dome like hills overhead

[Zairyn Arsyn]

PF terrain with simple shape shaders set to circle(a total of 8 ) with different displacements and radiuses.
NWDA stone bed was used

models used:
NWDA pine trees 22m & 27m

more renders coming soon (as well as extra populations)

C&C welcome.

[:)]

Is very good, better than most here I think done well

[AP]

That is entirely relative.   

[Zairyn Arsyn]

added a second PF terrain and some of Walli's Grass from the NWDA site.
Stone monoliths modeled and textured by me.

i'm not completely happy with the quality of this one i think the scene looks better with RTO on, and something about the texture of the monoliths does'nt look right to me... (its UV mapped.)

the original is 3800x1600

C&C welcome   

[Walli]

cool! I think I would try to add another population. Just a stripe in front of the forest, probaly same trees but use the offset to move them downwards, so that the base trunk vanishes under the terrain. That way you can simulate "edge population", because at the rim of a forest you usually find plants with branching all the way down to the ground.

[Dune]

Nice update and a good idea from Walli. Due to some darker rocks (on the left) you seem to have some floating grass, which is not true of course. Perhaps hit seed one more time?

[Zairyn Arsyn]

i got lucky, my new PC did a windows update & restarted,   fortunately the render was already done by the time it happened.

walli and dune, i only saw your comments this morning, after this render was done, i will have to make changes later.

original resolution, 3800x1600
http://-zagadka-.deviantart.com/#/d4cowr8

you can see the monolith texture a little better in this one, plus i added three of Mr. Miley's bushes
one of the grass pops still needs to be fixed - its still partially submerged below the terrain.

c&c welcome.

[Tangled-Universe]

Interesting work, looks pretty good. Nice stones, they are FrankB's stones from NWDA, aren't they?

I have a couple of suggestions for improvement if you don't mind:
The trees are all standing perfectly straight which looks kinda boring imho. In the object maker give them say 4 degrees rotation on X or Z so they will all just not stand straight up.
Also there seems to be a bit lack of size-variation which together with the straight trees gives a very monotone look.

Renderwise I think it's a lot more interesting to have your new monster machine flex his muscles on renderquality rather than huge ass resolution
Try something like AA32, set to 1/16th first samples and pixel noise threshold 0.15 or 0.2. Set atmosphere samples to 8 and enable RTA.
For GI choose 2/4/6 with SS-prepass, but no surface details.
With these extreme AA settings, which are perfectly render-able on your 2600K you can get awesome results with the cubic b-spline AA filter, which normally is inferior at lower settings.
Try it!

Cheers,
Martin

[Zairyn Arsyn]

32AA!! ok i will try it
i'll make the rotation changes when i get back home.

yes those are frankB's stones from NWDA, i've been meaning to give them little variation in there distribution, soon.

[Tangled-Universe]

AA32, yes...but not without the other settings I mentioned, otherwise it will be enormous overkill. It is a bit already of course.

[inkydigit]

this is coming together really well....looking forward to an update...

cheers

J

[Zairyn Arsyn]

first 32AA render...
followed TU's render settings recommendations

render time was actually under 3hrs  

will make more changes when i can...
rendering a even higher resolution version with the same setting to see how it handles (ram usage)

Comments & Critiques welcome

[Tangled-Universe]

That looks better, isn't it? Especially the bushes look less noisy.

One thing which you could add is soft shadows. Perhaps throw half a dozen trees just behind your camera to the right.
They could cast longer shadows into the image. Soft shadows would make it look very realistic and pretty awesome.
Roughly expect a doubling of your rendertime though.

Here's an example: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11025.msg113559#msg113559

[Dune]

It softens up the veggies a lot. Great. But what about the stonelike grey surface? Why not make it sandy. It's very smooth. Or make it a cracked hard rock surface, with some gribble in the gutters.

[Cyber-Angel]

Would it be possible to center the image, focusing on the two hills with the monoliths? The compensation with that half hill on the left, makes for (IMHO) a visually disturbed, unbalanced composition! Other wise nice work?

Regards to yo.

Cyber-Angel