Alternate view of Ashkelon

[Mr_Lamppost]

Markal threw down a challenge here:  http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,16695.0.html

The terrain is here: http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,16630.0.html

To be honest I wasn't really sure where I was going with  this until I got there, I just knew I wanted to go somewhere different.  This lack of initial direction means that this image is full of fudges.  There are two suns, the atmosphere is distinctly non-standard and all the objects have been scaled up.

The trees are:
Sabal palmetto - Xfrog
Palm - Harvey Birdman
Tree Wide Shoots - fmtoffolo

The grass is one of my own grass patches.

The green of the grass may be a little bright, easily changed.

[yossam]

The grass could use some color variation.................and the clouds look almost blurry to me, maybe raise the quality some? I like the image.........maybe I'll try that terrain to see what I can come up with. 

[Markal]

I agree with you about the grass. Palms....I never thought of palms on this terrain but, it works. The image could use some more color variation and surfaces detail but, I like it....very cool. This terrain seems to ask for an upwards view...that is a lower camera angled up....I think its more majestic...well, that's what I think...LOL
Thanks MLP
Mark

[inkydigit]

nice variation... where next I wonder?

[Mr_Lamppost]

Thanks for the comments.

I won't get a chance until the weekend but now my rendering machine is free I'll make some tweeks:

Improve the grass is a definite
Clouds:  I kept the clouds slightly soft but will experiment with quality and or density.
I had already thought that the surfaces could use a little more detail but I don't want to over do things and distract from the shape of the terrain.

Rendering this at all was a nightmare, I tend to develop things on what should be a moderately fast PC; quad core 3Gb ram, while the better spec box does the heavy rendering jobs.  For Blender this works fine, TG2 was not a problem but TG3 does not perform well on this machine at all.  I couldn't even render the terrain, no clouds, no populations at a detail higher than .3    I did the render no trouble on my laptop, (i3 4Gb), no problem.  The big difference is that this machine is running 32 bit Vista while the laptop and i& are 64 bit Win 7 and 8.  When it runs 32bit T3 is fine but it very quickly generates errors and drops buckets.  I've looked at upgrading Windows, the machine does support 64 bit versions but have been undecided as the cost of upgrading windows and adding memory is half way to a new no frills PC.   

[Mr_Lamppost]

I found the time yesterday to make some changes.

Experimented quite a lot with the clouds but came back to something close to what I started with.
Toned down the saturation of the grass and added some colour variation.
Added more variation to the rock surfaces.

Here's the big one: Killed the second sun

I've made a start on another one using the same terrain so I'll switch my attention to that but for mow I want to work on some Blender stuff. Also not being able to render on the machine I have set up to develop on is a pain.

[Oshyan]

I don't think rendering in TG3 should take up significantly more memory than in TG2. You'd have to compare on the exact same scene to be sure, of course, and it would have to be a scene that originated in TG2 to avoid any TG3-specific features. The 3D preview does definitely use more memory though, so if you can avoid using that on the 32 bit version (e.g. display modes other than bounding box, at the least, or even avoid letting it update the preview to max quality; just pause it), it may help. If you do see notably higher memory use for TG3 on the same scene, let us know.

- Oshyan