Ridgeline - Large

[choronr]

Excellent. Adding some ground at this distance would make it hard to see them - depending upon their color.

[otakar]

You need some dead/dying trees, otherwise great, rock faces look very nice.

[Bjur]

It's looking awesome darth and realistic, I'm jealous!

Don't know/get exactly what do you mean if you say you want to "making atmosphere bigger and bolder" I have to admit.

Maybe my Panels aren't set/showing things "right", but for my taste, the upper shadows are
just showing too much blue atmo/haze for it's viewers range, also the water looks great but also a bit too blueish.

Maybe there's also a need for tuning down highlights surface wise (bright parts)..

Alex

[Gannaingh]

I like the idea of adding some dead trees. Consider it done 

Bjur, to me the ridge just seems a bit "smaller" than I want it to. I know in my head that the top of the ridge is over a kilometer above the water, and the scale of all the vegetation is correct, but it just looks small to me. I'm going to play with the atmospheric haze to see if I can get a bigger feel to the image. It sounds like your monitor might have a higher gamma or contrast setting than mine. I know that has happened in the past when I've made images.

[Oshyan]

A very nice and promising image. Glad to see someone trying to develop a ground-up granite shading system with a baseline granular structure. This is something I've wanted to do for Yosemite for ages, but it's in the closet of my long-time TG goals, along with a complete top-to-bottom, strata/color correct Grand Canyon setup.

So far your granite is looking pretty good. A bit more of the dark gray than I had in mind for my own, but that's based more on Yosemite than Pacific Northwest so much. Maybe it's the size of the patches, not sure, or how they blend with the lighter areas. Very curious to see how it holds up closer-up, too.

I do see what you mean about the uncertain sense of scale, but I don't have any good suggestions for how to remedy it. You've done a superb job with scale in the past so I trust you'll nail it.

- Oshyan

[Gannaingh]

I've taken to messing with the aspect ratio of the image in an effort to give a better sense of scale. I like the upper half of this latest version. It looks...nice to me, for some reason that I can't quite explain. I think it might be because that part has the sense of scale I'm looking for.

I also am going to up the saturation of the trees. The more I look at them the more 'dull' they look so I'll try to remedy that. Also, more dead trees to come, once I figure out the best models to use for them.

[Oshyan]

Hot damn this is looking better and better. I think you're doing well with sense of scale across the image now, though the upper parts definitely communicate great height and scale the best. I also really like the variation in coloring in the screen and open meadow areas. It's probably just simple surface color variation between greens and browns, but it's quite effective at this distance. The granite also seems to be more well balanced and nuanced, unless I'm imagining things. The water is a bit dark to my eye, but may be realistic, I don't know.

Again, really looking forward to where this one ends up.

- Oshyan

[EoinArmstrong]

The surface work here is truly jaw-dropping... wow!

[Gannaingh]

Not much has changed. I played with the rock surfacing to make the color variation a little smoother and I made the water less choppy. This is probably going to be what the final version looks like (i might give the water a different seed), except the final will be bigger. Thanks for taking a peek.

[otakar]

Stunning! Great variety. Now add some undergrowth

[Gannaingh]

As suggested I've added some undergrowth. Apparently I also changed the sun's position. I'm going to undo that since I think the shadows are too prominent. I'm also going to play with the POV some, since I like the POV I had back in V2 the best.

[ares2101]

Wow, I gotta look into using some DEM terrains if this is what's possible.  Very nice images.

[Tim O'Donoghue]

I've been trying to make a generic scene setup to recreate the pacific northwest sort of look that I love so much. Essentially I just want to be able to pull a DEM off of the usgs site, stick it in a scene, make a few adjustments, and hit the render button. How very lazy of me.

THIS is the kind of tree distribution I wanted in Terragen from day 1, and also for a lot of the same reason.  I live near Seattle and spend a lot of time in the mountains. I've recently started back with Terragen 3 after several years off. I'm very curious about how you distribute the trees, and whether the full version is needed to support all that.  So far I've been able to place individual objects and render them, but I need tens, or hundreds of thousands of objects to reproduce the tree density in the Cascades - much like your renders in this thread

Any recommendations you might have are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Tim O

[Gannaingh]

Here is the final. I'll probably render it bigger at some point in the future, but right now I want to move onto other projects. Overall, I'm pleased with how it all turned out. Thank you all for your comments along the way.

Tim, it's good to see another person from the PNW on here, cheers. The tree distribution is entirely doable in the free version of Terragen. The placement of the tree populations is controlled by a Surface layer shader which is limited by both slope, so the rock will show up, and altitude, so there are not tree sticking out of the water. The "tricky part" is setting fractal breakup fort he surface layer to something that looks reasonable, but that just requires some time messing with the fractal scale and a generous helping of hitting the random seed button. I'd be happy to give you a hand, just send me a PM and I'll do what I can to help.

[Tim O'Donoghue]

The "tricky part" is setting fractal breakup fort he surface layer to something that looks reasonable, but that just requires some time messing with the fractal scale and a generous helping of hitting the random seed button.

I got the first bit, but you lost me in the fractals.   I'm still trying to pick up the basics for TG3 (last I used was .8-something,) so I'll work my way up to this.  and send a PM after that.

Thanks,

Tim O