Australia

[alessandro]

Another project done for fun, in a 3 hours spare time I had. Started with a ZBrush plane, modeling a rough shape of the cliffs, and exported the .exr vector displacement map.

Back to Terragen, applied some displacement (especially lateral) and color nodes, toning all very red as I love those australian outback pictures so much. Used painted shaders to create the pond depression and masks for the plants pops. Populated the terrain with bushes, a red gum tree, some ferns (not appropriate I know), put some fake stone shaders and placed to Kangaroos OBJ's exported from DAZ Studio. These last where rendered to gather water reflections, and have been used as reference later, when I replaced those with the DAZ+Look at my Hair furred models counterpart (which BTW don't make much of a difference at that distance, as hair are barely visible).
Waterfall modeled and rendered in ZBrush, and composited over the TG render later.
Here attached the images from the initial terrain, the waterfall mesh, how the TG node interface looks, and the final composition. Thanks for looking.

[bigben]

That's a very nice image, especially for 3hrs. Thanks for the background on the creation.

My only cries are related to plants. Unfortunately most "Australian" tree models don't have the randomness in branch direction that is so typical of our trees, but that's not your fault    Took me a while to find the redgum because I was expecting to find a mature one, although it would have looked out of place here. The distribution is the only other thing. Wherever there is water you will expect to find a lot of trees, and the bare tops of the rocks would only have very few.  The white mallee is possibly a better alternative to the ghost gums you'd expect to see and it's free at the moment http://xfrog.com/product/OC49.html. Maybe just lighten the trunk so that it's nearly white.

I must get around to learning xfrog one day

[Oshyan]

Great workflow outline Alessandro, thanks! It's a very nice final image, I like the cliffs and texturing, although I think there is a bit of an odd mix of smoothness and cracks that I think looks a bit unrealistic. If you can use more procedural displacement on those cliffs while keeping their basic shape and character, that would enhance the realism I think (if you're using the displacement map as I imagine you are, then this should not be a big difficulty). The waterfall from Zbrush gives a good basic particle flow structure, but woudl also be enhanced by some cloud-based mist in Terragen, I think. You mention how the Daz-rendered kangaroos don't look much different from the TG ones in this case because of the distance, and I'm just curious if you have the TG-rendered ones for comparison.

Overall a great scene already and like I said it's great to see the workflow breakdown on it.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Well I like it too. I understand and agree with the comments about realism. But to me this image read right off as a high quality kids animated movie more than an attempt at a photo.

Im waiting for a bird to fly in and yell to the roos that the coyotes (or whatever) are raiding the grass lands again. Whereupon the roos look at one another and frantically yell "Joey!" Refering to their adventurous but slightly naive young son.

But we need http://www.alembic.io , and wind for this. A few other things too I guess.    Just do it.

[Dune]

Thanks for showing this, Alex. I very much like it, but agree with Oshyan about a little more fine displacement on the rocks. Did you need the gradual transparency for this render?
I wonder if the waterfall can be done differently, in TG I mean. A combination of a semi transparent plane, vertical cloud column and a pop of stones as water would very well be possible, though it might even be more work.

[bigben]

I'll have to disagree with comments on the mix of smoothness and cracks. It's been a while since I've been to the outback but they look pretty believable to me.

[Dune]

Yes, maybe you're right, on second glance. And you're the Aussie expert!

[mhaze]

Great image - I might soften the cracks a little but looking at climbing photos of the area they are pretty close to the real thing.

[alessandro]

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions.

@Oshyan: I meant to create just a sort of water leaking through a hole, rather than a real waterfall (even if I gave that definition), so that is why I didn't put some mist down there. About the kangaroos rendered in TG, here is a cropped render, but as I mentioned earlier no fur on these, as I used those just for placeholder reasons. I'll probably see if I can rework some displacement on this, but no promises as there is never enough time to do things as I'd like to

@Dune: yes I wanted to see if I could use a water shader efficiently with a mesh such a waterfall in this case. After many attempts, my answer was no. I wasn't able to create any reflective, shiny and "wet glossy" look on the waterfall mesh. I'm not sure if one can create a network of nodes to simulate such, but the water shader itself takes ages to render, and I hate time ticking
I'd love so much to see the TG renderer being able to handle a higher variety of materials that don't fall into the category of terrains and partly water. Say I'd like to get some proper SSS, more "modern" shiny and complex shading capabilities (see for example what ZBrush, Keyshot, Maya itself are able to accomplish), so that all kind of surfaces can be replicated. Dreams, I know, but it doesn't hurt to share thoughts. And along with SSS of course backface lighting so that finally leaves look good also close to camera (again, even playing with specularity maps, I've never been able to get some glossy, shiny look on leaves that need strong highlight areas). And my wish list would go on (transparency on OBJ's, displaceable OBJ's, multi-type populator node and so on...)
In any case, here attached comes the waterfall OBJ, in case anybody likes to try: http://www.alessandromastronardi.com/xp/waterfall.obj.zip

Thanks to bigben for the hints about the australian vegetation (I had already the idea that not all the plants used were coherent with reality), and all the other folks as well.
Terragen is an excellent application, and I'd love so much to see more features coming in regularly and more often so that it could become a complete suite capable of serving multiple purposes.

[archonforest]

Great image and many thx for the waterfall object. I really like the colors and the lights/shadows of your picture

[Dune]

 I might try to have a go at believable water....but, direct import of your waterfall doesn't show any part(s).... Can that be?

[mhaze]

I've just downloaded it and it unzipped ok.

[Dune]

Yeah, unzipped okay, but no parts in TG.

[alessandro]

You are right, it seems like the OBJ is not read properly. I resaved it and tested in TG, it now works. Same download link...

[mhaze]

Run it through Poseray and add a material