Planetside Software Forums

Something I've been working on the last week or so; complete overhaul of polder (new trees, ditches, and cycle/footpaths) and new highway (top area), tunnels, bridges, etc. I had to pull out of lot of trickery, mainly for the overview.

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Love the aerial view. Looks very real. Amazing amount of details.

The skyview is marvelous. It took your breat away, impressive sight.

May I ask you how do you get these plant colors? Are they from photos or just randomly taken?
I work on a average colour palette for sand and grasses.

STORMLORD

Amazing!!!!! Looking at the plants, I guess you used the path tracer? Fantastic work!

Thanks, guys. No, it wasn't even Path Traced (or I wouldn't have the transparent water). Perhaps a lucky (or professional  :P ) mix of translucency and opacity of leaves.

What plant colors do you mean? I use a lot of (own) photo's for leaves, and mix that with procedural variations. The overview has an underlying aerial photo, but that needed to be redrawn almost completely (for new highway, and new distribution of agriculture and such).

Just beautiful, as always Ulco. How do you control the field areas? Some function / procedural arrangement or just some SSSs?

(yeah, that's a lot of S's up there...)

Wow, fantastic work, Ulco!
You need really to look twice to find out they're renders and not photos!

I made a heap of masks in PS to add additional coloring/texturing over the aerial image if needed. Bicycle and walking paths too, made a bit soft edged, so I can adjust (color adjust) in TG and measure exact needed widths (like 180cm for walking paths), which is hard to measure in PS. Also masks for placement of shrub and trees of course.
Especially the brick center of the bicycle path was a bit of a challenge. Luckily it's mostly straight, so SSS's were used to mask out tarmac bump and mask in bricks, and brick texture rotated where needed.
Getting grass and shrub to grow on the bridge/ecoduct was also a challenge. I could have planted new pops on the object, but I decided to smooth and raise ground under the bridge by SSS, so the terrain just hit the bridge floor. Won't be visible anyway, as I will render a crop of the underside of that bridge without the smoothed and raised ground and comp it in. 

once again WOW sums it up

Aerial shot is my favorite, all are excellent in there own right

I like the agriculture look to the aerial shot.

The narrow DOF makes it look like its on a table top, a miniature train environment.  Cool gag.

Now, there's an idea! I can put this small area of earth on a table (seen something like that before). The client wanted some vanilla colored, soft focus image to show it's future ideas, but I didn't like the vanilla hue, just blurred a bit.
Some loose objects scattered around, train, trees, houses, pile of sand, tube of glue....

That sounds mighty interesting!!!

I have a somehow offtopic question: what does "vanilla colored" in this case mean? Sometimes this description is used for a warm, creamy white (like vanilla ice), but actually vanilla is black, so it's a bit confusing to me.

These are awesome!

I really like the aerial shot  :)


- Terje

I think they mean warm creamy, not black  8)

Looking through the clouds is a nice touch as well