Blah blah blah Sunset!

[Draigr]

Ok, so it's not all sunset.

It started out like this:



And that, after a bit of work with clouds and whatnot, became this:



Then I got tired of that, so I made this:




Which had the right atmosphere, but was definitely not the right colour. This next one took a looooooot of rendering, tweaking, and general pain to get to where it is now. The lighting and trees do not co-operate nicely at this angle. Though I did discover you could boost the water highlights! Yay!





But then I got bored of the angle, after many, many renders. And moved the camera round a bit. Eh Voila! This shot. Only, not quite so fast. Think waiting for hours and tweaking, then discovering what turning the diffuse up in the tree materials does kind of voila!





But I saved the best till last. This one is one of my favourites. It was accidental, I got bored with the sun angle, and changed it slightly, and then the cloud layers at the water became amazing. It took just under or around 11 hours.






And this one I just finished rendering. Today.





Let me know what you think!

[Henry Blewer]

These are some very nice images. The lighting is great in all but two (the darker ones). I hope you saved the tgd files for these. They would be worth longer render times with high settings.

[Draigr]

Yup. I'm up to version 1.22 or thereabouts. I save each render change incrementally. So I've got all those renders, plus the ones in between.

Also, those are 1920X1080 images. Right click -> Open Image. You'll get the full size. I think the forum linking stuff makes them smaller or something.

[Violoncello]

Let me know what you think!

Try the "road trip" method, where you travel on a road at 70 mph (or the legal speed limit of your location) taking snapshots during the travel. You take what you can get, producing a more natural look with a sense of urgency that if you don't see it, you'll simply miss it.

[Draigr]

That's a novel concept. So instead of doing the 'campsite' sunset style renders, which I do enjoy until they start taking too long, I should just take shots from anywhere and move on?


Also. I am now getting issues with the terrain not rendering out properly. Especially the fake stones shader. It hasn't shown up at all for some reason, and I have no idea why.

Included is the current iteration of the scene. The ground hasn't had much work on it yet, since I have lots to learn still. But if someone could explain to me why the fake stone shader isn't doing anything, that'd be a great help.

And yes, I know the water is funky. I'm fiddling with settings to see what happens. I've worked most of them out. I kinda like the caustics.

[Violoncello]

That's a novel concept. So instead of doing the 'campsite' sunset style renders, which I do enjoy until they start taking too long, I should just take shots from anywhere and move on?


Also. I am now getting issues with the terrain not rendering out properly. Especially the fake stones shader. It hasn't shown up at all for some reason, and I have no idea why.

Yeah, kinda like "grab a camera quick, no time to mount it on a tripod -snap- got it (I hope)". Don't worry that the camera wasn't exactly horizontal or pointed perfectly at a target, or that the sun wasn't completely in the view.... etc. etc. You may still have to "cheat" to prevent blurriness by driving too fast. And obviously that huge boulder in front of you will still have to be addressed.

Regarding fake stones.... could it be shadow accuracy? Can you adjust it?

[Draigr]

The fake stones aren't showing up at all. Theoretically, the whole shoreline is supposed to be a pebbled beach. There are no pebbles, however. As the included image attests.

I'll keep the road trip method in mind, however, at the moment, that would be impractical. The terrain isn't really ready for me to go shooting randomly with the render camera, and let's not consider how long the render times can get sometimes, which sort of put a damper on the whole, 'shoot it quick' ideal.

[Dune]

You have an alpine shader, which takes a lot of time, but isn't very effective here, so I'd get rid of that (take a ridged perlin). Also your water depth isn't useful, and the fake stones shader is best put after compute terrain. The patch size and sharpness accounts for the strange water. Best take a new water shader set at default for subtle water.

[Draigr]

Ok. So I know about the water, I was just playing round with the settings at the time, and left it for the render. I've done calm water shots, and am going for something a bit rougher now.

I don't get how the water depth isn't useful? Explain what you mean by that. I have the water positioned exactly where I want it in the scene.


Trying to move the fake stones shader in the shader tab. Not really working though. It's still not showing up in any of the renders. I've even started colouring the stones blue to make them obvious. The current render is going, so we'll see. Although this one's starting to look really nice.

[Dune]

I don't get how the water depth isn't useful? Explain what you mean by that. I have the water positioned exactly where I want it in the scene.

I actually meant the decay distance and color. You won't see any difference I'm sure, whatever you put there, as you look quite flatly across the water, and towards a strong light. You might as well use a reflective shader set to RT. Faster and just as nice. You'd have to make your own waves then, of course, with some perlin, ridges or mix.

I played a little with your setup and changed some things...

[Draigr]

Cool! I like how it's looking. I'm dog tired right now, but I'll definitely take a more in depth look later on in the day/evening. Although, I'm wondering, how do you switch on the depth of field and render layer parameters? Is that the terragen ini file? Coz the warning lights beeped when the project started on those.

Speaking of shaders, what ones does Terragen support, and is there anywhere I can learn to twiddle them? A

Although, Photoshop does do a substitute if necessary.


Also, I fixed the fake stones shader rendering issue. I'm not sure what was wrong, but just adding a default fake stones shader to the shaders worked fine.

I'm liking how the renders are turning out on this scene, and since a lot of the lighting and water is look quite good now, I can start developing the terrain.

Also, thanks for the clarify on the depth settings, I'll see to them asap. Render times for higher resolution is quite high, and the scene is obscenely noisy. I know why, but it doesn't help either way.


Thanks, updates soonish.

The not-so-latest render (didn't save it) is below.

[Tangled-Universe]

Nice work so far, I especially like the last image from your first post. I suppose the halo around the sun is postwork?

If you keep on having issues with fake stones you could consider putting your .tgd file here so we can have a look.

Cheers,
Martin

[Henry Blewer]

I like the lighting on the pine needles in the last render, just before T-U's comment.

[Draigr]

Thanks for the comments .

I fixed the fake stones, in that they're rendering out now, but I'm still struggling with colouring, it's partially got to do with the lighting, which makes everything somewhat indistinct in the bottom part of the image. From what I can see though, the stones aren't too bad.

If Frank drops by, you're wilderness tutorial is down.


@njeneb - It took me a loooong time to get those pine needles to show properly. For some reason, most of my trees end up very dark. Which is annoying, to say the least. But I'll imagine it's got a lot to do with my settings. If anyone knows how to render these things properly, I'd be happy to know. Or cheap tricks, that'd help too.


@Tangled - Thanks for the comment Martin . The sun is not postwork, . Just very careful lighting. I may have tweaked it to make it look like my screen which has a whole bunch of effects that make everything really bright and colourful, but breaks any attempts to know what it'll look like on someone elses screen. So I compensate a little.

So apart from some minor saturation and vibrance, I think that's stock. Actually, it doesn't make much difference in this render's sake. It's stock .

Renders are still confounding me, so no updates today, although the file should be attached. Camera POV changed so I know what's going on at the edge of the water.

[Henry Blewer]

Go into the parts shader of the tree leaves. The translucent value in the default shader may be too low. 0.4 to 0.6 works well.