Generic Mountainside Project

[Gannaingh]

Just as an exercise I want to create a generic, boring, yet believable mountainside. Everything needs improvement at the moment, but you gotta start somewhere! There is some funky stuff happening on the rock surfacing that needs to be sorted out, the tree distribution needs to be less uniform, the atmosphere needs...something to make it pop, and the talus fields need to be more visible. Thanks for taking a look.

[Kadri]

The starting point is good

[AP]

How do you get your trees so well lit and soft? My trees are always too dark even after adjusting the diffuse on the texture sets.

[kaedorg]

Good POV. Good start. This can become a masterpiece.

David

[Dune]

Indeed, it's already really nice. WM terrain, I assume? I like the vegetation coverage of the foreground very much.

[DocCharly65]

Good start!

[mhaze]

This has huge potential - how did you get the talus BTW.

[Tangled-Universe]

Great stuff already, again. Always a pleasure to see when you post a new thread and to see every iteration pass by

Talus fields are cool in general, so is this one

I'm not too keen on the vertical surfaces and splotchy yellow'ish texturing.
If I use a heightfield I always either disable fractal detail or reduce it to 0.1 or lower.
From there it's easier to add displacement, allowing you to keep certain slopes/parts to remain smoother rock.

[Gannaingh]

Thanks all! I wasn't expecting so many responses so quickly!

Chris, trees are always tricky. I've done quite a bit of editing of textures in photoshop to give better results depending on the lighting: sometimes you need to desaturate the texture, other times it needs more yellow or red, etc. Terragen is great, using other tools in addition to Terragen increases the scope of what you can do. The softness of the trees could be due to using the Narrow Cubic filter, a tad higher than realistic soft shadows settings, and an opacity fractal on the needles to 'thin them out' in places.

Ulco, you're correct, the terrain has seen some WM treatment.

mHaze, the talus fields are masked by a flow map from the erosion in World Machine when sculpting the terrain.

Martin, I agree talus is cool! I've been inspired by the ones you've made. I agree the yellow sucks...it should have plant objects on it, but it doesn't for some reason. One more thing to figure out!

Thanks, all!

[AP]

So basically trees are a lot of trial and error outcomes. I figured that long, long ago but i thought i'd inquire for some tips. I will try that Narrow Cubic filter and see what comes of it.

[Gannaingh]

I haven't had too much time for Terragen so I haven't made as much progress as I'd like. I've mostly been working on the rock surfacing and the tree distribution, both of which I like much more now. I also moved the camera a bit to get closer to the tree line which I think could help by adding more layering to the image. I might end up changing the aspect ratio of the image since, besides the four peaks, there isn't very much in the background terrain that is interesting.

[Oshyan]

Looking very good. I especially like how you have multiple layers of vegetation with different overlapping distribution, trees giving way to bushes giving way to talus slopes, etc. Very realistic distribution, in general.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

Very convincing

[AP]

Agreed, very photographic. Vegetation placement is just one part that can make or break realism.

[Gannaingh]

Here is an attempt at a portrait style aspect ratio. I kind f like it better in this case. I've added some clouds to make the sky more interesting, added more plant species to the hillside to give better variety, did some pruning of the foreground vegetation, and I updated the rock surfacing. Thanks for taking a look.