This is the image I was writing about in this thread:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=8144.0Finishing this one was like giving birth to an elephant baby, I can tell you!
Some information:
after I had these render problems I mentioned in the thread above, I rerendered the whole thing in quick render mode with higher settings without any error. Strange. Like Oshyan said there is no difference in the render presets except the settings.
Anyway it worked.
There's a lot of stuff in that image: Vegetation here frome the file section (thanks to the creators, I don't really remember who made what...), except the "hero tree", which was created in 3ds max, mainly with a plugin called "tree storm" which I had the opportunity to put my hands onto. It's not allowed to share objects created with that plugin, so I'm terribly sorry that I can't share this tree.
Anyway, I didn't like the trunk. It was just a regular column. I distorted it to make it look really gnarly and copied some of the bigger branches and "glued" them to the bottom to fake some roots. Hard to see, but they are there!
The foliage wasn't dense enough, so I erased it and used the smaller branches as particle emitter. The particles were four sets of billboards with leaf textures and opacity maps. I then used ivy generator and exported the whole object into TG, adjusted the textures.
More than 300 MB!! Takes quite a while to load. Nevertheless I had no problems creating a whole population with it.
The godrays are rendered in a separate pass and were added in Photoshop to have more control over it.
I wasn't able to eliminate the grain and noise in the volume light. It's just the haze in the athmosphere tab with ray trace shadows on. The first attempt was made with 128 samples. Because of the bad look I upped the samples to 360(!). Still grainy, so I had to reduce some noise in PS.
Next I created a DOF mask and blurred the result in PS. The last thing was adjusting contrast, saturation and colour grading. Hope you like it.
