Antelope Canyon

[Primalace]

Here is something I've been working on after seeing some pictures of this really interesting canyon.

[Seth]

very good light and colours

[Zairyn Arsyn]

very nice, 
maybe you could render it larger

i like the wavy displacements, they go well with the lighting

[cyphyr]

Very realistic, great lighting and well framed
You could take this a lot further and have a real stunner:)
Richard

[Tangled-Universe]

Very realistic, great lighting and well framed
You could take this a lot further and have a real stunner:)
Richard

Absolutely!
Go on with this, please, this is a great start!

Cheers,
Martin

[Primalace]

Thank you all for the kind comments. I do want to take it further but I'm unsure how. I've not even fully explored the terrain I made. The canyon is ten kilometres long and that section I rendered was just after entering it So I might get lucky if I explore it more. There's some really interesting cave like bits and then much more open sections.

I used a lot of reference from the actual canyon on getting the terrain shape right so I'm not sure if I can develop that aspect any further. I did originally want to create a very bright light beam coming from a gap at the top of the canyon but as far as light rays go I'm not sure how to do this in just pure atmosphere and I would need the light beam to be bright enough to reflect slightly off of the walls too if I'm going for complete realism.

I would also love to render this larger but that's as large as I could get the free version of Terragen to go. I even rendered it on its side so I could get as much height as possible. It's a shame that the restrictions in image size are different for each dimension rather than just being 800px x 800px giving you the choice between portrait and landscape but rotating the camera works in a pinch

[Tangled-Universe]

I'd be more than happy to help you with the rendering and constructing the scene.
If you feel anything for that then please let me know.

Cheers,
Martin

[domdib]

Primalace, if I were you, I'd take up Tangled-Universe's offer, as he is known within the TG2 community for his expertise with canyons. I think it's a great render already.

I'm interested to know how you created this terrain - it sounds like you worked from DEMs originally? But they wouldn't give you overhangs of course, so how did you go about developing those?

Oh, and if you want a larger version, there's probably one or two people who might volunteer to do this for you 

[Tangled-Universe]

Primalace, if I were you, I'd take up Tangled-Universe's offer, as he is known within the TG2 community for his expertise with canyons. I think it's a great render already.

I'm interested to know how you created this terrain - it sounds like you worked from DEMs originally? But they wouldn't give you overhangs of course, so how did you go about developing those?

Oh, and if you want a larger version, there's probably one or two people who might volunteer to do this for you 

Thanks for your compliment Domdib

I think he used 2 heightfields as a base and displaced those 2 together (or separate perhaps) with a redirect shader.
That's how I (would) do it.

[Hannes]

Very nice! The lighting looks very natural.
First I thought that the surface might be a little bit too smooth, but I know that sometimes nature looks like that.
So take TU's advice and see where it goes! Looking forward to the next version.

[Seth]

I think he used 2 heightfields as a base and displaced those 2 together (or separate perhaps) with a redirect shader.
That's how I (would) do it.

^^
best way for easy canyons !

[Primalace]

Thanks for your compliment Domdib

I think he used 2 heightfields as a base and displaced those 2 together (or separate perhaps) with a redirect shader.
That's how I (would) do it.

I did indeed use two heigthfields. I spent a very long time working on each heightfield individually before merging them and doing a few extra redirects but I ended up with weird artefacts along the floor from the merging process and redirects. I spent a very long time debugging this issue until I gave up and started from scratch, this time merging the heightfields early and doing all the redirects on them both.

Due to the shape of the canyon, a billowy fractal redirect in one direction on both walls layered with another redirect working in the other direction has the combined affect of nice round billowy shapes layered with sharp curvy lines on top for both sides. Which is exactly what I wanted in the first place. Plus since all these redirects happen after the compute terrain node I could use surface layers to limit the redirects to the canyons walls keeping the surface flat.

Google Antelope Canyon and you'll see that the walls are very smooth except for the flowing lines caused by water erosion I think. A strata and outcrop shader has done that for me and I also added slight, grainy stone like displacements on the surfaces after seeing them in the photos. All in all it's actually a pretty simple set up after I scrapped the first iteration and made a new one from scratch. As for the render offer I might take you up on that after I've tweaked the surfaces a bit more and explored my canyon for better angles.

[Seth]

I hope you will consider this offer when your tgd will be finished as we all hope for a hq render ^^

[domdib]

You might even consider making the set-up available on the NWDA Community Store, as you've clearly put a lot of work into it, and I'd guess there would be a fair amount of interest. But keep tweaking!

[Primalace]

You might even consider making the set-up available on the NWDA Community Store, as you've clearly put a lot of work into it, and I'd guess there would be a fair amount of interest. But keep tweaking!

I didn't even think of that. Does anyone else agree? If so would people pay for it? If so then it might be worth my while if I clean up some of my other works such as my asteroids, as the surface shader that makes them is quite something and completely distorts a planet via craters at many many scales. Either way I'm currently exploring my canyon looking for some alternate angles. The great thing is you can easily control the canyon height, wall angle and length so there's no end to the possibilities here.