From the desert to the forest

[DocCharly65]

and here we are back in a quite old thread again... 
It's time to work on the integration of this road into my "2020 movie".

First step was to add puddles all the 1.5km of the road. I also did a bit detail work. There are 8 different populations of leaves, branches and other kind of dirt on the road now.

The vehicles are optimized for animation but it's not sure that they appear all at the same time in my animation.

Here I just used the same POV to test different daytime views. Later I will test all 100-200m of the road if objects and plants are ok or something else looks too bad.


Let's begin in the night with some extraterrestrial monster-fireflies 
[attach=1]

Early in the morning. Intentionally without the "casting shadows function" in clouds/atmosphere  to get a kind of "sun shining through the trees needles". I didn't want god-rays.
[attach=2]

In the late morning. The weather is hazy. I hope the feeling is like the forest will simultaneously reflect your voice as he tries to swallow it.
[attach=3]

I also tried it already for 3D (anaglyphic red-blue)
[attach=4]

Tonight a hi-res "afternoon-version" should be finished. Here is only the 1280x720 version:
[attach=5]

[Kadri]

Looks good Doc.

[Jo Kariboo]

The light is very realistic and natural!!!

[Hannes]

That looks amazing! Great work!!

[Dune]

You're a master!

[bobbystahr]

You're a master!

In agreement here

[DocCharly65]

Thanks 
But I'm not a master, only a pupil in this forum 

Last night I experimented with some more variations of POV:

Here first the promised "HQ Afternoon"

[attach=1]


One for the animation important POV is the view to the stars. The stars are made as projection on the background shader as I learned in the Frankb planet pack I bought on NWDA.

[attach=2]



In my animation I will use one additional effect: Either slowly passing clouds or a clear sky and 1 or 2 passing meteorits... I will see later. Here I tested just the clouds. Not the best ones but ideally suited for 4D noise animation.
Left side usual / right image 3D Red Blue anaglyphic:

[attach=3]   [attach=4]

[Dune]

Let's rephrase 'Master' into 'Master of Animation and StoryBoarding'

The detailed render is very good, but how will you keep the rolling robot on the ground? I assume the whole path it takes it virtually flat, and you 'just' have to bend its direction here and there.

My problem with stars is that it always looks like it's dust on the monitor. There's a kind of harshness and lack of depth, which is obvious of course, due to their nature, but I wonder if there would be a better way..... But of course, for animation it's a great addition, nobody will scrutinize it like a still.

[Jo Kariboo]

Excellent!!!

[Kadri]

...
My problem with stars is that it always looks like it's dust on the monitor. There's a kind of harshness and lack of depth, which is obvious of course, due to their nature, but I wonder if there would be a better way...

If i understand rightly what you mean that is sometimes a problem to me too Ulco.
I try to use very very subtle clouds or colors -depending if it is an image or real 3D scene- to break the sky a little up just for this.

[DocCharly65]

The detailed render is very good, but how will you keep the rolling robot on the ground? I assume the whole path it takes it virtually flat, and you 'just' have to bend its direction here and there.

I found out a nice trick when doing the canyon renders, Ulco. Not very fast but quite effective:
I set the wheels of the robot almost perfectly on Y=0 in wings3D. I let the Terragen preview render the ground with view from above the robot. Then I pause rendering and watch the ground from UNDER the ground. Then I place the Y of the Robot that I can see all of the 3 wheelscoming through the ground a bit. Then rotating the X and Z axis of the robot untill all of the wheels look same deep "under the earth". If you do this at least all 3-5 frames, you get a nice kind of wiggeling over the ground and almost authentic.

[DocCharly65]

I am an absolutely blue-node-noob but sometimes second before fall asleep I think about a theory that a kind of script could keep an object on special places, axis or "relative" paths... I am thinking about something like "get position / get terrain height..." but in this I am really not a master -- I am even not present at all 

But perhaps it's interesting for the developers and explorers of you. I personally would even buy something like this in NWDA.



The stars: As I told it's from FrankB and I do not understand 100% but I think it works like this:
One small png of a star is projected randomly and repeated allover the background which has an additional surfaceshader inside its node network.

Because of render speed I usually never have detail levels above 0.5 - sometimes even down to 0.3 depending on the action or movement in the scene. so I have never seen the "dirt on the monitor" effect. But I can imagine that it happens with your (as I asume up to 0.8-1 detail levels because I can follow the getting smaller star-size when I e.g. increase  my detail level from 1280x720 at 0.1 (fast test image) to 2300x??? at 0.5 (some oversize to 1920x1080 to compensate if I loose material when adjusting 3D views)

[Hannes]

What about using a population, tweak it until there is only one instance? Animate the population the way you want, check "repopulate every frame" and use a compute terrain with the appropriate size (balance between floating and getting each little hole).

[DocCharly65]

What about using a population, tweak it until there is only one instance? Animate the population the way you want, check "repopulate every frame" and use a compute terrain with the appropriate size (balance between floating and getting each little hole).

Interesting idea! I think this could work and I will test the method. With the lean effect it would look even more authentic.

First I have several other things in the pipeline at the moment (the helicoper ...  10...9...8...7...6... ok - a joke... will need some more days but almost finished. 

[bobbystahr]

Great workaround from under the ground Doc and a fine solution from Hannes...But this all could be a moot point if we had collision detection....izzat on the wish list yet?