Quote from: domdib on April 07, 2009, 09:50:56 AM
Here is the next iteration, with some grass (Dandelo's) and trees (free Xfrog) for scale. AA1, 6, 3,3, 8. Ray traced shadows on.
Where did you enable raytraced shadows? If you did it in the renderer (which is enabled at default) than it's good of course.
When you enabled it in the clouds then there's no need for it because the terrain isn't casting shadows on the clouds.
I agree with Calico about the translucency, but be careful with it.
Mostly I increase the diffuse color of the leave-shader along with the translucency.
I do it like this because the textures themselves are sometimes quite dark at diffuse color at 0.5.
If you increase the diffuse color the texture self will become brighter.
In my experience when you solely make the leaves brighter by cranking up the translucency I find them to look more plastic.
Also, don't forget to add some reflectivity to the leaves.
A suggestion to start at is strength @ 0.2 and roughness @ 0.4 for example.
You don't need to increase the GI at all, really. 3/3 is sufficient as you can see yourself because the shadows on the mountain are well detailed.
I suggest you could try GI 2/4 which might give even better results and also renders a tad faster
Another tip: when I use water I always center the lake-object to the middle of my image and I make the lake-object's radius as small as possible.
Just enough to cover all the visible water in the scene.
Since the renderer has improved in backface-culling/clipping there's still great chance that much water will be rendered even when it isn't visible in the final image.
To prevent this as much as possible I always keep the lake radius as small as possible.
Saves rendertime
Martin
