Check your object textures.

[bigben]

Coming from a position of relative ignorance about object modelling, I had automatically made the assumption that the XFrog trees (being free samples of commercial objects) would have optimised texture images. The first time I saw the leaf texture for the birch tree the photographer in me said it was too washed out, but I assumed that it was like that for a reason. Given the control over lighting and atmosphere available in TG (and other rendering programs) I couldn't really think of what that reason was so I went ahead and optimised the levels. Modified file and backup of original available here: http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/terragen/files/birch.zip (1Mb)
[attach=#2]

Below is a render of a default TGD with a fractal terrain and a bunch of trees using my modified texture. The leaves on the left look pretty close to the birch tree I walked past this morning on my way to the station.

[rcallicotte]

Good job.

[old_blaggard]

Very neat.  I love what you're doing with the colors and the textures of the XFrog models - it's giving us a whole lot of new possibilities to play around with.

[Tangled-Universe]

Glad you adjusted your post, because the first one didn't make sense to me
(couldn't figure out what you've been rendering)

Ok, on topic:

I also noticed the colours are often a bit "pale" (don't know the exact word for it in english). Great job on taking the effort to adjust the textures, they're definitely looking better, they're fresh
Did you also adjust the bark? They tend to be pale too.

Keep it up!

Martin

[Volker Harun]

Funny, I was thinking the same but vice versa and reduced the saturation of the leaves by about 50% 

Well, maybe because I am using another lighting or something 

[Oshyan]

As far as directly viewed photographs are concerned yes the textures are often "off", however they are designed to work with lighting in 3D applications and so may be intentionally tuned in terms of levels, contrast, etc. for best results in these situations. Certainly you may want to tune your textures for your preferred result, but just be aware that there is not necessarily a "right" way to do it. Unfortunately since these textures are photo-based they will inevitably have some lighting and color information that is not "neutral" and so may need to be manually adjusted to fit certain scenes. If the "essence" of a leaf texture could be generated truly procedurally it could be more "idealized" and neutral and thus fit into scenes more naturally since it would be directly responding to the scene lighting, etc.

- Oshyan

[Cyber-Angel]

Have a look at this paper on modeling leaf vanation paterens this is a method to consider if Terragen gets its own internal planet generator one day:

http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/venation.sig2005.pdf

In fact doing a Google search for: Leaf Venation Rendering brings up 12,400 hits and there is some interesting reading out there on botanical methods of rendering this phenomena, and if your getting into that scale then you should also consider having the inclusion of plant stem hairs as described in this paper based on an L-system approach

http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/hairy.pg2004.pdf

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel

[Que]

far to tecnical for me all this lol

[bigben]

As far as directly viewed photographs are concerned yes the textures are often "off", however they are designed to work with lighting in 3D applications and so may be intentionally tuned in terms of levels, contrast, etc. for best results in these situations. Certainly you may want to tune your textures for your preferred result, but just be aware that there is not necessarily a "right" way to do it.

And this is partly why I posted these modifications. If you start with a texture modifed for a certain set of lighting conditions (including the particular characteristics of the rendering program) and then import that into a different situation you can go around in circles trying to get things look right. I've always found Terragen's lighting to be pretty good so as a photographer it seemed to make sense to start with a normalised image so that you could see exactly what effect TG's lighting was having.  Otherwise you have to optimise all of your surfaces to match the lighting you set up for the textures.

... and then of course there's the odd mixture of quality within an object...  e.g. light leaf, dark bark... these surely can't be rendering optimisations.

The issue of reflections is one I looked at. At one point I experimented with creating a mask for a reflection shader, which appeared to work but extended the render time horribly.  Maybe something to revisit later.