After weeks of toiling with project after project for weeks and months trying to find something that I actually want to create I find myself in a bit of a rutt. There's loads of inspiration of things to create but so many have gotten so far past me that my attempts seem to meager in comparison. (I'm one of those harsh self critics who can't accept trailing the pack unfortunately)
I think I've narrowed my problem down to a problem that seems to crop up in almost every "newbie" post on the forum. A lack of control, we can create things that look very pretty but almost entirely at the behest of Terragens power. When people see my renders I feel almost enclined to say "it wasn't me" but then I do appreciate the amourous "oohs" and "aahs" of an extolerant crowd.
Let me give an example. I saw an amazing photo posted as part of an "inspiration" collection by someone on this forum of beautiful rolling hills and a road sweeping between them. I thought of a brilliant scene and I could see it in my mind but when it came to applying that in TG2 my mind was a vacuous pit of palimpsest.
What I'd really love, and think would be helpful to others in a similar situation, is to know the thought processes of those gifted scribes for turning vivid imagination into stunning technicolour.
for translation into english please request
When I start a new terrain, I have thoughts about what techniques I want to use. This is so I learn new functions of the node structure, or apply something I've dissected from someone else's tgd file. I quick render the landscape from an aerial prospect looking for places which look interesting. Then I move the camera in.
After the camera has been placed, I decide what aspect ratio I use. Since I use the free version, it's always 800 x ? (between 300 and 600 pixels)
The terrain tells me how to shade (color) it. What looks more natural (alien sometimes)? The use of coloring and/ or strata helps determine the vegitation. Would water (longer render) look good? I normally add water.
Last comes the atmosphere. I do like cloudy, rainy days. These are much more difficult to light correctly. Even on clear days there are contrails or some high clouds.
Last comes lighting. Do the clouds get in the suns way, making the landscape too dark? If so, I add a distance shader to the density shader of the the offending cloud layer.
Summary: I sort of have an idea of what I want, but the terrain really determines the final image for me. It's more exploration than forcing the program to do something. There are landscape editors which will allow you to force a landscape. For me it takes the discovery part of the project away.
Copying a photograph in tg2 is definitely the hardest part.
Some scenes allow you to make it in TG2 easily, some others are killers. Usually anything that is related to human influence is hard to do. Roads are a good example. On a flat terrain, yes. along the border of a mountain, no.
Choose your battles, would be my advice.
Hmm. yeah, yeah maybe the thing I've lost is the fun of exploring. These days I tend to hit the random seed button till the camera is above the terrain and run with that ;D I'll have some fun with that I think, I've also never really explored any of the features for terrain. I still have no idea what the distance shader really does to a terrain ::)
I only use the distance shader for population control and clouds. With populations of grass, for example, the density has to be very high close to the camera. In the distance, less density is needed because it blends into the haze. The distance shader can also thin out a population until it merges into a color shader in the distance. This reduces render times.
I do the same as njeneb, except for building the atmospheres before doing surfaces.
Else I would have to tweak the surfaces twice (at least very often).
Volker, so you make the atmosphere, then do the color? I have been tweaking the Global Illumination or Ambient Occlusion. Your way may be easier.
Quote from: PG on August 16, 2009, 05:51:41 PM
What I'd really love, and think would be helpful to others in a similar situation, is to know the thought processes of those gifted scribes for turning vivid imagination into stunning technicolour.
for translation into english please request
Thoughts,..................... What Thoughts???? :P ;D ;)
I usually start with putting together a heightmap in World Machine. It really gives a lot more control over your scene, and you can just "texture" it afterwards. Plus you can think what you want to make first.
Normally I go through a few refe photos as well, trying to decide the mood and lighting beforehand (of course it doesn't always end up like that).
Still perfecting my technique, but so far it's working out well enough. What I've recently been battling is blending of surface layers nicely and trying to get some well-saturated scenes - for some reason most of the time my colors come off a bit bland.
Quote from: tempaccount on August 18, 2009, 03:39:59 AM
... for some reason most of the time my colors come off a bit bland.
A common problem, but I figured - at least for myself - it was due to me wanting to have well lit detail everywhere. In photography, this isn't the case, so why should it in renders? It looks unrealistic and flat to our eyes, so the cure for me was to dare more contrast and increasing exposure (where it fits). Decide whether you want to optimize for sky or for terrain on daylight scenes, not both.
Frank
Quote from: FrankB on August 18, 2009, 03:46:55 AM
A common problem, but I figured - at least for myself - it was due to me wanting to have well lit detail everywhere. In photography, this isn't the case, so why should it in renders? It looks unrealistic and flat to our eyes, so the cure for me was to dare more contrast and increasing exposure (where it fits). Decide whether you want to optimize for sky or for terrain on daylight scenes, not both.
Frank
Ah, thanks for the insight - I've been suspecting the same, but never really could put my finger onto it :p
My latest scene is a bit low-light, so the dynamic was missing - it was tough to get little detail on the scene, while maintaining a sky that is not over-bright and the result was that there was no detail anywhere. I think I'll do some research on how to cast heavy shadows on a scene, so I can maintain some detail and contrast. And add the missing dynamic.
In the rendersettings I usually push up contrast to 1 and lower the Gamma to 1.7 ... this is good for contrast and saturated colours.
contrast at 1 is a little steep for most scenes.
Actually, 0.7 is my max, and only if the focus of the scene is on the sky. Clouds benefit greatly from increased contrast, whereas in scenes that focus on a lot of dense vegetation, you might want to decrease the contrast.
Regards,
Frank
This is interesting - I never thought of altering contrast in render.
Does anyone know what the soft clip setting does?
I sometimes run my renders through Corel Paint X2. The paint program lets me 'fix' issues if they occur. Usually I just resize.
Well I had a go with your suggestions, I focused on clouds as that's my strength. I'm still working on it, I don't really like the left hand side, looks like some weird plasma goo. Lemmie know what you think. :)
Which version of TG2 is this? Or did you use some unusual GI settings?
Matt
I'm using the latest 2.0.3.1, but my detail and GI are a little..emm, high. The GI options are both set to 4 with supersample prepass checked, detail is 1.8, AA is 8, pixel filter is Mitchell Netravali and cloud samples are 6579 with raytracing on and acceleration cache off. Oh yeah and the atmosphere has 62 samples with raytracing, and soft shadows are on too. Took just over 80 hours.
Hi PG ...
I followed this discussion from the beginning...
me too I m waiting for the Inspiration to come ... and it doesn't
NKAID..
PS Good Cloud (it needs work but it's good)
I would be really interested to see if you could notice a difference if you rendered it at 0.8 detail, 1/2 GI, max 1000 cloud samples, ray tracing off in both the atmosphere and cloudlayer.
Quote from: RArcher on August 21, 2009, 11:27:53 AM
I would be really interested to see if you could notice a difference if you rendered it at 0.8 detail, 1/2 GI, max 1000 cloud samples, ray tracing off in both the atmosphere and cloudlayer.
Exactly my thoughts. Especially 1.8 detail. Rendering (sub-?)sub-pixel detail in clouds doesn't sound very useful.
I'd like to add something in general: please stop mentioning cloudsample-levels but use the quality-setting number. Samples change because of different parameters (depth & density primarily). The quality setting is way more informative and really tells you about the expected quality.
Ok I jump in ! ;D
Here is my way :
First, I almost never have an idea before beginning to play TG2.
So, I start with the terrain and try 1 or 2 simple fractal terrain. Then I try to find a nice pov with that simple terrain.
Now that I have this simple start, I create 2 surface layers (one for flat areas and one for vertical areas) and i connect 1 powerfractal on each ones with different colours and displacements to have a "taste" of what the scene might become... No need to be precise there, it is just a start.
Now, I have a starting scene with a colour flavour (if I may speak like that).
All I have to do now is to.... errr... improve the feeling of these colours with atmo.
And, as Volker said, I play with atmo (a lot) and then i go back to my colours to "adjust" them to my atmosphere values.
Then I add some details like stones (yeaaaah) or vegetation or water, etc...
I think there is a point that people don't work enough on : the POV !
I must say that finding a good POV can take me a lot of time...
You understand now, that I don't really have an Inspiration thing before I come on TG2...
Inspiration comes while I am having fun...
So I guess my advice will be : HAVE FUN (and maybe try something you never experiment before, it sometimes gives very good looking renders) ^^
Quote from: Seth on August 21, 2009, 11:52:23 AM
Ok I jump in ! ;D
Here is my way :
First, I almost never have an idea before beginning to play TG2.
So, I start with the terrain and try 1 or 2 simple fractal terrain. Then I try to find a nice pov with that simple terrain.
Now that I have this simple start, I create 2 surface layers (one for flat areas and one for vertical areas) and i connect 1 powerfractal on each ones with different colours and displacements to have a "taste" of what the scene might become... No need to be precise there, it is just a start.
Now, I have a starting scene with a colour flavour (if I may speak like that).
All I have to do now is to.... errr... improve the feeling of these colours with atmo.
And, as Volker said, I play with atmo (a lot) and then i go back to my colours to "adjust" them to my atmosphere values.
Then I add some details like stones (yeaaaah) or vegetation or water, etc...
I think there is a point that people don't work enough on : the POV !
I must say that finding a good POV can take me a lot of time...
You understand now, that I don't really have an Inspiration thing before I come on TG2...
Inspiration comes while I am having fun...
So I guess my advice will be : HAVE FUN (and maybe try something you never experiment before, it sometimes gives very good looking renders) ^^
thanks Seth ...
I will try your advice every time I lunch TG2 ... ;)
Seth's on the same page I am. The terrain 'tells' me what to do.
Well I've rerendered at the settings suggested by Rarcher, seems to just be more blurry and the shadows lack the definition they had before so it looks bizarre. Other than that no different really, other than the fact it took 1 hour instead of 80. I guess increasing GI and soft shadows would fix the blur and shadow issues.
I think that, for me at least, the cloud now looks a bit more natural, precisely because the shadows aren't so defined. And I'd like to see a wider (or deeper) shot. But as has been said many times before, it's your vision of the scene that's important.
I'm with Seth on the POV thing - and I usually have multiple cameras in a scene to give me a choice.
Don't ever enable ray traced shadows in atmosphere or clouds unless you know what it does ;) Seriously, it's not worth it until you find that you need it.
Ray traced shadows in atmosphere or clouds are only needed if you have a hard surface (e.g. a terrain or an object) casting a shadow into a part of the atmosphere or cloud that you will be able to see. In most situations this doesn't happen.
Apart from obvious situations where shadows from hard surfaces would be present (e.g. a cloud sitting low in a valley with terrain casting a shadow onto it), you will probably also need it if your sun dips below a mountain and you're looking towards the sun. That's because the mountain needs to cast a shadow into the atmosphere to stop the atmosphere glowing around the sun direction. (The sun showing through the mountains is not a bug, it's just the lack of correct shadows.)
That settings should probably be renamed to "receive shadows from surfaces".
Matt
I would like to have a sculpt terrain tool It wood be nice to create soom odd impossible terrain lol!
Terragns atmosphere and lighting you can do pretty much whatever you want The colours you can produce and mix is just amazing
I work differently from Seth and njeneb. I sometimes get to do commissioned work, which is bound by strict rules (like an exact topography, and placement of objects). So I make a lot of masks first, for terrain, vegetation, etc. Then find the best angle, render a rough preview for the client, then work it out with increasing detail and complexity. Which sometimes takes weeks!
The fun renders grow out of curiosity, testing behaviors of nodes, trying to achieve more difficult things to realize in TG (such as breakers and waterfalls, lately). Just trying to push my own limits or trying out ideas, and from a simple test a nice landscape grows.
oh yes, if you do commissioned work, you can't do the same way I do ^^
but, well... that's different inspiration i think :)
Have you and are you allowed to share the commissioned projects? I'm sure they would be interesting.
Like Seth I start with a blank page, and look for something interesting in the default Power Fractal. So I'm swinging that camera around from the start to find a pov that has potential, and then I start tweaking scales, displacements, noise flavours. And as your messing around like this a scene gradually takes form in your mind. It's at this point that I may recall a photo or an inspirational Matte work I've recently seen, and that may inform my further progress with the scene.
Wetbannana alluded to a tool for sculpting terrains. I have recently begun to use a Power Fractal as a Blend by Shader mask on the main Power Fractal terrain to sculpt that terrain. That's how I got that weird Stupa-like peak that features in my latest "Mangas Coloradas" scene.
So, the Zen, open mind approach works best for me.
John
@njeneb: well, the creek (the one that won, you know) was a commissioned work, due to be published in a book. I had another one in the forums; medieval Zutphen. But I'm a bit careful when the client hasn't published yet.