This is still not complete, but I am going to take a break on it for now. This is a 100% terragen render with very minor postwork in photoshop.
This image features a new breaking waves technique I've wanted to try, and it seems to have worked well. Additionally, the render time only took 3.5 hours at quality 1.0 and at 800x600. I should probably render it larger.
The terrain is a simple image map I painted in Photoshop. This allows direct control over all aspects of the terrain, as well as allowing me to quickly and easily create precise masks for placing other elements in the scene, like textures, foliage, rocks, etc. I finally figured out how to give those smooth beaches, which will really come in handy on future images. Tip: Just make sure your first terrain is really smooth with low noise, then stack the exact terrain on top of it, but with more noise, and with an altitude constraint. The smaller land displacements were done after the compute normal, so this allowed some "bulging" to simulate eroded rock.
The textures are all procedural fractal stacks filtered through a surface layer (I really love this technique).
The trees and foliage are a heavily modified tree model I found in the forums a long while back, but its so modified in the shaders, I can no longer tell who's it is (but a big thank you to whoever created it). I definitely need to work on foliage as I haven't spent much time in that department yet. Where's the procedural foliage when you need it?
The water is a standard TG2 water plane with a few color and transparency tweaks.
The waves are actual painted image maps, created in Photoshop. I'll try to explain the general idea, as there are 2 things going on here. A-the water is displaced where the waves will be. B-The water is colored where the waves will be (for the foamy white). Of course, knowing where the waves will be requires knowing where the terrain is. Since I had already painted the terrain in Photoshop, this was alot easier, as I could paint how the waves wrapped and warped around rocks and onto the beach. This would be have very difficult with procedural terrain, as it would require estimation, trial, and error, and would be very time consuming. So for the displacement (A), I added a surface layer between the water shader and lake shader, and fed the wave displacement image into the displacement input of the surface layer. For the foamy white colors (B), I created another image map based off of the wave displacement image, and merged that with the water shader via "screen", so that only the white would show through. The merge shader has a mix control, and I used that to dial in the color. So with that, everything was mixed perfectly into the water surface. Though this takes some external paint work, I am very excited about this technique, as its really not all that complicated.
The clouds are a clip file I've been working on for a while.
The background and lighting are using the GI technique I've been working on. I've found it really spices up the scene, though since this is a mid day scene, it could easily have been done with standard TG2 lighting. The background itself is an image map I was using as a temp cloud background. I am considering removing this for the final scene as I think TG2's clouds are much better.
The pirate ship is a low res model I found a long while back and converted to a TGO for distant shots.
Image StatsRes: 800x600 (I am going to try for even larger)
Detail: 1.0
AA: 10
GI: 2/2
Render time: 3.5 hours
Things I could improve:I forgot to turn on soft shadows! I could kick myself for this.
Definitely higher resolution needed.
The waves could use even more detail, as well as showing some swells off the coast.
The foliage could use even more variation in color and type.
The clouds could be better.
The ground could use more variation.
The pirate ship could use more detail (sails anyone?)
The background image map clouds show in the top right, and though it doesn't look bad, it bugs me.
As always, many thanks for looking and any comments you may have to offer.
-Jeff
