Lakeside + 720p Animation on page 2

[dandelO]

This is the big cloud I said I was trying to warp the other day. The render time was far too much for me so, I'll just have to post a still, for now.

[attachimg=#]

Cheers for looking!

[Kadri]

Nice

Not surprised of the long render times.
I tried something along these lines but was upset and didn't tried other things. And this was for a still

Just curious the upper and lower part looks kinda different Martin? Postwork etc. ?

[dandelO]

Cheers, Kadri.
The only post processing was to sort out a couple of broken stone displacements and a bit of colour correction. Oh, I slightly de-noised the water and clouds, too.

Here's the tgout image...

[Kadri]

Thanks Martin 

[Jonathan]

The cloud is pretty mega, but IMHO the fake stones steal the show....very realistic! J

[dandelO]

Thanks, Jonathan. You can download those same stones from here... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12428.0

[Jonathan]

Thanks Martin, will have a gander. J

[choronr]

Like this one a lot. The low point of view and composition is impressive. The greenish coverage on the rocks is perfect - must try this some time.

[Oshyan]

Cloud seems a bit yellow-ish to me, but nice shapes. I'd really like to see it animated. I'm going on vacation for a week or so quite soon and have 2-3 i7's that will be idle. If you can get me the scene file in the next 24-36 hours I can probably have it rendered by the time I get home...

- Oshyan

[dandelO]

Thanks, Bob.
Oshyan, I shared the .tgd elsewhere and removed all the animated parameters before I did, without an incremental save, so, give me a little time to rearrange things and, of course, since it was only the cloud and sun that was animated and the scene now has water and some broken stones, I'll need to do something with those as well. I'll get back to you before the day is out. Thanks a lot!

[Oshyan]

Sounds good.

- Oshyan

[dandelO]

I've just sent the file to you, Oshyan.
Fixed(well, hid) the broken stones, the altitudes of the wet layer needed adjustment, I needed a really small patch size when the compute terrain node was after the stones to make the altitude constraints work properly and it was really increasing the render time, I changed my mind and finally settled on moving the compute terrain back up to before the stones layer and just used 'final normal' altitude constraints for speed, it did look better with the smaller patch size but it's still fine this way, and quicker.
And as I said in the pm, I hope I have the timings right for the water, I think it should be cool.

Thanks again!

p.s. I'm not seeing the yellow tint you mention here at my end. Does anyone else notice that?

[Oshyan]

The yellow color is subtle, could be interpreted as simple under exposure too. I'll play with it a little if you don't mind...

- Oshyan

[dandelO]

Cool. The exposure is just default settings in the file, the .exr output was very close to blown-out in the sky, I used some pretty extreme internal scatter lighting(6) and higher than normal propagation mix(0.25) so I didn't think I should raise the exposure and lose any detail.
I like to have a darkish cloud colour with lots of fake internal scatter lighting, this leaves the shadow areas nice and contrasty while keeping the whole thing nice and bright. I know those settings pretty far from physically 'correct' but it's a good way to have nice detail in the shadows/edges of fractal features and also in the brighter parts of a cloud at the same time. Raising the ambient colour is a good cloud control too but not this time, as I wanted the contrast. Actual 'scattering colour' has no effect on my version(as I used no GI) so you might have a play with that area too when you enable the envirolight.

[dandelO]

Here's a crop of the .exr. Pretty blown.