Just sharing a few of my renders with all of you .

[Michelh]

I am new to the forum, I did a few renders and I wanted to share them with you. I am open to critiques and ideas to improve my skills . I've used Terragen  for about 2 years now off and on and been using  terragen 3  for a few months every day now . Am still a noob but I really wanted to have some feedback from people on the site .

[Mahnmut]

Hi Michel,
nice start.
I like the colors and depth in the first one. Only point of critique in my view is the scale of the trees. If the bright mountaintop is supposed to be snowcovered, the trees are way to big in comparison. But because the image is nice looking as it is I´d rather loose the white top, make the haze a little lighter and reduce the scale of the trees only a little, that would shrink the perceived scale of your landscape to fit the trees rather than the other way round.

I think your clouds need work, if you don´t want to put much effort and rendertime into the clouds at this point I´d recommend cirrus, these look good without much effort and rendertime.

I´d like to see further works, welcome to the forum!

[archonforest]

Welcome to the Forum!
I like the 1st one. Nice colors and cool mood. Like a fairy tale. The only thing I would consider to change is the size of the trees. They seems to me a bit big. Especially at the far back.

On the second one I would reduce a bit the amount of clouds and see what veggies can
be planted around.

[Michelh]

Thank you guys for the nice welcome to this forum and yes I will implement the feedback you gave to me as soon as I finish my other projects that I hope to show you soon. One of them is a video  .. so takes ages to render but i hope to show more soon .

[Dune]

You can use the slope and height restrictions of a surface or distribution shader to restrict the trees to say lower areas. You can also add a power fractal with perhaps changed sizes into the masking input of that surface or distribution shader for more patchy distribution of the tree, and thus set up a more natural environment. Say you only want clumps of trees of about 100m, and hardly any solitary trees; then make the sizes of the fractal 100/100/100 or something like that, harden the color to a very white (1 or 2), and slide the offset left. Check the colors on the terrain by adding a surface shader just before planet and temporarily use that; pull the distribution shader into the masking input of that last surface shader and you'll see the patches on your terrain, that's where your trees will sit. Disable that last surface shader again before rendering of course.   

[DocCharly65]

Welcome Michelh,

I find in both something I like. I personally would also reduce the tree size in the first one.

In both I would do something with the clouds. Perhaps increase depth, reduce density and brighten color... or something like that.

In the second image perhaps reducing the roughness of the water will look better - but I like the fog bank very much.

Anyway have fun and take as much time as you like to do many experiments 

[Michelh]

I already use the height restriction and slope one for textures. Id like to understand one day how to have a height restriction for trees, I mean being able to say that trees under 1000M would be at a certain scale and over that height it would be less . Id also like to understand how to have more stormy like clouds ( hurricane or Tornado )  and how to import if it is possible a animation of a 3d object i made in MAYA to Terragen . Also can we import camera form terragen to Maya ?. Anyways, I can't really work on Terragen at the moment because of rendering a video and after that all try to upgrade my RAM and video Card .. Thanks again on the feedback,  all improve everything you guys told me as soon as I have time.

[Michelh]

btw I posted on YouTube a few seconds of my video render done with Terragen . If you could give me some feedback on this video it would be very appreciated .  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtnbxCL2LpA

[Oshyan]

That's a lot of questions for one thread. I'll give quick answers and maybe you can try things out and post more in-depth questions in separate topics when you're ready.

For height variation, you can't control this by a shader or mask with a single population so what you would have to do is have 2 populations and control their relative distribution with masks so that they appear to blend 2 sizes of the same model. For your purpose, you'd probably use a Distribution Shader to control distribution by Altitude.

There are many parameters that affect the look of clouds. A hurricane or tornado is quite a specific thing though, it's not just "stormy" (for which you could increase density and coverage, and also darken the colors if you like). Creating a tornado is possible, but is probably a bit advanced for now. Fortunately you can get a pre-made tornado scene from NWDA to get you started easily: http://www.store.nwdastore.com/atmospheres-clouds

Animation can be imported using CHAN data (for camera), or FBX (camera, lighting). You can also use OBJ sequences, which is what you would need to have an actual animated object (as opposed to camera motion, or simple object "translation"). To get the camera into TG from Maya, use FBX or CHAN formats.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

I like image 1 just as it is.
It has a nice children's illustration book feel to it. With that in mind and a bit more work It would make a great image to hang where young dreamers could see it. Really rather pleasant 

[Michelh]

Thank you Oshyan, will try to mess around with the clouds and animation soon. Thank you also  TheBadger its always nice to get feedback.

[Michelh]

This is just an update of a few images I rendered with Terragen 3 in a more complex scene I think. As always comments are welcome. The screen is made by myself but the 3d objects are taken from a scene I didn't made. Only did the texture on them.