C&C please...................
Great :)
The reflections of the trees does look a little problematic. Higher AA maybe?
Looks like it will be great when you do a clean render. Nice one!
1. Make your water completely still, or you'll keep these grainy reflections, which distract. Maybe just a tiny patch of wind somewhere (blend in a small sized perlin, by patchy perlin before the water shader).
2. Use shorter and more varieties of grass, and lessen the effect of rotation with slope.
3. Use more varieties of birch, this is very uniform. Perhaps leave the leaves on some of them, or some remaining leaves, thinned out if you will.
4. Try to break the very straight horizon, perhaps by a large rock or outcrop, or bunch of bushes.
Changed some things..........
The water is a great improvement, but I still think the grasses are not very nice. Why not use (smaller) grasses which 'stand less out on an angle'? And you could also think of a muddy/rocky embankment. Or add 2 lines of straight grasses sticking out of the water, like reeds. http://static.nationalgeographic.nl/pictures/genjUserPhotoPicture/original/23/24/08/oever-van-de-nijl-82423.jpg (http://static.nationalgeographic.nl/pictures/genjUserPhotoPicture/original/23/24/08/oever-van-de-nijl-82423.jpg) http://www.natuurgegevensprovincielimburg.nl/site2010/plantpic/big/jg000106.jpg (http://www.natuurgegevensprovincielimburg.nl/site2010/plantpic/big/jg000106.jpg) http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cE3HALmWJCU/S69A-ihH95I/AAAAAAAAAgg/WtjlNZopf30/s1600/Waterkant.JPG (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cE3HALmWJCU/S69A-ihH95I/AAAAAAAAAgg/WtjlNZopf30/s1600/Waterkant.JPG)
I agree. The grasses seem odd at that extreme angle. Excellent lighting and overall mood.
James
The reeds/grasses is the most confusing for me, but I have to say that this looks very very good so far!
Especially the reduced size visible here looks pretty photorealistic.
So I think it's definitely worth trying to implement the previous good suggestions and make this a killer :)
a tad underexposed for my taste, but as was mentioned before, the small version almost looks like a photo, so you are on track! Really nice overall.
Two comments:
- the reeds look a bit strange at that angle, it took a while until I could see what this is.
- the branching structure of the naked birches looks to much like cg. I guess thats not a problem if the tree has leaves, but now it looks a bit strange. If you have a chance to change this, then that would be the icing on the cake.
Another tiny adjustment you could make is to slightly tilt the camera up. The composition is too 50/50 I think.
Me through I think..............
That actually looks quite decent! Nicely done!!
Very good.
If you like to take it to the next level you could consider the following:
- adding some detail to the soil surface between the grasses/reeds. Use a billowy fractal for instance.
- reduce water reflectivity. Try 0.5 instead of 1. Why? The water is clear, but yet a bit murky (english??). I think less reflectivity will emphasize what's going on with the water. You can also add a density colour which is pretty similar to the transparency colour. Use density ~0.1, not more.
- increase ray detail multiplier. You can do this by going into the render node and then enter the "render subdiv" node. Default is 0.25, try something like 0.5. This should decrease the noise in the reflections I think, but especially will increase underwater detail. If it's not satisfactory then increase a bit further. (be aware, this increases rendertime quite some, so you may compensate with lower resolution rendering if necessary).
my 0.25 is a lot better then your 0.25 ;-)
Ok here goes.................
Followed T-Us' suggestions:
Added some billowy fractals to the soil surface, changed the water reflectivity to .5, it was at .7 to start. The water already had a density color, so I did not change that. The ray detail multiplier is the big change that to me added some subtle differences to the render. Default is at .25.........I changed it to .5 and really did not see much difference. So I took it to .75 and this is the result. By the way, that change caused an increase of render time by a little over 50%. Was it worth it ?...........you tell me.
I don't think Ray Detail Multiplier will affect reflection quality, just subsurface rendering quality. Also it looks like there's a lot of JPG artifacting (and possibly post process sharpening) on these images (see halos around tree edges), which probably just makes the water noise look worse.
I like the green algae in/on your water, very realistic.
- Oshyan
The only post processing was a gamma adjustment.
This is the pic without any compression, only changed to .jpg from .exr and the gamma adjustment.
Must just be JPG artifacts then. Conversion to JPG *always* involves compression, even the larger version you just posted (where you can still see the JPG artifacting I referred to, though it's significantly lessened). Depending on what you're using to save to JPG, you may be able to get better quality at equivalent size with other settings or a different app, e.g. Photoshop's Save For Web option vs. just Save As JPG, or XnView's Export option.
With the fairly high resolution of the image and lots of fine detail, it's going to be hard to compress it to reasonable size without getting those artifacts. I'm not sure if you render at that resolution due to your screen size or some other preference, but for web sharing something more like 1280x1024 or similar is probably better for both file size/compression ratio (quality), as well as people being able to see the entire image without scrolling.
- Oshyan