Cloudy Peak

[moodflow]

Well, I'll be honest.  This one started out really nice, with a great view, perfect colors and cloud placement - but ended up a complete nightmare in the end.  Plenty of cloud artifacts and crashes (mainly due to out of memory errors due to the foliage).  I had to switch out the foliage at the last minute with other lower res versions to avoid these crashes.  I had a perfect vantage point at first, but then couldn't get the foliage to "lay" properly art-wise, so ended up moving the camera for a better view.  I couldn't get anything to look right after that.  I nearly gave up on this one, but decided to complete it due to the sheer work I had put into it.

Sure enough, the final render had plenty of unexpected artifacts (mainly in the clouds).  You'll notice I "smoothed out" some portions of the clouds in Photoshop (else it just looked annoying).  Luckily it wasn't much work at all.  The image was a standard 4:3, but I had to crop of the bottom 3rd of the image due to the foliage not laying right due to the camera moves. 

Stats:
Render time: ~20 hr
Res:  800x600
Quality: 0.8
AA:  16 (for the foliage - it needed it)

Other than the cloud smoothing, only minor color adjustments, lighting, contrast, and selective sharpening in Photoshop.  This gives the images a little something extra.  This one needed it.

[rcallicotte]

Beautiful clouds.  Nice overall.  It seems busy, but it might be I'm the one too busy to study it thoroughly.  Like the quality.  We'll keep wishing for the next update.   

[Mr_Lamppost]

Those clouds are very nice.

If you keep to this wide format you could use another tree to obscure the small piece of terrain in the lower left corner.  This would let uoy keep the overall composition but would simplify the perception of depth and reduce that "Busy" feel.

[Oshyan]

Very nice mountain, clouds and moon. Looks like the moon is our real moon - what image source and setup did you use? The results are quit enice.

What artifacts did you get in the clouds? Did you try adjusting (or disabling) the Acceleration Cache?

- Oshyan

[dhavalmistry]

can I have your cloud settings!....they look real good!

[moodflow]

can I have your cloud settings!....they look real good!

Absolutely!  Here is the .tgc   

[moodflow]

Very nice mountain, clouds and moon. Looks like the moon is our real moon - what image source and setup did you use? The results are quit enice.

What artifacts did you get in the clouds? Did you try adjusting (or disabling) the Acceleration Cache?

- Oshyan

Thanks for the compliments.  Yes, this is an image map moon.  I haven't been able to build a convincing procedural moon yet.

As for the cloud artifacts, I didn't use accelaration cache.  It was due to 2 cloud layers interacting over terrain - thats the best way I can explain it.  Pretty much, the terrain that was obscured by the clouds created a harsh white line where the terrain line was.  I had to cover it and blur it out in Photoshop.  It didn't exist when I used one cloud layer, but I needed 2 for the effect I wanted.  This was a good learning experience for sure.

[Tangled-Universe]

Very good work on this one!
I like the cloud-formations and their settings.
The left foreground isn't really disturbing to me, only thing I'd change about it is to give the soil/rock a bit more rough look/details.
The composition is really nice and the peak looks fine too.
Like some said the image looks a bit 'busy', removing the moon and birds will make a huge difference I think.
Another thing is that the sky is a bit too saturated to my taste. I'd prefer a cooler color of blue.

In overall still a very good image and I'm already looking forward to see your next work, keep it up!

Martin

[sjefen]

Wow. This is really beautiful. My only, tiny crit would be for the background mountain. It's very nice, but I think it could use a litte more details. Mayby just in texturing. Is it the alpine fractale?