Peaceful River Currents

[pclavett]

Hi all ! I have been working on this for a few week to try out my new Blender rocks and decided for a river scene. The riverbed base was done with some file bought at NWDA but changed and modified to keep only the small pebbles and some colour adjustments. Afterwards numerous populations of my Blender rocks were applied with different textures so as to give some variety..although the dark ones do stand out ! The river was done with countless hours of tweaking on the water shader and the underlying terrain was done in GeoControl...and still having some difficulty controlling the outputs on this one !.....(the tutorials on this one are not too clear and we should strive to have clearer directions on this software as it does seem to have immense potential!) The trees are mostly from the HQ spruce and pine collection from NWDA (and thanks Frank for those amazing items !) The variations and adjustments on the veggies were done with some of Martin's suggestions at the Webinar...thanks Martin for your expertise. Some of Dune's bushes are in there..and they are nice. Rest of the veggies were various files given in the forum by various other individuals and unfortunately do not know all of their names...so thanks to all that share your files in the forum. The Terragen Community is incredibly generous and I will share some of the files developed for this image such as the rocks and the river settings. Hope you enjoy this image and pardon my on-off participation here as my regular job does invade significantly on my CG time. Thank you all for the help and suggestions (and files) of the past (and those to come) and take care !
Paul

PS: I include 2 versions, one with a mountain range as a background for perspective and one without. I intend on doing more with focus on mood and atmo !

[Dune]

Very nice river, Paul. I like the sweep of it and the water color is fantastic. I do have some comments; I would take a look at the trees; some are very translucent, others very dark. A more subtle mix, perhaps with added species would do the render good.
Also, some wisps of foam at the water's edge would be quite natural. Not much, just a few strands. Another thing you might try is increase patchiness of the water, like turbulence creating smooth areas and rougher areas.

[pclavett]

Thanks Ulco for the comments and suggestions...would love to comply with the water but have no idea how to do it !!! How do you add the foams and how do you control where they land As for the trees I will look into this and try to improve the mix and will examine my settings for the translucency. Your comments are appreciated and this always helps to improve the looks of future renders....thanks again ! Have a great day !
Paul

[Jo Kariboo]

Agree with Ulco. A nice one anyway ! 

[choronr]

You have a good one going here Paul. As for the foam, there are a number of clip files here at the forum you can download and experiment with.

[TerrMite]

Agree with all above,

Love the water but it would be "perfect" with some foam. Like the sandy beach with the stones. Good job with those btw.
But as Dune said, the trees on the other side looks strange. Before I saw Dune's comment I almost thought they were painted afterwards :-)

Please re-work a bit and post again. I would love to see a version 2.

Cheers

[efflux]

Nice work on the shore area. One thing I would say though is that the water is quite violently wavy. I see this in a lot on renders. It could be this wavy but I think what causes the dislocation from reality is that violent waves like this would be more influenced by rocks and shore.

I don't know if anyone has tried this but utilizing other fractals from the surrounding terrain or rocks into the water might lead to being able to shape things around better.