud - which could probably be a little whiter.
Cheers,
Frank
I'm not sure what a "metacloud" is, but I'd just keyed in "it could be a little whiter" when I got the "further messages while you were writing" warning. I see the "metacloud" as snow driven off the mountain by the wind, and that is probably your intention. I wouldn't add any more clouds in the background as that would detract from the contrast. Looking forward to the finished scene.
(Planetside might wish to add that excellent jawdropper smiley posted by deepdish to their array of smileys.)
John
@Frank: the blue color should be ice on the rocks, but as i wrote i will have to improve it. The favor depression function should give the right results when combined with some reflections. I've tried to use intersect underlying for the snow, but it didn't work very good. To look realistic the patch size needs to be "very" huge, which leads to some problems in combination with smoothing. But i will work something out. ;)
The texture is in fact procedural, but has no displacement yet. I will add some more contrast and color variation as cracks and some strata too.
@John: The Idea of meta-clouds is from this thread: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3691.msg50489#msg50489 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3691.msg50489#msg50489).
And you're right, it should be snow driven from the top. I'll make it brighter and see if i find a seed and a good warper to get a better structure.
Also i want to add a few rocks and maybe a climbing person if i have the time to model it. Next update will probably follow this evening.
Thank for your comments so far!
Is that the merchant from monkey island I see as your avatar here ;D
Yep, Stan. :D
Quote from: Goms on June 23, 2009, 06:33:42 AM
@Frank:...
The texture is in fact procedural, but has no displacement yet.
Hi,
ok, so I thought the granite and light blue color did belong together as a photo texture, hence looked washed out, but I see how it is now.
Thanks,
Frank
I'm just about to render another "preview". The displacement intersection still won't work like i want it to, but i also don't want to use more than one compute terrain node. I will see in around 4 hours. :D
I am really impressed by two things. Mainly this render. It really is fantastic. I agree with Frank about the blue coloring. I have seen real rock formations that are blue, but a lighter color. This color would look good as a component of a marble texture.
The second, less topical, thing is the jaw dropping smilie.
Looking forward to more refinements of this render!
Very nice work, impressive :) Looking forward to see where this goes. Frank already provided you some good pointers.
Personally I'd remove the thin snow which reaches to the top of the mountain. I'd keep it to one snow-border/edge. Just personal preferences, know what it's worth! ;D
I like the deep blue sky and perhaps you could try to keep it also abap (as blue as possible:)) near the horizon, think that would be a tad more realistic.
Also, there are some topics about how to make clouds follow terrain, perhaps you might find it interesting to try.
Good luck, you still have 3 weeks, so hopefully you can improve it even further :)
Quote from: Goms on June 23, 2009, 08:37:37 AM
I'm just about to render another "preview". The displacement intersection still won't work like i want it to, but i also don't want to use more than one compute terrain node. I will see in around 4 hours. :D
I understand why you don't want to use too many compute terrains/normals because it slows down the render, but as a matter of fact if you build up your network "logically" you won't need an extra compute terrain/normal to let the displacement intersection work properly.
Simply put, it often works best if you use those kind of shaders as last in the chain.
My snow and canyon (sand in canyon) use this principle with success.
Martin
Well, i have only until Saturday; Sunday morning i wall leave to Korsika for two weeks. 8)
The Problem is i have to write a 15-20 pages paper about medieval... well, some kind of boring stuff which only is interesting for historians.
The Problem with the compute Terrain node is that i use a intersect underlaying function twice.
One for the icy parts as favor depression, which shall give very exact results, and than one for the displacement intersection, which shall give only bigger snow-fields.
For Terrain-following clouds there is not time, i guess. but i will think about it. ;)
The paper wouldn't be about trade treaties in the Hanselactic League would it? I did one in college about it. :o
@ njeneb: no, its about some "Weistümer" of the region Kurpfalz in Germany from around 1400-1500. The lord came into the Village and had a nice Chat with the Farmers about how they are useed to handle the rights. And somone decided to write this down, so i can read it and write about it. :D
That's esoteric! I think you'll write an interesting paper, judging by your nice render here.
Hooray, update!
For now i deactivated the Clouds to get a reasonable rendertime for a bigger image.
I think i will add some voronoi-structures or maybe a goos texture, but overall the shape and the surface are ok for now.
The Snow will get come more attention tomorrow. :D
What do you think?
Quote from: njeneb on June 23, 2009, 04:26:43 PM
That's esoteric! I think you'll write an interesting paper, judging by your nice render here.
Thanks, i hope my Prof will think similar. :D
The rock is better. I thought the cloud/snow blown off the mountain was a nice touch on the first render.
The terrain is great - one thing that, for me, is making it look a little unrealistic, is that the shadow areas are very light. Do you have the Environmental Light on surfaces up high? Or perhaps it's just the reflections from all the snow?
it will be back. maybe tomorrow, maybe friday.... ;)
@domidb: i think its the soft ambient occlusion i have build in. maybe i will delete this or spend more time on the hdr-afterwork
this has gotta be the most badass mountain picture i've seen on these forums yet ;D
keep up the awesome work
good point Dominic. Goms, yes, rather disable the ambient occlusion here or at least decrease strongly.
The rock surface coloring is looking really good now. Next step of improvement for me would be on the displacements. For now, the whole summit structure looks like a frozen liquid.... hmm, hard to describe. It all kind of "flows" from top to bottom, where I would certainly expect a few outcrops and rocks, more edgy and cracked. Do you know what I mean?
If you can get that going convincingly, I will be deeply impressed and instantaneously want to know from you how it's done ;D
Cheers,
Frank
Heres another one.
I deleted the ambient occlusion and tried to get a more realistic lightning during the hdr-postwork.
Also i tried to get "a few outcrops and rocks, more edgy and cracked". I think i've overdone this a little bit, but when i reduce this displacement 1/3 it should be ok.
The cloud is back, but i still have to figure out a way to get something like this: demoimage (http://www.photoeverywhere.co.uk/west/winterholiday/windy_mountain5647.jpg)
Anyway, when the snow is done at least the terrain-surface is ok so far.
The new lighting looks really better!
I think the outcrops are a bit overdone, but not really that much. 1/3 might be a good guess.
I think it would be really cool when you apply (tilted) strata on the steeper slopes.
Feed the powerfractal which makes the outcrops into a colour adjust, reduce the gamma a bit and then use that as a blendshader for your strata to break them up a bit.
Very good work so far, keep going!
Martin
Yes, agree that the lighting is now more dramatic. I'm not sure whether the outcrops are overdone, except perhaps right at the top (maybe it can be limited by altitude??).
Getting the snow right will be an interesting one - I haven't yet managed to produce very convincing snow, although I've got Tangled Universe's snow pack and haven't used it yet, so maybe that would help?
@Tangled-Universe: The Strata was a good idea. Thanks ;)
Also the Snow has a little displacement offset now. I think i will let it look more icy and "older" with only a few patches of newer snow. But now i'm gonna search for my iced structures first. :D
Then i will have to work on the clouds a little bit...
The snow comes out really well now! :)
I think a ridged noise on the cloud would do the trick. The hard part would be getting the blowing snow cloud's noise to stretch off axis, if you follow me. A white to black image shader should be able to mask the length of the the effect.
Yip, this isn't easy. It seems to be not possible to stretch the noise in y-direction. Maybe i should try a normal cloud attached to the planet itself with a distance shader or whatever...
Very nice, Goms.
small update. :)
the snow is getting too thick and too rough, Goms. The cloud is nice.
Cheers,
Frank
Yep, i have to think about how to handle this. the intersect underlaying function seems to be able to handle only one compute terrain node....
Yeah cool cloud, keep it!
The snow needs some work indeed, there are ways to reduce the roughness and thickness.
I'd start with reducing the offset.
Also, since this looks like a really cold environment I think you can better tone down the glowing white of the snow and make it look a bit cooler (literally). Perhaps it's something you post-worked.
The strata are nearly exactly what I had in mind, great man!
I now have a idea how to fix the Problem with the snow.
I will try to get a blendshader for the ice in the depressed regions out of the displacement shader i use.
Maybe this will work. And then i can choose a bigger patch size and use one layer of icy snow depending on slope and one for newer snow depending on intersect underlying. I will try this in the evening.
Thanks to all btw! :)
Edit: Next update will follow when i'm back from the island in two weeks. :)
Hi Goms, did you have any chance to work further on this one? Looking forward to see your improvements!
Martin