Hi All,
This image was created using a terrain created by WM2.0 as a base. Trees- and stone-distribution were determined using WM2.0 generated masks.
Models were from Xfrog, MrLamppost (1 bush) and NWDA.
Clouds were inspired by a clip from Frank, thanks! :)
The rubble/stone-bed is from NWDA as well.
Rendersettings: detail 0.9, AA8(MN) and GI 1/3.
A link to 2 high-res versions and breakdown-shots of the process will follow below.
I hope you enjoy this as much as I did creating it :)
Cheers,
Martin
Original res here: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/010/e/1/Yosemite_Valley_by_Tangled_Universe.jpg (http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/010/e/1/Yosemite_Valley_by_Tangled_Universe.jpg)
Frank was also so kind for me to render a higher res version for me, with a slightly different POV, thanks a bunch! :)
Check out the details here ;D
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/010/9/a/Yosemite_Valley___HQ_by_Tangled_Universe.jpg (http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/010/9/a/Yosemite_Valley___HQ_by_Tangled_Universe.jpg)
wow, the final final is amazing Martin!!!
Martin , before i posted in envy i searched for a flaw in your image . Now that i did find one i am relieved and can post .
There is a exploded fake stone on the bottom left (i hope it is) ;D
Seriously , this is a great render Martin ;D
Kadri.
That's really a great image, Martin (although I personally prefer more atmospheric images). There's one thing that bothers me though; there's a certain regularity in the distant trees (the structure of each tree is more or less repetitive, if you get my point). Calling it a carpet would not be very nice, but that's the term that springs to my mind. Perhaps another pop (another tree version) would be good. But, great image!
---Dune
Beautiful. The grass is fantastic.
- Terje
Thanks all so far :)
Quote from: Dune on January 10, 2010, 11:49:54 AM
That's really a great image, Martin (although I personally prefer more atmospheric images). There's one thing that bothers me though; there's a certain regularity in the distant trees (the structure of each tree is more or less repetitive, if you get my point). Calling it a carpet would not be very nice, but that's the term that springs to my mind. Perhaps another pop (another tree version) would be good. But, great image!
---Dune
I definitely see what you mean and I tried to avoid that. There are 3 tree-pops and I wanted them 1) more clumped instead of randomly distributed 2) not too dense because of overlap
I solved both using a powerfractal for 2 of the pops. The unlucky result is that there's a kind of diagonal repetition because of the branches which is even enhanced by the anti-aliasing and mainly just that slight lack of breakup by the 3rd pop which I didn't blend.
I'm planning on using tgd for more images and then I'll rty to pay more attention to it.
Thanks Ulco :)
Martin
I think the tree population is fine. The trees are a little too bright green, but this may be because of the species.
Good work.
Beautiful scene. I especially like the waterside stones and the grass beyond. After it being pointed out I do see a (to my eyes) certain weave pattern in some of the mid and distant tree branches. Reseeding the distribution might eradicate it, though it's always going to be inevitable to some degree in 3d graphics where the source tree numbers are limited (of course in nature every one is different).
John
They are superb - love the stones, detain on the mountains and the lighting - the grass is excellent, as are the trees, but I'd prefer to see some red creep into that ultra-green of the pines - make it more like the grass colour, or perhaps darker?
STUNNING!.
Marc
the colours seem a bit strange, like very contrasted and saturated. The green of the trees and the water particulary look unrealistic to me (on my screen)
i think the thing that appeals to me the most about this image is those stones. it's almost like i can just feel myself actually walking in them. trees seem a bit to single colored. like the leaves, i mean, seem almost just all pure green. maybe some variations in hue and saturation in the leaves would have been a nice touch. but other than that, it's pretty darn convincing to me.
I agree about the saturation.
Regards,
Terje
love the scene, agree about the colour/saturation too, though this could be a simulated film stock.
Guys Ok this is subjective but come on !
Try putting this on a photo site . I think nearly no one would think that this is 3d .
You are picking things up because you know it is 3d . I have seen 2 times more saturated photos or weird ones .
And i was going to put some links here. But there is no need to be to be more royalist than the king :)
Cheers.
Kadri.
hehehe
I guess that Martin wouldn't appreciate any hypocrit comments from me (or from anyone), so I always post honest critics ;)
If it is an artistic choice, I don't see anything to say but as Martin usually never does high contrasted and satured renders, I think it migt be a good idea to write that I truely find it "oversaturated" on my screen ;D
oh and i just re-calibrated my screen to check if it didn't come from here and it looks the same as before.
Great realism Martin - I love the grass populations.
I think I agree a little with those who find the tree species unusually bright and saturated - I guess the model could be toned down quite easily though.
The one *tiny* fly in the ointment is that, given the coverage of the grass pops, the background grass shader coverage looks a little sparse to me.
Look forward to seeing more details on this.
Well, when I use Mr.Lamppost's grasses, everyone points out that they are 'really green'. I think this is a really well done render. But that was the only thing which I found to be an issue. If I had done this, I would have been very happy with it.
this is a very cool scene martin!
great work all round i love the colours though i think its a little dark.
i Ran it quickly through PS I hope you don't mind just to brighten it up and bring out more of the exquisite detail ;)
(http://i48.tinypic.com/33cudrb.jpg)
and a sharper version
(http://i45.tinypic.com/2lxusmx.jpg)
The sharper version seems better. I would like to see if and what martin may try.
Hi Martin,
What an awesome and beautiful render..and an excellent piece of work.
One small quibble; the shade of green on the trees takes away somewhat from the realism for me.
If you feel the same way, you might consider taking it into Photoshop..or wwhatever your image-enhancing program..and reduce the saturation just a tad- certainly not much at all and apply two 25% doses of unsharp mask. Rather like the result below.
I feel like I've been artistically and technically fed by yours and njeneb's renders.
Linda
First of all, I think the bottom third is an absolute stunner. The rocks are superb. The trees - their distribution, similarity and color uniformity - do take something away from the entire picture, but it's still beautiful. A yes, I agree, post this one on a photo sharing site and nobody would suspect it's computer generated. 8)
A couple of populations of less than healthy trees would go a long way, IMHO.
very good render and the cobble stones together with grass are stunning. I second the color critique, for my taste the trees and the sky are to saturated. I think you probably would find something like that on broad leaves, but not on pine/fir trees. Even if they grow out there fresh branches, it´s usually only the tips that are so colorful.
But if i was an artistique choice, then it is up to you where you want to go!
Great work!
I think this is a great image. It looks very natural but I'd like to see this one with a less saturated texture on the fir trees. To me this is the only thing that makes it look less real. Maybe a little color variation in the rock texture would be fine. The rest is fantastic!
Ah yes - I like Linda's post-pro best. Still an awesome pic!
Great work Martin. As others have said the colours are definitely too saturated to my tastes. The image itself and the setup is fantastic. I really like the clouds as well.
Here would be my post-pro attempt.
Thank you all for the extensive crits and feedback :) How one image can lead to such an interesting discussion with a variety of solutions, I really like this :)
Thank you Banana(?), Linda and Ryan for posting your suggestions :)
I find Linda's suggestion the most appealing so far. I don't like post-sharpening images, I barely do that.
Ryan, I always like your photographic approach for postworking TG2 work, but I think the one you suggested has a too much sepia-look.
Looks good, definitely, but also not what I had in mind or was aiming for.
During development of this scene I aimed for a more saturated look, so basically this was intentional.
For anyone thinking I upped the saturation of my textures: I didn't ;)
I basically increased the diffuse color of the textures and gave them some translucency and reflectivity.
If I look at the renders which come along with the Xfrog-documentation of the models; these were as even saturated, so one might also say that the species I used in these images have colorful leafs/needles and are meant to look this way.
Of course, one can debate about this in both technical and artistic ways and neither of them will be wrong.
In retrospect it might have been a bit too much, so after seeing some suggestions I have attempted a little color-correction myself.
I kept some of the saturation because I just simply like it this time :P
I'll "abuse" this tgd for rendering some more POV's and will see how I approach colors then.
@Dombib: it's hard to really asses the coverage of the foreground grasses (because of perspective) and thereby compare them with the grasses in the background. Especially when these are mostly covered by trees. I hope you can see better now that the coverage is very similar to the eye. In technical terms, by slope restriction, the coverage of the background-grass is even more than the actual grass-models.
I've made 3 small renders showing the breakdown of the image and one crop of a 3000px image of the upper right, showing the displacements somewhat closer up, see 2 posts below.
Thank you all so far :)
Cheers,
Martin
A crop from a 3000+ px render showing some of the displacements and fake-grass shader.
The fake grass shader uses intersect underlying as a base, which also has the darkest green color.
On top are 2 other colors layered, all with 5 degrees less slope than its parent.
3 renders showing the buildup of the scene:
I started with a very very simple WM2 generated terrain, kindly provided by Frank which started with this idea :)
The POV for this image is straight from the tgd he sent me.
In the second image you can see the fractal detail added, some additional displacements as well as fake grasses and fake stones rubble.
The rubble is from the Fake Stone Bed & Hero Rock Pack from NWDA.
The third image shows the addition of water and a "double-distance-restricted" clouds.
The clouds are restricted from the first couple of 1000m away from the camera, then "allowed" for the second couple of 1000m and then restricted for the rest of the distance up to the horizon.
This way I created a narrow band of clouds which will save lots of rendertime because the rasteriser would otherwise render them first and then the terrain, all up to the horizon.
THIS 3 image composiiton is telling a long story about how TG2 can turn shit into gold, if in the hands of a savvy artist :)
It is absolutely amazing - and I mean it - how this app can keep adding and adding details until the result becomes barely distinguishable from a photo. Thanks for putting this together, Martin!
Regards;
Frank
the render without water looks really good, with all those fake stones !
I agree with Seth, The stone are quite possibly my favorite part of the image :)
Very interesting - look forward to seeing more of this sort of thing at NWDA.
QuoteA crop from a 3000+ px render showing some of the displacements and fake-grass shader.
The fake grass shader uses intersect underlying as a base, which also has the darkest green color.
On top are 2 other colors layered, all with 5 degrees less slope than its parent.
With all due respect, Martin, would you really need such a sophisticated setup for the (distant) grass? It will probably take render time/memory, and in this crop I don't really see an improvement over 'ordinary' mix of some colors and slope restriction. Correct me if I see this wrong!
---Dune
Quote from: Dune on January 12, 2010, 03:30:47 AM
QuoteA crop from a 3000+ px render showing some of the displacements and fake-grass shader.
The fake grass shader uses intersect underlying as a base, which also has the darkest green color.
On top are 2 other colors layered, all with 5 degrees less slope than its parent.
With all due respect, Martin, would you really need such a sophisticated setup for the (distant) grass? It will probably take render time/memory, and in this crop I don't really see an improvement over 'ordinary' mix of some colors and slope restriction. Correct me if I see this wrong!
---Dune
I'll make some crops to show how it looks as a single, double and complete layer and then you can see for yourself. I think it makes a difference and I like the way it looks, even though you can't see it easily :) and by the way, it's just one single surface layer with 2 childs, not sophisticated at all. The 2 extra layers of color-variation at different slopes barely costs extra rendertime as well.
The displacement intersection of the base-layer is more render-expensive, but if you wish I can also show you the non displaced intersected vs displaced intersected.
When using this terrain/tgd for other POV's it is quite likely that it is more exposed and then it is always nice to have this ready to go, even though it takes very little time to set up.
You must also not miss that I'm not only trying to show an image, but also a way of using WM2 generated terrains as a base and then to show how easy you can make something nice of it with TG2-only-shading.
Wow - that's some amazing instruction right there - very inspiring, dude
Quote from: EoinArmstrong on January 12, 2010, 05:27:55 AM
Wow - that's some amazing instruction right there - very inspiring, dude
Thank you, you're welcome :)
I'm interested as well in learning some of your WM-generated terrains some time ;D
It would be interesting to compare the non-displaced intersected with the displaced, to see the difference. Do you regard it as more realistic?
Quote from: domdib on January 12, 2010, 06:02:48 AM
It would be interesting to compare the non-displaced intersected with the displaced, to see the difference. Do you regard it as more realistic?
Of course I do, but do you? ;)
What do you think how displacement intersection would differ in look compared to a flat surface layer?
Thanks Martin, I'll give your procedure a go. Sounds good. I'd be very interested to see the differences. And of course, if you travel around for different POV's you might encounter an area where it really makes a difference.
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on January 12, 2010, 06:05:21 AM
Of course I do, but do you? ;)
What do you think how displacement intersection would differ in look compared to a flat surface layer?
I'm not sure - are you just teasing here? Go on, show us the difference!
Martin, the explanation you have given is great. Thank you for sharing it!
Quote from: domdib on January 12, 2010, 08:13:38 AM
I'm not sure - are you just teasing here? Go on, show us the difference!
I'm teasing as well indeed :) I was also curious to see if you'd know the difference of the result on forehand.
There are quite some examples already which show the nice-ness of displacement intersection, hence the latest work of Dune for example.
Displacement intersection allows to create smooth patches of surface layer on top of rough terrain, while normal surface layers would be as rough as the underlying terrain and would exactly follow it. Displacement intersection doesn't and "overspans" negatively displaced parts which gives smoother results.
If you're not convinced by this principle and in the application in my image, then I could show you the difference of course, no problem :)
Ah, I get it. I can see how, for snow, for example, or indeed most surface shaders that aren't displacement-based, it would be important. Thanks!
The evolutions here are so inspiring ...you are a deliverer of pure enthusiasm!
Hi Domdib,
Here's a small comparison between using a regular surface layer and a displacement intersected surfacelayer.
[attachimg=#]
IMO the version with displacement intersection enabled looks much more realistic. On some parts the grass-layer creeps over rocks where the flat layer does not.
It also gives a stronger idea that the slope restriction is more randomized, (edit) because on some slopes the flat layer has coverage and the intersected does not. (/edit)
Cheers,
Martin
TU, I would agree with your assessment. While I didn't see much of a difference in your earlier renders I can clearly see that intersect underlying definitely benefits the quality of the scene. Thank you for showing us.
Yes, it does look more realistic. Is it tricky to get the settings right?
P.S. It's Domdib :)
Quote from: domdib on January 13, 2010, 05:41:45 PM
Yes, it does look more realistic. Is it tricky to get the settings right?
P.S. It's Domdib :)
Oops sorry, have corrected that ;D
The settings, if its tricky, yes and no. It's tricky to get a hang of the settings, but I've found a ratio between the settings which works in the majority of cases.
So knowing that, it's quite easy to set up. The whole grass-surface took me around half an hour to set up and test this way. If I had to figure it out first I probably would have used a non intersected surfacelayer, since I spent quite some time on finding out the know how.
Thanks for showing the difference, Martin. I'm convinced.
Quick question - you mention Double-distance restricted clouds earlier on. How is that done?
not sure if that's how Martin has done it, but if you have two distance shaders: one goes from black to white, the other from white to black, and multiply the two, then you get a ring where the two white overlap. This way you can mask out near clouds and far clouds at the same time.
But again, not sure Martin has done this nor even whether that's what you were interested in :D
That IS what I was interested in, but I've tried fiddling with it (I assume by "Multiply" you mean a "Multiply colour" node), and although at one point I had what seemed to be a ring displaying for the density fractal, the actual render produced clouds that were a completely uniform layer. Any chance of a node shot?
Hi Dominic, just download the planet and rings pack (it's free). There you can see it in action :)
http://store.nwdanet.com/terragen2store/6-terragen-2-presets/11-celestial/27-class-m-planets-and-planetary-rings-pack.html
Cheers,
Frank
Ok, thanks!
Aargh! Doesn't seem to work with clouds - at least I can't make it, even though the density fractal window looks as if it's playing ball. I hope Martin will chip in with his thoughts...
Hi Domdib,
I've made an example to show how the restriction works and have attached the .tgd-file for it.
[attach=#]
Hope this will be clear :)
Cheers,
Martin
That's great! Many thanks, Martin.
Martin you should consider to officially declare this a tutorial thread. For anything. ;)