Since I'm currently on break from school I have a lot of time on my hands. I've decided to try and make a scene based off of the view from my parents house while making it as realistic as possible. This image is the fourth one I've come up with so far the process is coming along nicely. More to follow!
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Looking very good.
Looks like a photographic picture!
How long to render this ?
nice photo, i mean render. ;)
looks incredibly good, trees in the foreground look quite realistic
yes tell us how long it took to render, & render setting info too,
very very good...well done!
Very nice!
Excellent realism ...collectively, all elements of your scene deliver very true-to-life results.
Love the colour range in this, the greens and browns are very natural. Nice one, DV! :)
Wow, very nice. This must have taken awhile to render.
Sweetly done. I always thought a competition entitled "View from my window" would be cool and this would be a great entry.
Only crits (not really crits as such) would be to extend the trees further into the background as you can see their outer limit at the moment and to "maybe" soften the foreground fog/cloud layer a bit.
Great work, what was the render time/machine spec?
Cheers
Richard
Looking nice. Curious about render specs as well.
James
Thanks everybody! I've extended the trees so the edge isn't as visible and I'm also working on the low level clouds, getting them right is going to be tricky.
Render time: just over 6 hours
Detail: 1
AA: 6 (max samples)
GI: 2/2
My machine has an I5 2.5 Ghz processor and 8 gigs of ram. It's rather nice in the winter since it keeps my lap nice and warm ;D
Great view indeed! Interesting render details. I would say with 'only' objects in front detail of 1 is rather high and a higher AA would be preferred. But your settings seem to work well here. What if you would do this with detail 0.8 and AA 8 or 16?
This one is really a very realistic one. Very good composition all over.
Hi, I agree this is a very good render, quite realistic!
If I may have one critique: the foreground clouds are too dense. I think that so close to the camera, the clouds would appear softer and less dense.
Other than that, love it :)
Cheers,
Frank
top notch!
That looks very good!
Quote from: FrankB on December 20, 2011, 04:21:58 AM
Hi, I agree this is a very good render, quite realistic!
If I may have one critique: the foreground clouds are too dense. I think that so close to the camera, the clouds would appear softer and less dense.
Other than that, love it :)
I'm with Frank on this one.
Looking forward to see your next version!
Cheers,
Martin
Very nice scene!! It's very realistic, I like how you made the ground and trees:)
Which models have you used? How many tree models are there?
Excellent work.
Wish the view from my parents was that picturesque!
Looking forward to seeing how far you can push this.
Chris
Very realistic indeed! Awesome!
Though the fog/clouds could be a little less denser near the camera.
Here's the final version (maybe)! I've added several high altitude cloud layers to give the image some more depth as well as thinning out the fog as was suggested. I also added some slight DOF, it isn't technically realistic but I like the effect. This has been a lot of fun to do since I grew up seeing this view just about every day. Hopefully you all enjoy the result as much as I do.
@ Icegrip: I have eight populations. Three x-frog medium grand fir, x-frog one small grand fir, one Dandel0 larch tree, one NWDA bush, and two winter trees from MGebhart. All of the models except the bush can be found for free somewhere here on the forums. I think the total was somewhere north of 2 million object instances for this scene.
http://gannaingh32.deviantart.com/art/Realism-Test-275687719
Excellent result! The thinner mist makes it even more realistic.
superb!
Perfect, I have no crits!
Often there is a difficulty with getting models tonality to match the landscape but you've got it spot on. The dead trees are a good trick to break up the forest too.
Five stars as they say in that other place! lol
Richard
Superb end result! It only seems a bit noisy to me. Maybe more AA? What was it set at?
- Oshyan
I had to grab a copy of this one. Very awesome! 8)
Very nice update! Agree about the noise also!
Oshyan, the AA was set at 6 with the maximum number of samples. I'm going to have to fiddle with the AA settings more because if I increase the AA to get rid of the noise from the leafless trees then the evergreens appear softer than desired. I'll mess around with the settings and post any improved results.
As promised, here are the results. The render settings are not optimized for a balance of speed and render quality, but since I had over a day where I wouldn't be able to touch my computer I thought I might as well just bump up the settings and render size ;D. Enjoy!
http://gannaingh32.deviantart.com/art/Realism-Test-275687719
I very like this one! Beautifull!!!
This looks so believable! I would really like a .tgd on this I haven't got anything to look this real.
Superb! I'm not super into the DoF on the tree to the left, but otherwise this is near perfect.
- Oshyan
Thanks everybody!
@TheBadger: To give you the TGD I would have to strip out some elements that come from NWDA preset packs that I bought. That would alter the scene some, but if you would still like to have it I'll make it kosher and post it to file sharing.
Quote from: darthvader1 on January 03, 2012, 03:13:01 PM
Thanks everybody!
@TheBadger: To give you the TGD I would have to strip out some elements that come from NWDA preset packs that I bought. That would alter the scene some, but if you would still like to have it I'll make it kosher and post it to file sharing.
Hi man, Thanks. you can post what ever you feel is good. Really Im just trying to understand why there is so much disparity between everyones renders. That is, why is your work here so real looking, and why does some of my work look fake? I am trying to identify the key setting and there optimal values that put everything in the ball park. I have to admit Im not going at it very scientifically, because every render is different there are to many variables. Nonetheless, I believe (incorrectly?) that seeing the file will help. And I would like to be sure at least that I'm doing everything I should, even if my settings are off.
Quote from: TheBadger on January 03, 2012, 08:19:05 PM
Really Im just trying to understand why there is so much disparity between everyones renders. That is, why is your work here so real looking, and why does some of my work look fake? I am trying to identify the key setting and there optimal values that put everything in the ball park. I have to admit Im not going at it very scientifically, because every render is different there are to many variables. Nonetheless, I believe (incorrectly?) that seeing the file will help. And I would like to be sure at least that I'm doing everything I should, even if my settings are off.
Hi,
after 11 or so years of using Terragen and using TG2 since (if I remember correctly) 2005, I think I have figured out a little bit of what makes a realistic looking picture. I know from my fellow NWDA artists that they all agree that especially point 3 is of utmost importance. Anyway, in my experience it can all be boiled down to the following guidelines:
1 - Scale is important. All scales need to fit in with each other. It's most simple to stick to real world scales. Think of trees: out of the box, they come in real world scale, say a tree is 10m tall. If the tree appears to small, then it's just too far away and not too small. Maybe if it appears to small then your other terrain features or objects are too tall? Another example is the scale of waves on a lake. On the average lake, you don't find 10m long waves, so don't use the default settings, which are more suited to fit to an ocean scene.
You may also choose to work with fake sizes, but then you have to work much harder to keep scales of various scene elements in balance.
2 - Render quality settings. Just don't do a "final" render on mediocre quality setting. I.e., don't render with AA = 3. Good quality takes time. Like when buying a car, if you want quality you have to pay for it. With cars of course, if you want quality you are pretty much limited to buying German car maker brands ;)
So what are the right quality settings? That depends on the image, but in my experience you don't go under AA 6 for vegetation, and GI of 2/3. I think that's a reasonable minimum to begin with. That being said, these settings for "final" renders. And with render detail I find that 0.75 is reaonable for screen size renders, but you might want to adjust that depending on the scene as well. However the render quality settings are the LAST problem, not the primary ones!
3 - Color & Lighting. If you understand this part, you've got the holy grail of making a realisitc looking image. Let's take Impressionism as an example. Made with just pretty large and rough strokes, you can't see much detail at all in the paintings of that period in time. But still the images look incredibly realistic. Why? Because they have chosen the perfect and absolutely natural colors, as in the original scene. That principle still holds true to your renders. If you make a single poor choice for the colors of a leaf texture, or a fake stone color, or anything really, it will make your render look fake. So pay extra attention to choosing the right colors! Secondly lighting. Most people don't think a lot about that TG2 works like a real camera with a limited dynamic range. If you walk around with your pocket camera and take a shot of say a house against a brightly lit sky (even if it's cloudy), you need to make a choice whether you want to expose the brightness for a good shot of the house, or a good shot of the sky. Usually you can't have both. So what most people tend to do in TG2 is to expose for the sky, although the center of their image is the ground with it's vegetation and objects, resulting in a way too dark render. Or, they want to find a compromise, but that usually results in a dull render with neither the ground nor the sky being exposed good enough.
Like in photography, you need good light on your scene to make a good picture. Try to get a good mix of directly lit elements and shadow. If your image has too much shadow or too much light, it probably won't look very good, even if everything else is realistic. Lastly, try to let the sun shine on your scene from the side, at least a bit. Oh, and low sun elevation is better than high noon. The default 25 degrees give you good results for daylight scenes, don't go to 50 or - god forbid - 90 degrees. It will be so much harder to make a good looking render with these settings. Of course sometimes you will want to have a high sun, but in most cases you probably won't.
Anyway, play with the exposure slider and dare yourself to push it up a notch or two.
4 - Detailed Objects - Don't use low or medium poly objects EVER in the foreground or midground. These will immediately sell your render as fake. If you don't have HD objects, such as Walli's NWDA HD Pine trees, just don't put any objects in the foreground, where the simple geometry and low res texture is immediately apparent. I am sorry for having to make this sound like an ad, but it's true nonetheless. Every image I made with low poly vegetation in the foreground actually sucked, and the xfrog libraries don't give you high poly objects and HD textures out of the box.
If you look at Darthvader's render here, I believe he used the xfrog library trees, which are quite low poly, but he wisely put them into the far midground where it doesn't matter much. There is just one foreground tree, but Darth made a good choice with blurring it "away".
5 - Pay attention to detail - Don't go for the quick win. For example, you don't just throw a population of bushes on a terrain, even if the bushes themselves are of great quality, in reality they don't tend to grow everywhere with equal density. Go the extra mile and make a distribution shader for your population that clumps your population together in places and leaves other places empty. This usually requires a lot of trial and error in the beginning, but it is so much worth it. Another example of where you should pay attention to detail is fake stones. Sometimes it's like people are so amazed with the ability to create stones everywhere that they forget to bother about making them look realistic: color variation, size variation, distribution variation, detailed geometry... all that is important detail. I usually have around fifty to a hundred incrementally saved tgd's of the same scene on my hard drive before the image is good enough for a final render. Take your time with tuning detail. If your render isn't detailed, it will not look realistic (in most cases).
I think that's pretty much it.
I am confident that abiding to these guideline will make any image look a whole lot better.
Regards,
Frank
Very well said Frank :) It explains for me why I have a relatively low image post count as I strive to follow these exact same rules.
When I look at many works here and there (like DA or CGS) I think it mostly lacks things of 1, 3 and/or 5.
The attention to detail is critical and also very important is that you should never be satisfied. Otherwise your work will not improve at all or very slowly.
That's why Frank explained that he sometimes has numerous incremental saves as he works to a tangent to some extent.
Frank, I think you should add this post to the FAQ on NWDA.
Then we can further elaborate on the rendersettings, as the rendersettings-thread here is somewhat outdated.
Cheers,
Martin
Thanks for the confirmation, Martin. I agree this could be useful in the NWDA Tutorial section, so I've added it there. I've kept it separate from your FAQ, as I couldn't find a way to fit it into the FAQ structure really.
The article: http://www.nwdanet.com/terragen-tutorials/62-how-to-make-realistic-images
Your (excellent) FAQ: http://www.nwdanet.com/terragen-tutorials/63-terragen-2-faq
Regards,
Frank
Yeah it's not the common question, but from time to time it seems some do wonder "how do I get more realistic renders?"
Good post Frank.
Great post Frank, it emphasizes the fact that one serious artist can never be truly satisfied with his/her work - such is the evolution towards perfection which can never be attained.
Wow Frank, thank you. I know it takes time to organize complicated ideas into usable info, so thanks for taking the time. I will read through the links of yours and T-U's!
Outstanding image!
To the mods: Can we get Frank's post as a sticky or similar? It's a great collection of important advice imo.
You can always bookmark the specific message-link if you're afraid you can't find it anymore.
One of the images i have to put "Terragen 2" in the file name absolutely ;)
QuoteTo the mods: Can we get Frank's post as a sticky or similar? It's a great collection of important advice imo.
What I do is copy lines that interest me and paste them in a series of text files in my tutorial folder, for later scrutiny and offline advice if needed.
Frank can add his points (which I agree are very good) to the Wiki: http://www.planetside.co.uk/wiki/
- Oshyan
Very inspirating picture ! Excellent+
luc
Quite realistic ! Excellent render :)
Certainly deserves the name you gave it...as real as it comes ! Excellent work !