A Brand New Day! --> 2400x1600 update

Started by Tangled-Universe, June 14, 2008, 12:24:05 PM

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Tangled-Universe

More info will follow...

old_blaggard

Wow, very nice!  The mountains here don't quite look convincing to me, but everything else was stunning.  It's clear you used a fantastically high AA setting - I'm guessing something like 12 or 13, right?  Also, which tree model is at the left in the foreground?
http://www.terragen.org - A great Terragen resource with models, contests, galleries, and forums.

Tangled-Universe

#2
Thanks O_b! What do you mean about the mountains?
The AA settings were indeed high, but not at 12 or 13....Actually, the rendersettings were detail 1, GI 2/2 and AA 18!
The model is from Xfrog, Europe 1 collection and it is a Crack Willow.

The scene contains 3 grass populations at VHQ settings, 1 VHQ flower population, 6 VHQ tree populations and the model on the foreground with an Ivy attached to it in 3DSMax.
I've spent well over a month on designing and testing this scene. Lots and lots of testing for water settings, population densities and placement, terrain displacement and lighting.
Made about 50 incremental tgd-versions and probably well over 100 test-renders.
The final image is rendered at 1500x1000px and took about 50 hours on my quadcore machine. Took many split renders to manage this RAM-demanding-scene :)

A lot of the masking of the populations is done by using combinations of positioned cameras connected to distance shaders which then act as blendshader for the density fractals of the populations. This gave me quite good control where I exactly wanted the populations (not) to be. Unfortunately at that moment I wasn't aware of Nikita's camera-mask technique which probably would have saved some time, but not that much.

I can show some more of the techniques involved in this image, but that will be a bit later...I'm a bit short on time.
Everybody just feel free to ask.

Martin

rcallicotte

Very nice.  I want to be there. 
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Alf15000

Impressive realism, particularly foreground and grass population !

Costaud

I really like it, nice vegetation and POV too, great work.

Oshyan

A good improvement! This reminds me I never gave you my feedback from your email, so I'm very sorry about that. Have been quite busy. :(

Anyway it's probably too late now, but I'll give my thoughts anyway. ;D Once again the foreground is absolutely stunning here. I wouldn't really make any changes there as it's really some of the best I've seen, and remarkably realistic.

Once you get beyond the greenery is when some little problems creep in. I think the most distracting thing to my eye is the uniformity, frequency, and consistent coloration of the dead trees. It really calls attention to the limitations of non-procedural models (they're all the same). I'm not sure there should be so many dead trees either. Even if the number of them were kept the same, if the color could be varied it would help a lot. They jsut stand out so much right now it doesn't look natural. But they're in the distance so it's not that noticeable really.

The other thing is the distant mountain. I find the shape of it just doesn't seem realisti. I think partly it's not "sharp" enough - it's very rounded in most of its features. It may also have to do with the texturing, but it's hard to say.

But these are fairly minor critiques - overall it's an excellent image and you could easily consider it "final".

- Oshyan

Seth

very very good render !!!
love the grass and the far population !

lightning

oh this i stunning!!!!
i love everything about this scene!!!!

aa of 18 is pretty high with my castle grounds picture the aa was set to 15 it was originally 33 and detail set to 1.5 but it was just taking so long to render may give another shot by splitting it like you did with this ;)

Saurav

I agree with Oshyans comment about the frequency of the dead trees, other than that his looks stunning. :o

Phylloxera

Beautiful render, very realistic ! Good work, but certainly a very long work !
A question: How did you do to spread your population regularly at the water's edge?

Tangled-Universe

Thanks a lot so far guys :)

I'll see what I can do about those dead trees. I presume you guys mean the area to the right of the tree with the ivy?

Quote from: Phylloxera on June 15, 2008, 03:42:25 AM
Beautiful render, very realistic ! Good work, but certainly a very long work !
A question: How did you do to spread your population regularly at the water's edge?

This was done quite easily using very tight constrictions near the water's edge.
Just take a look at the picture below to see how I did it :)

Martin

Mr_Lamppost

Very nice, I really like the tufted foreground grass.. I do have to agree about the dead trees though and while it's hard to put my finger on what is off, the show line looks a little odd. 

Shame about the dropped bucket, at the bottom lust to the left of centre.
Smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast.

Tangled-Universe

Quote from: Mr_Lamppost on June 15, 2008, 08:34:32 AM
Shame about the dropped bucket, at the bottom lust to the left of centre.

Oh darn :s...I made 7 additional renders to replace bucket-errors :( and missed this one, but thanks for noticing :)

Please solve this problem guys, it's really annoying and costs lots of extra time to solve.
Re-rendering parts costs time and sometimes the GI doesn't match so you'll have to match it in photoshop or in the worst case render it again :(

Phylloxera

#14
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on June 15, 2008, 05:28:18 AM
Thanks a lot so far guys :)

I'll see what I can do about those dead trees. I presume you guys mean the area to the right of the tree with the ivy?

Quote from: Phylloxera on June 15, 2008, 03:42:25 AM
Beautiful render, very realistic ! Good work, but certainly a very long work !
A question: How did you do to spread your population regularly at the water's edge?

This was done quite easily using very tight constrictions near the water's edge.
Just take a look at the picture below to see how I did it :)



Martin

I use as a shader distribution for my populations, I am just surprised as you succeeded in laying out your population also clearly!
Certainly a question of adjustments of the shader!
Thus it is quite carried out!