Boundary Waters Final

[old_blaggard]

I wanted to try doing an image with a cinematic aspect ratio, and this scene kind of grew up around it. I was also inspired by a trailer I saw for the IMAX movie "North of Superior" a while back. The smaller waves are a little too sharp, but I feel that the clouds came out quite well. Render time was a 36 hours on a Core 2 Duo (reflective rocks take a long time to render). Comments and critiques appreciated.

[Zylot]

I dunno, the image is cool, but the waves seem to uniform and sharp.  the clouds are really cool, in a weird huge puffy way!!

[rcallicotte]

Except for the lines in the water, this is pretty nice.  The clouds looked like icebergs, at first.  Nice rendering of the trees.

[Tangled-Universe]

This is nice work so far, but I do have some suggestions:

You mentioned that rendering the reflective rocks takes very long. How did you add reflectivity? Using a reflective shader with raytraced reflections? If so, disable raytraced reflections. It renders ~4 times faster and there's almost no visible difference. You can also choose to use a default shader as base layer for your rocks and then set reflectivity using the specularity settings similar to that in the reflective shader. The default shader generates the specularity/reflectivity the same way as the reflective shader except that it doesn't generate it using raytraced reflections.

I see what you've been trying to do with the lines in the water I like the approach but as said before the lines are too sharp and also to regular.
But I have to admit or make a remark about the water in Terragen.
In all previous version the waves of the water are 'always' 'horizontal'. If you want waves arriving at the shore you will always have to choose a pov from the beach rather then from the side like you did.
I think a function to rotate the orientation of the waves or to make them concentric would be very useful.

The rest of the water and the transparency looks very good, keep that untouched
I also like the variations in stones, though one fake stone layer looks a bit triangled.
The grass, trees and logs look nice and work well together. Looking at the stones I think you can even increase the tallness of the trees, maybe 1,5 times.

Those clouds are amazingly deep and thick. The distant hazy effect is nearly perfect to me
Maybe you can try to decrease fake internal scattering to give the clouds some more definition, beceause it's mainly blue and white.
If so you may also consider to increase the small scale size in your fractal. As you probably know the density roughness of the fractal roughly controls how well the smaller scales are defined.

Seeing the length of the post it seems a lot is wrong about this image, but that's nonsense. It's good work so far with a couple of very strong points and I think like your waterfall picture this has potential.

Martin

[old_blaggard]

Thanks for the comments, especially your very detailed one, Martin.  I agree wholeheartedly that the lines in the water are too sharp and horizontal.  I created them using my concentric waves function set (you can see it in action in my waterfall image here), but I placed the center out a bit too far, so the radius is large enough that they're horizontal for all intents and purposes here.  Also, masking the smaller waves on the water plane according to the altitude of terrain (thus the depth) is also a bit tricky, which contributed to their sharpness.  I also agree with you about the stones, and I feel that the red ones especially need a little more interest to them.  As for the clouds, the shape is quite like that the clouds take when brewing into a thunderstorm in northern Minnesota.  In regards to lighting, I played with almost all of the settings in the density fractal and the cloud layer, and have noticed extremely little effect from the scattering and propagation settings in the clouds.  I'll do a test render, though, and see what happens.

[Tangled-Universe]

hmmmm...changing scattering and propagation settings in your cloudnode should really have strong effects...strange...well, let's see what you come up with next

[Mahnmut]

I really like your Vegetation, it looks real.
On the other hand your stones to me look as if they lie on hard ground, not in the sand. I would have guessed that they are objects, not fake stones, which I  like better most times because they blend more into their surrounding ground.
The concentric waves have been discussed enough, but this depth-depending mask for the waves is great, how did you do that?
Best regards,
Jan

[inkydigit]

nice job o_b....!

[monks]

I really like the undergrowth under the trees- very convincing touch!

monks

[old_blaggard]

Here's the update.  I adjusted the waves (obviously) as well as playing with some other settings such a little bit of nearly imperceptible depth-based cloudiness to the water and reducing the size of the fake stones to put the scale of the image into better perspective.

[Blonderator]

The revised version is much more realistic. Great job!

[Zylot]

Now we're talking!!

[nvseal]

That's looking fantastic. 

[Oshyan]

I'd still add even more randomness to the incoming waves, maybe a Warp Shader or something. But otherwise it's a really nice scene.

- Oshyan

[Yoda Almighty]

this is much better than It was before. looks great!