Gannaingh's Cliff WIP

[Gannaingh]

Here's an attempt at increasing coverage of the grey surfaceing on the cliff while slightly reducing the lichens. Personally, I miss the brown a little bit but I need to see if greater light/dark variation in the grey (since it's pretty mono-colored) changes my mind.

[Dune]

Like it!

[cyphyr]

I want to go here.
Good surfacing on the cliffs and great sand texture.

[Gannaingh]

I've been working on the beach a bit to get some more variation in the sand texturing as well as the general shape on the slight sand dunes. I've also made the water slightly less green. I'm starting to run out of things I want to tweak so I might have to work on the sky a bit.

[Hannes]

Stunning! The rocks are still quite dark. Makes it look mysterious.
What about soft shadows? There are very sharp shadows inside the palm trees, which look a bit strange.

[Gannaingh]

Thanks!

I'm kind of trying to create the natural look of a beach on a bright sunny day where your eyes have trouble seeing a lot of detail in the shadows due to being adjusted for the bright sunlight. However, the dark shadows cover over half of my cliffs so I probably want to make sure they're visible!

The soft shadows are activated with the default diameter of 0.5 degrees. I've been trying to find the cause of those sharp shadows and I think I've narrowed it down to the displacement map on that section of the tree model. I'm going to do some crop renders to test my theory this evening after work.

[Oshyan]

Beach is definitely looking better (very good now). The shadows don't look too dark to me, and I like the idea of a high contrast, bright sunlight scene... but I'd say the actual lighting is not bright enough for that. In fact I think it lacks dynamic range overall, aside from that narrow strip of bright sky. Unless that sand is intentionally very dark, then I think there's some underexposure going on. I've attached a quick reprocessing just from the JPG that seems more like the range of brightnesses I'd expect in a scene like that (even with a few scattered tropical clouds). Of course the results could be much better from an original EXR or render elements, this is just to give you an idea of what the scene suggests in my mind's eye. It may not be what you actually intend.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

Agree with Oshyan.

[Gannaingh]

Oshyan, that is the sort of image I was picturing in my head and I like the adjustments you've made. I've been putting off playing with any EXR settings but I should probably get around to it sooner rather than later!

[Hannes]

I could imagine, that increasing the environment light a bit would help.

[Oshyan]

I think increasing enviro light would just make the shadows look too bright. Maybe just a matter of preference. I'd go for increasing the sunlight or overall exposure, honestly (along with contrast, either in render or post, ideally in post). Anyway, a lot of this can be done in post in the EXR.

- Oshyan

[DannyG]

Cliff face is well done indeed.

[Gannaingh]

I've done some tests with increasing the exposure as well as EXR tweaks with the results posted in the image below. What are your thoughts?

On my home computer screen I like the middle one, only an exposure increase, the best. The bottom one, with the EXR tweaks, has more light in the shadows than I intend and is starting to blow out the sand on the beach. More testing of the EXR settings can probably improve the results, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

[Oshyan]

100% agree, the 2-tick exposure increase looks best to me. It better maintains the dynamics of the scene. What you get in the "sight EXR tweaks" version looks very much like Photoshop's default HDR processing, which frankly sucks (their fault, not yours). What I'd do if you really want to fine tune it yourself (even after you do the 2-tick exposure increase) is open it in Photoshop, save as a 32bit/channel TIFF, then do "Open As" (File Menu) and change the file type selector lower-right to Camera Raw, and then open your .tif. This will give you all the control that Camera Raw has, but on your Terragen image. Way more powerful and integrated and non-destructive than any of Photoshop's other functions in regular edit mode. Alternatively you can try adjustment layers.

- Oshyan

[archonforest]

The middle one.