This is a start of a project I'm working on. I had a grass population but, I started to get Runtime Errors. So, as soon as I find that fine balance between objects and resources I'll do a large render.
That looks really great. Maybe the water is a little bit too rough.
You can try to crop render the image to avoid the errors. That helped me sometimes.
definitely interesting mood. This could become a great scene if you want to continue working on it.
For starters, I'd give the exposure one more bump up.
As for grasses: your surface works quite well, but if you want grass models, populate them with the use of a distance shader, until the individual grass cannot be distinguished any more. Then blend into "just surface". The tricky thing is to match moloring so you won't notice that the grasses are not models anymore.
Frank
I use Blender to get the RGB values from the grass images of the models for color (moloring? :o) Just import the image into Blender's image viewer, open the color picker, and roll the mouse over the color you want.
Here is another render with a sparse grass population. Also, upped the camera exposer. Crop rendered in two sections.
I'm going to add more ground clutter and do a large render.
Hey Marc, I'm curious: is that my alpine mountain pack in the background?
I think the sparse grass vegetation works well. You don't need millions of grass instances at this resolution.
Cheers,
Frank
J'aurai ajouté un peu de brouillard, par endroit. Mais, très faible.
@ Frank: The terrain was created by studying your Alpine Pack and building on what I learned. There are small adjustments of my own but, for the most part it's your setup.
@ bla bla 2:Bonne idée. Je vais essayer.
A nice image - do you have anti-aliasing bloom on, as the water reflection is very 'sharp' to my eye?
I like the way the cloud obscures the top of the mountain. The lighting seems quite well done.
Sweet image! However, to my eye the size of the trees make the mountains in the background appear tiny. This combined with the small scale of the waves on your water give the image a funky feel to it. Besides that The sparse vegetation looks wonderful!
Looks very realistic....but the fallen tree seems a bit pointy and the angle seems unreal. A cool image...way to go!!
Quote from: darthvader1 on April 26, 2010, 08:24:30 PM
Sweet image! However, to my eye the size of the trees make the mountains in the background appear tiny.
This combined with the small scale of the waves on your water give the image a funky feel to it....
This is it ! I didn't commented because here was something not quite right feeling for me . But i couldn't see what .
With other ground textures or placing the mountains further back you can change this quickly . If you want of course , Marc :)
well, what if the "mountains" are really hills? that's how I *saw* the image.
Quote from: FrankB on April 27, 2010, 03:58:16 AM
well, what if the "mountains" are really hills? that's how I *saw* the image.
Yes me too :) But the snow depicts it is not . Thus i said with other ground texture ;)
this is really beutiful, very serene :)
i agree with domdib, the water reflections look too sharp, or noisy,
thats my only real problem with this scene.
Thanks for everyones input.
I had a problem with the water and terrain scale as well so, I will be correcting these issues today.
I may have some questions before I do a final render so, be ready.
Thanks again.
Here is my next image. I think I fixed the scale and water issues.
Suggestions welcome.
I think some patches of bushes and other patches of dry grass would fill out the ecology of the scene better. I have been playing with the gamma slider in the render tab. Increasing this to 2.4 may light the scene a little better.
I like the progress on this one Marc. It will be great when you're ready for a final render!
this is looking good Marc!
@Henry: increasing the gamma to 2.4 is not a good idea. It would just make the render look greyish. Instead, it's better to reduce the contast in the render node, maybe increase the power of the AO helper light (slightly), and render with high GI settings, such as 2/4, and use a render quality of 0.8 or above. This way Marc gets a lot of details in the shadows, which he can fine tune in post.
Yep, the water is much better. My only issue now is with the tree trunk - it looks fine, but from a compositional angle it's a bit too distracting. Good work Marc!
Thanks Frank. I have an image to try the AO settings you suggest myself. The bummer is the increased render time. I've been trying to avoid this.
This may be the last test before the large render.
Comments are welcome.
Go for it!
Great!
the only possible improvement I see concerns the allen log.
In the previous render it was quite obvious and obvious models have to fulfill high standards.
maybe you thought so yourself making it a lot smaller in the last version.
Another option could be to let its end lie under water.
Just an idea.
Besides that, great!
best regards, Jan
Marc, nice progression with your scene here, it is going to turn out great at higher detail. One thing that I would play around with prior to rendering larger would be to lower the camera significantly. I think you have it too far off the ground and it is playing havoc with the perspective and the trees in the foreground.
This image has improved nicely and I'm looking forward to see bigger version.
Looks like I will need to render the project in 4 crops. Here are some of the settings I will be using. If there is an area where I can knock them down a bit to increase render time I would appreciate your input.
These are where I made changes everything else is default.
Render:
Detail 0.8
AA 7
Ray trace objects
GI relative detail 2
GI sample quality 4
GI blur radius 8
Supersample prepass
Catmull-Rom
Contrast 0.2
Camera:
Light exposer 5
Lighting:
Enviro light (default) GI
Enviro light (default) AO 1.25 on surfaces
Sunlight strenth 4.5
Clouds 32 Edge sharpness 60 samples Raytraced shadows enabled
Let me know what you think.
Don't forget to texture the foreground trees, now that your rendering at full size their surface needs to show some "roughness".
Otherwise looking good, looking forward to the final render :)
Richard
This is a 1/4 crop of a 800x500 using the settings in my last post. The the final render will be 1200x750.
Shadows?
Hi Kadri,
I'm using standard shadows however, I will do a test with soft shadows enabled.
Thanks for asking.
This is a 800 x 500 render using the posted settings. I'm not happy with the results.
I think the exposure of the camera is too high. Reducing the gamma may help also.
I agree Henry.
Thank you .
Are you using photo reference for this, Marc? I ask because this is almost too close for comfort not to be based on an image in inkydigit's Jasper National Park thread, check it out from the second image on this page... http://www.naic.edu/~pfreire/canadian_rockies/Jasper_3.html
:o
dandelO,
Yes, I did a simple Google search for nature photographs and found the 4th photo in the Google Images. I clicked on the "see full size image" Fantastic photographs. I figured it would make good sense to look at photos for reference than try to pull a scene out of my can.
I never read inkydigit's Jasper National Park thread however, I'll take a look at it now that you brought it to my attention.
It would take a ton of time to try and make the Terragen image match the photo but, it would be a blast if I wanted to spend that kind of time on it. Perhaps I'll work on-and-off to get it close. Right now I just want to get the lighting correct and add some more ground clutter.
I bet you thought it was a freaky coincidence. ;D
Ha ha, I knew it! It kind of is still a freaky coincidence, if you didn't read the Jasper National Park post! :)
I'm not sure what happened here. Everything looks blown out.
Also, in the water in the foreground you can see a line from putting the 2 crop renders together.
Any suggestions?
Try resetting the lighting, GI, sun, exposure, and gamma to defaults. Then try some 320 x 200 renders adjusting each until it looks good. This may be a result from too much gamma in the render tab settings. Sorry, but I am really guessing. Hopefully FrankB or Tangled Universe will have a better idea. They seem to know the lighting settings to use the best of all of us.
Thank you, Henry.
The sky is definitely blown. I'd suggest lowering the exposure of your camera by a stop or two, because if the highlights go, even reducing the exposure afterwards in the EXR file can't rescue them
EDIT - my mistake, it CAN - I was misled by the way PS6 handles OpenEXR (see http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9769.0)
- whereas underexposing the file and then making a couple of different exposures afterwards through the EXR file and combining them will mean you'll get a better range of tonal values and the sky won't be blown (although you might want *a little* overexposure in the sky).
On the cropping issue, have you seen this thread http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9665.0 ?
Very nice scene.
You could try tone mapping the image to bring back the detail in the sky.
http://photoshoptutorials.ws/photoshop-tutorials/photo-manipulation/layered-hdr-tone-mapping.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping
Very nice. At first, it looks a little noisy.