leafy orchard

[Kevin F]

Here's a new one using lots of vegetation. Thinking of doing a "God ray" version with receive shadows from surface enabled in the cloud layer
but the time it'll take on this old system is so long. I did a test version without the apples etc. and it took over 20 hrs at medium res! so it might have to wait till I get a new system. Any way C&C welcome.
Leaves - from Walli
Trees from X-frog
basket from Archibase.net
Apples my own.

[mhaze]

Very nice image, great mood but the apples appear to be floating. The god rays would bring this to life.

Mick

[masonspappy]

The apples on the ground are floating above the ground a bit. Might also put some grass tufts among the leaves.

[Kevin F]

I agree the apples do appear to be floating in some places. I'd convinced myself they were o.k.! The problem is that they're modeled in a group and are at slightly different heights. I've got another version rendering now with an improved model ( and grass! which I'd taken out of the original because I love Walli's leaves so much.
Thanks for the comments.

[inkydigit]

very nice...apples floating = too much cider!
can't wait too see the next one!

[Kevin F]

Here's a recent update with most problems solved.
Credits as before plus pronghorn deer from Curious Labs. (free with poser)
One problem I can't resolve is the shape and colour of the "apples" on the trees, especially the red variety on the right.
Both are actually modified peach trees available free from X-frog, with the peach image map replaced with an apple image. I've tried everything I can think of to improve them but none are good enough. The images used are the same type and size etc. but nothing gives a convincing apple. Being a tgo. file the fruit element of the peach tree must map the image in some way other than as an .obj and since you can't convert .obj's to tgo's (can you?) I'm stuck.
All suggestions comments and ideas welcome.
by the way there are 11 populations and 10 individual .objs in this pic.

[Dune]

You can save a tgo as an obj. But I don't see any problem with the tree apples, they're distant anyway. The only 'problem' I see is that all ground apples are nicely laid down with the same way up. Probably hard to change procedurally (yet?), but if you turn some objects around and use 3 or 4 differently rotated populations you may overcome that.
Otherwise; nice composition and I like the pronghorn addition!   

[Kevin F]

Thanks Dune. You've just made me realise of course I can change the angle of the apples on the ground just by changing the angle of the original apple in the populator by rotating x,y,z. This was something I'd meant to do and completely forgot about.
just done a quick test render and it works. will post later.
And I hadn't realised you can save tgo's as .obj's - thanks again.

[Kevin F]

How can I use one population of objects to mask out where a second population will be placed. i.e. I have a black and white mask of my population of red apples. The apples are black and everything else is white. I've used a distribution shader blended by an image map (b&w mask) as the density shader for my green apples, but the apples overlap.
Any help appreciated.

[Henry Blewer]

I use a distribution shader with a power fractal to mask one object or group of objects. The power fractal goes into the blend by shader input. Copy and paste the ditribution shader for use with the next object or object group. Now you can use the invert shader checkbox on the power fractal mask.

This is very basic. But it does show the basic idea. More complex masks can be made using the paint shader and masking that. The same can be done with image maps.

[Dune]

You could simply paint a (tiny, say 200x200px is enough) mask in Photoshop. If you paint these white on black, non-overlapping in the RGB channels, and insert it in TG, then use the blue nodes blue to scalar, red to scalar and green to scalar, you have three masks from one image.

[Kevin F]

You could simply paint a (tiny, say 200x200px is enough) mask in Photoshop. If you paint these white on black, non-overlapping in the RGB channels, and insert it in TG, then use the blue nodes blue to scalar, red to scalar and green to scalar, you have three masks from one image.

So then I'll have three masks to not know what to do with!

I've solved it anyway with a plan (y) projection of my mask used via a surface layer and plugged into the blended by port, for the second layer of apples (green ones).
Thanks anyway.

[DutchDimension]

If you have access to an advanced 3D application that supports particles, you could play around with a more procedural means of creating distribution maps.
With Maya's nParticles for instance, you could spawn several differently coloured particles (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, etc) set to be the shape of a sphere for instance, from an exported version of your terrain. Make sure you've set the particles to repel each other so you don't get any overlapping. After running the simulation for a few hundred frames you'll have a very nice distribution of differently coloured particles. At that point it's simply a matter of shading the particles to be incandescent (so you get their raw, unshaded, flat colour). From the resulting render (done from an exported projection camera that you'll use in Terragen to project the maps from) you could easily key the individual colours and separate them out into individual black&white distribution maps. Or simply use render passes or layers to do this process automatically.

You could even make sure the particles respond to gravity so that they "roll down" from steeper inclines of your terrain and gather where they would normally.

Just an idea.... 

[Kevin F]

I'm sure your right, but dare I say it - between you and Dune it's double dutch to me (sorry 'bout that!).
Thanks anyway.

[Kevin F]

You can save a tgo as an obj.

by the way Dune, just how do you do this?