Tetons WIP

Started by bigben, February 25, 2007, 08:43:32 AM

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bigben

Hi All

I figured it was about time I started putting something together from all of my tests. Here's a basic start of my Teton's project. The distribution of trees is still just limited to a flow map and will be extended in the lower altitudes later. I still need to experiment a bit more with tweaking my flow map.

I've included some screengrabs of partial renders 'cos I thought they were interesting seeing what is going on beneath the water. The lakes are carved out of the TER using an image masked displacement shader (needs a little fixing at the high end of the lakes) and filled individually with image-masked lake shaders using the same water surface.

The yellow lakebed is a preview surface I use for a) finding the lakes in TG in order to fill them with water and b) to check for errors where the mask is too wide.

Ben

Aenea

The trees look fantastic so far....as well as the lake shape....the whole landscape is wonderful!

I would change the water a bit....it´s a bit unnatural looking (I had the same problem with my current project....maybe that´s the reason why it caught my attention *lol*)

But I bet when you´re done this will be a great picture....keep us updated.....this one´s really interesting

Aenea

old_blaggard

This one really looks like it's on the right track.  The trees so far look great - if you can find a bush or two to add in little bunches, that would add to the realism (as well as the render times ;)).  It's a pity that water doesn't have translucency yet... until it does I wouldn't recommend rendering any of those close-up shots as final images ;).
http://www.terragen.org - A great Terragen resource with models, contests, galleries, and forums.

bigben

Thanks for the comments.  The water does look a bit fake at the edges because there are no shore effects  :( ... just open water being cropped by the shore. I might try some surfacing tweaks later in the abscence of any water plugins. The main reason I've set the camera here is to check the transition from the rocky shore to the rest of the terrain. I'll have to check whether it's the fake stones that are causing the problem or the redirect shader tweaking the terrain, but the terrain on the left should be much smoother.

I'm not entirely happy with the trees on the mountains either as I went a bit overboard with tweaking the WM flow map, but this is easily fixed.

I've also just pre-purchased, so a few more plant populations will soon be on the way.  :)

Oshyan

Looking very nice Ben. Similar to a St. Helens scene I'm working on as far as the lake, stony shore, etc. goes. I think the lake color seems a bit too blue, but I know some lakes *are* like that, and lacking transparency it may be hard to fake a good appearance. But I have found things looking more realistic with darker, less blue water colors.

I'm looking forward to watching your progress on this.

- Oshyan

bigben

#5
Thanks Oshyan

I agree that the water is bit too blue.  The tone is similar to unmasked water so I'll try dropping the saturation first and compare it to unmasked water. 

I was toying with the possibility of doing some extra surfacing with the water mask to simulate some subsurface colours, but this would only work for a high camera position. There is some subsurface detail in the Landsat image I could start with, mostly in the shallow end of Lake Jackson.  The other possibility may be to use an internal drop shadow (0 offset) in Photoshop on the water mask image to use on a child layer of the water surface. I'll apply that to my next high camera render and see how it goes.

Update: Render's in progress. I've set up a demo mask for changing the water colour using an image mask on the colour function of the water shader. This shows some merit given a better mask image. 

The other fix was getting rid of the fake stones from everywhere to just the lake beds and surrounds.  Even though the fake stone shaders were child layers of a base "lake bed" layer they still extended across the entire terrain screwing up grass and snow in the process. >:(  I plugged in the mask for the parent layer into the blending shader for each fake stone layer (and set blend by shader) and everything was fixed   ;D.  I had found some other interesting rocky areas up on the mountains while exploring this file so I'll probably have to put some stones back in this area.  Given this behaviour of fake stones, it's probably pointless having them as child layers. This is not an entirely bad thing as I can now combine extra masks to place the same stones in other areas of the terrain as well without having to duplicate them to another surface layer.

ProjectX

wow! That's a complex scene to put together, I'm sure the whole community would love a peak at the .tgd once you're finished with this! Amazing stuff.

bigben

#7
Despite the excitement of getting my registration key last night I managed to focus on this project a little more. Test render's in progress...

Quote from: ProjectX on February 26, 2007, 03:34:19 PM
wow! That's a complex scene to put together, I'm sure the whole community would love a peak at the .tgd once you're finished with this! Amazing stuff.

I did a bit of tidying up of the node network as it was getting a bit too crowded.  While there may be a lot of nodes in my masks, they're really relatively simple. In some cases the controls could be combined using a single shader but I've deliberately kept them separate to make it easier to modify specific controls.

[attachthumb=#1]

If you take the tree distribution in the bottom centre for example it's just a series of specific placement options to try and simulate a more realistic tree distribution.

  • Flow map : more trees in valleys than on ridges
  • Add some trees in low altitude, flat areas
  • No trees above a certain altitude
  • No trees over water
  • No trees on really steep slopes


Having a bit of a rest for a day or two while I render a higher quality panorama test

Dark Fire

Two 'Wows':
1. The picture in that last post.
2. The node network in that last post. (I don't even know what the faint lines are for or mean - I have never seen them before).

bigben

#9
Quote from: Dark Fire on March 02, 2007, 02:54:29 PM
Two 'Wows':
1. The picture in that last post.
2. The node network in that last post. (I don't even know what the faint lines are for or mean - I have never seen them before).

The faint lines are links to disabled surfaces. I create preview surfaces to check my distribution maps for populations and then disable them for the render. A demo of this is available in http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=864.msg8415#msg8415

I'll post some sample TGDs later to illustrate the masking methods I use.  Some of the node network is technically redundant but it I find it easier to break things down into smaller components at times.

I'm rendering a high res panorama in this project at the moment (latest update below, 50% reduction), but it's going to be a while...  a long while....  I'm down to 10 degree tiles to render at high quality, and some of the tiles are taking 4 hours to render (and others only 6 minutes)... 29 tiles down and counting ;)

Dark Fire

Quote from: bigben on March 03, 2007, 05:09:51 AM
The faint lines are links to disabled surfaces. I create preview surfaces to check my distribution maps for populations and then disable them for the render. A demo of this is available in http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=864.msg8415#msg8415
Thanks - I understand now. That's very clever.