It's been very hot here lately and I'm dreaming of snow! Trying out the Alpine Fractal. Any suggestions welcome.
I think I would make the lower clouds thicker with sharper edge detail. Turning on ray traced shadows would help to. Seth or Frank may have more input, it's a real good image.
Where would I turn on ray tracing, in the clouds or in the atmosphere? I've got two cloud layers, cumulus and cirrus.
You would turn on the ray tracing in your cumulus cloud layer. I always have liked the alpine fractal but due to a slow computer I don't use it very much; keep going, this is a good start!
The way the snow distributes over this is very nice. Shows up the forms well.
The cumulus layer, low clouds on the mountain slopes. You may also try a second snow layer, add a compute normal between the first snow surface. In the extras tab, enable intersect underlaying. Switch the favor depressions to favor heights. A slight luminosity on the color should bring the snow to look more white.
Or add a very fine fractal with little (very) white and much black, to create some sparkles in the snow. I don't agree about the clouds. To me they look like haze remnants coming from the valleys and are a nice offset against the harshness of the rock. I would add something to give this scene size, such as a hot air balloon (if you can find one, or fake one with a box and a sphere) close over the snow (with shadow).
I'm currently playing with Alpines too at the moment, and would be interested in your settings, as mine seem a tad too steep. For me, the snow could be a little brighter - some good suggestions above, and you could also play with putting a little blue in the shader.
Classical but succeeded!
Thanks for the ideas. I tried to brighten it up some. I couldn't tell any difference in the ray tracing in the clouds, might be the angle of the sun isn't right to make rays? Also tried the second snow layer with the compute normal but the render time went way up on the quick render so I didn't try it on the full. I like the idea of the balloon but couldn't find one (except expensive ones) but I found a cool glider at sharecg.com. I added the textures in Cheetah3d. I would like the canopy to be more reflective. Actually I considered making a completely clear canopy but the only problem is the glider doesn't have anyone in the cockpit! Maybe I can figure that out sometime. For the cumulus clouds I just increased edge sharpness from 5 to 15, I like them better.
Although your plane is pretty big I still don't have troubles imagining the scales of your scene, so that's good then.
The reason why you barely see difference in raytraced or non-raytraced clouds is because there barely aren't shadows cast on them.
Rule of thumb regarding raytracing atmosphere/clouds: ONLY use it when shadows are being cast into (atmo) or onto (clouds) it. Tadaa! :)
Do a full render. See how it looks at 400 x 200. Next thing I might try is a sunset render. The sun reflecting off the glider would look cool.
I really like the distribution of the snow in the foreground, but if you look at the background, most of the detail is lost. So I figure if you change the snow distribution just slightly, so that a little more of the rock shows up, it would look better in the overal picture.
I would decrease the glider's size and hang it so that it's shadow falls on a smooth piece of snow (just below it's right wing, or so). It would not be as obtrusive, but you'll see it and it enhances the size of the mountains greatly.