This is the Stone Age farm that Henry had built, along with some other things I made myself. I have spent all day figuring out why it came out so bland, no shadows, terrible... what, no shadows... I accidentally checked off 'do shadows', and never noticed it. This is the one WITH shadows, and it turned out quite nicely, although just a test for the Roman bridge actually (which of course wouldn't fit into a Stone Age landscape, but nor would the haystack perhaps).
---Dune
I don't really bother that the roman bridge doesn't fit the scene, or the haystack. This looks very good and that's what counts most for me :)
Which model did you use at the shores? Looks very convincing!
Great atmosphere as well.
Cheers,
Martin
these "constructed" scenes are really nice. I've got to try something like this too some day.
Cheers Ulco
The bridge and the haystack don't look out of place in my opinion, nice scene!
Very nicely lit, and kudos to Henry for the farm.
Ulco, you took my duck and made a swan. 8)
Very nice render. I would suggest a coracle or a raft instead of the bridge. If they had cows, there would have been haystacks.
@Martin: They are one type of reed I made, a bunch of 100 or so stems actually. The idea was to give them some more color variation, but I just remembered I renamed the node, so it missed its color projection, and they turned out a little single-colored. I'll post an update later.
@Henry: thanks again, but what is a coracle? They'd had have cows, I'll drop some.
I just figured I might use this scene to produce several moods: spring, fall, winter..... back to work again.
---Dune
A coracle is a shallow draft type of boat. It looks like a bowl. The frames were often made from willow and they had animal skins sewn onto them. I heard they tip over easily, but don't sink.
Aha, I know these 'boats', typically prehistoric. Well, I added a 'hollowed tree canoe' in this update. But i's an idea to make one, not too hard in XFrog.
Anyway, here's an update, now with more (but subtle) color variation in the reeds, and some 'old' cows. I worked all day to make this scene into a winter scene, which is now rendering. With ice crusts along the creek banks! Wait and see....
---Dune
This is a very cool image.
Marc
The cows look very good. I am getting ready to build another longhouse now.
Dune i love this scene . Especially the first one.
In the second one the grass (vegetation) looks for me a little out of place .
Because of color ( green ) , luminosity or such i don't know .
Kadri.
agree with kadri...very nice!
Well, the grass are reeds, so 1-1.5 meters high. I'll have another look at the colors. In fact another Fall update is running. This one here is the Winter variant. Hopefully more to follow.... like Spring and Summer.
---Dune
It looks quite cold. I think you have done a great job with the texturing of my 'duck' building.
@Henry: the texturing is really quite simple. Just some extra fractals added. The building is what is important!
Excellent job, I like the winter picture a lot, looks very genuine :)
I like the last one :)
Kadri.
Another one is cooking, where I raised the water level and made it murky. And now a problem arises as you can see. The shadows cast into the murk are grainy. I know it's probably because the level of detail underwater is internally decreased to save rendertime, but it's not nice. How to overcome this? Higher detail, I'll try that. Otherwise I'll have to find another way; perhaps put a thin cloud layer just under water....
I like the winter scene too!
Try using ambient occlusion. It softens up the shadows. It also allows the control over more of the lighting effects.
not sure this is good advice, Henry. AO is really only helpful to increase the lightness of shadows, but not for adding detail. Also AO has a global effect, not only for under water, so it can spoil the lighting for the rest of your scene. AO needs to be used with caution, and ideally is not necessary at all (rather increase exposure and add GI sample quality).
Cheers,
Frank
It will help with the rough shadows. The only other way I can think of is to use soft shadows with a detail sample setting of 27. For me 27 seems to work well without increasing render time drastically.
But you are right. If ambient occlusion is not used correctly, it washes everything out, and can cause the image to be colored weirdly.
@ Henry: I'll check your idea out. In the meantime a hazy Spring version has arrived, with the waters still a bit high, and some wind coming up... I wish we could bend the vegetation in strong winds ???
---Dune
Very nice one! I like the spring version most of these.
The spring version seems to have the best lighting. Looks quite good. I would have grouped the cows, they tend to have buddies and only face one direction in strong winds. (They space themselves apart in strong winds; the gas ;D )
So I open up the Winter scene and I am blown away. Then I see the Spring scene on the next page. That's even better (and sure, very different)! I love 'em both. Would make a great picture series. All four seasons, side by side, framed on the wall. Really, really nice. How Terragen does not get more exposure with output like this is beyond me.
I can't get enough of this scene, and produced another Fall version, with a sort of Rembrandt-like lighting (only a sort of). Right now another one is rendering where the creeks are almost dried up. High summer (or the end of times). I'll make a nice blend-over thing in Flash, and put it up on my site later on. With all earlier version slightly improved.
---Dune
These renderings are really nice. I know what you mean working with a good setup trying different POVs ...keep on!
I like the last one a lot, as you said, feels just like a painting. :)
I love the series - Spring is my favorite, it has the most appealing lighting. A very nice mood. Winter is pretty cool too. But man is this a flat landscape! Like the salt flats in Nevada or Utah, hehe.
For the grainy shadows in the water, do you have Soft Shadows enabled? If so, try increasing samples very high and do a crop render to see if this helps (e.g. try samples of 30 or something). If it does help you can tune the setting to try to achieve acceptable render time and quality. If not, then you may be right that it is a limit of the underwater detail rendering, which would only be solved by very high detail settings (e.g. 2 or 3!), which is probably not practical.
- Oshyan
Very nice! I expecially like the winter version..
i like the winter version the most, the frozen ice/ melting ice/ water is impressive.
Thanks for your comments, all. I have made some more versions; see here: www.ulco-art.nl/digital.html (http://www.ulco-art.nl/digital.html) (Dutch, I'm afraid). These overflows make them especially nice.
---Dune
real nice slideshow Ulco! (echt mooie!)
Echt mooi.
oops!...its been a long time, and my Dutch was very minimal!
I like this site you made Ulco. The images are great.
The additional renders are all very nice. The last one offers an interesting perspective and the atmosphere is always so well set up.
One last render then. Then I'm fed up with this sequence. I'm getting deeply into modeling, so I haven't posted much lately. One of my own Stone Age farms is in this last render, replacing the one Henry was so kind to work on. And I added a dilapadated tree.
---Dune
Looks really good. I wish my models had worked out better. I just could not seem to grasp what you were looking for. Lightwave Modeler is far superior to Blender, it was better in 1990 when it first came out.