veggies

[Henry Blewer]

Maybe shining the sun through some clouds would work. The atmosphere's haze would only be illuminated where the clouds patches let the light through, creating contrasting light.

[Dune]

Thanks for explaining your choices, Chris.

[Rich Gelles]

Chris --
              must say i liked all the variations ---nice work. Just starting looking here but certainly some amazing images.

Rich

[chris_x422]

Thanks guys,

Latest update, a little softer and more balanced light and comp set up this time.
Might leave this one here for now, or maybe come back to it again later.

Thanks again for all the feedback and suggestions guys.

Chris

[Dune]

This is great, Chris. I like the lighting much better as well.

[TheBadger]

Last one is outstanding! What was your method for getting moss on the fallen tree on the right side of the render. Can you be specific?

[chris_x422]

Thanks guys.

Sorry to say that the moss on the fallen tree was not procedural, the whole element was sculpted and textured in Zbrush.
No doubt that it could have been done very effectively inside of terragen, Zbrush is just such a fast tool for me when creating those kind of assets.
Fibremesh was also used for generating some of the plant populations on the exported mesh, so as to avoid too much repetition.

I was amazed at just how many variations of plants and even full and very heavy imported mesh systems terragen was able to handle, and still render utilising less than 12 gigs of ram.
Like I said earlier, this was really an evaluation test scene for me, not having done much vegetation work for quite a while now.

Still not completely happy with the level of photorealism I'm able to achieve with the imported models though, and need to do some more testing to determine why, and how far I can push that.

Chris

[TheBadger]

Thanks for the info Chris.

Still not completely happy with the level of photorealism I'm able to achieve with the imported models though, and need to do some more testing to determine why, and how far I can push that.

Have you considered doing multiple passes?
What I mean is two renders. One like you have now and one using displacement; TRO off using bump. and then masking in select plants in photoshop.
I found from doing fantasy stuff that doing the two renders is effective in making plants that are obviously not real, realish. I would guess that it would work very well on plants that already are very close to photo quality. For me it was very effective.

I also wanted to ask you about what you said about working on the light in the image. What parameters are you playing with. That is, just in terms of the quality of light from the first image to the last, what settings are you adjusting to get the softness in the last image?
I suspect its not just a question of exposure, right?

[chris_x422]

Cheers Badger,

I am doing multiple passes, I think it's more a case of the way I'm used to shading and lighting in other render engines versus how terragen works with imported objects.
I work a lot with Arnold and Vray and they have far more advanced shading systems than terragen currently. This is by no means a criticism of terragen as it does a great job, and it's primary goal (I believe) is realistic terrain and atmospherics which are head and shoulders above the competition in my opinion.

But as is the case with any render engine, it takes time to learn how to get the best results, or should I say, the results you are looking for, and that's what I'm exploring in these series of tests, just trying to get as close as I can to other renderers with imported objects.
I think, for me, some of the things I miss are, indirect specular contributions, and the render time hit in ray-tracing true reflections on the leaves and fauna, none of which are particularly an issue on scenes of a large scale, but when hero elements are in shot, it's very tough to match the same level of shading and light interaction.

Still, I know some of you guys are achieving great results, so I'm sure there's more for me to get out of this yet.
Been freelancing this week, so not had any more time for testing, but hope to get back to it after this job's done in a few weeks.

Chris