Cherry Hill

[Henry Blewer]

 I took a little liberty with the size of the cheery trees. They are a bit large, but the shadows worked much better with this scale. Sweet Seduction Cherry Tree is the name of the tree object.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/njeneb/4900585031/sizes/o/in/photostream/

This is a really awesome tree object. I had to 'unburden' many of the programs and services I normally run on my computer to do this image.

[domdib]

Wow, that tree sure looks good. I think it would look nicer if you took the brown out of the grass.

[Henry Blewer]

Spring, around here when the cherry trees bloom, there is quite a lot of brown grass left.

[Tangled-Universe]

I think the grass looks good Henry. Very natural.
I'd like to suggest that you render your images a tad smaller, but with higher quality settings.
The grasses look better with higher AA settings. What are you using now?
Maybe you've seen my comment in Dune's tread, but I found that (for me) the sweet spot for quality is AA6 with maximum samples.
AA8 gives better results, but takes quite some longer.
With optimizations like this you might even be able to render this image with soft-shadows, because that would look awesome on the bark where the shadows of the blossom would be blurred out a bit.
If you'd like I can render something for you. I don't have time to design stuff this week, but I can still render images of course.
Just let me know.

Cheers,
Martin

[jbest]

Those trees look very very realistic njeneb.

[Henry Blewer]

This was rendered with detail at 0.75, AA 7. I did not have the GI settings checked on. Amazingly, it only took 16 hours on my machine using one thread. At 1920 x 1080, that's really fast for me.

[Tangled-Universe]

This was rendered with detail at 0.75, AA 7. I did not have the GI settings checked on. Amazingly, it only took 16 hours on my machine using one thread. At 1920 x 1080, that's really fast for me.

Hmmm..."funny" that it doesn't look like AA7 to me.
What do you mean with the GI? This image has no GI at all or no GI surface details checked? (which I think you don't need).

[Henry Blewer]

The GI surface detail is not check in the render tab settings.

[TheBlackHole]

[Henry Blewer]

A couple of test renders. I reduced the number of Sweet_seduction_Cherry trees with a distance shader. I added two plants, crepe myrtle, and the_noble_one. The POV has been changed. Last, I put the tgc file for fantasy clouds pack in for fun.

Any criticism would be welcome. I'm going for a full render Sunday night.

[Dune]

They're totally different in feel. The first one is kind of upsetting due to the ambivalence of the blossoming cherries and the dark ominous clouds, shadows and the warped Noble One. The second is just pleasant. I would pick the upper one, but give the grasses some more diversity (more species/size variation, or a camera driven color image throwing patches of subtle color over this pop).

Have a good render.

---Dune

[Henry Blewer]

Thanks Ulco. Great advise!

[nethskie]

very nice! i like the design! just some more clouds and mountains in the background and it will look the best! too bad i don't have some nicer xfrog plants to practice with...

[Henry Blewer]

I am going to put this render aside for now. It is taking too long to render. I am about 1/3 done with over eighty hours render time involved. When I get a new PC, I'll render this one. ( I hit a memory barrier again. )

[Dune]

That's too bad, Henry. 80 hours is half a lifetime! Is it taking that long because of the 'weight' of the cherry trees? I can hardly imagine that. Never tried that actually, to compare rendertime in identical settings but with higher poly trees.... more work to do.