Recent posts

#71
Image Sharing / Re: Mudflats
Last post by Dune - March 12, 2024, 10:14:03 AM
Thanks for your somments, guys. The ripples are 2 imagemaps, and I'm still trying to do something procedurally. I agree about the roughish part in the center. I am also not satisfied with the whitish color. It could be watered/smudged bird droppings, but it's not recognizable as 'something'. The only floating foam is in the water. The 'clams' are just fake stones with a hard color variation, but I like the effect too. The wet areas are also a bit bumpy (watered down sand ridges), and for real water remnants they have to go.
The stream is just a simple shape, but something like this will have to be built from a wider area with actual creeks.
For wettish mud I usually use non-RT reflection with a reflectiveness of something like 0.2-0.5 and roughness 0.2, highlight intensity also down to 0.5, but it depends on how wet your mud needs to be. For the watery bits, full reflectivity and roughness 0.01 or so. I didn't use RT, but added some localized (Simple shapes) RT reflective areas where it's really beneficial (for a reflected plant or bird or so). All to keep render times low ;)
#72
Image Sharing / Re: Mudflats
Last post by schmeerlap - March 12, 2024, 09:00:10 AM
Nice mudflats scene. As I said on Discord the bland sky as a backdrop helps to highlight the tall grass on the mound. Good juxtaposition between gently rippling shallow pools with the higher frequency ripples of the wet sand. If I may pick your brains here: what parameters do you use on your Reflective Shader? I have yet to properly master this shader.
#73
Image Sharing / Re: The Rough-Hewn Shore
Last post by schmeerlap - March 12, 2024, 08:15:04 AM
Thanks Martin, Ulco for your expert advice on render settings. I will seriously consider rendering with higher AA and lower Micropoly Detail henceforth.
#74
Image Sharing / Re: Mudflats
Last post by Tangled-Universe - March 12, 2024, 07:39:37 AM
As a fellow Dutch the render is very recognizable for what it's meant to represent, nice work!
I like the ripples and the transition between them. The white'ish patches visually make sense to me when behind the bicyclist, but on the left part I don't know what they are meant to represent, especially because one patch is on the 'dry' surface. I guess it was meant as foam you sometimes see floating?
Not a huge fan of the noise/interference going on at the very center of the image, but I respect the argument you gave me on Discord with regards to rendering.
Else, I also like the flat seaweeds and I don't know how to describe it in English or even at all, but those stones or clams(?) in the wet area have a nice smooth displacement effect around them which gives a strong sense that there's actually interacting liquid there.
I think that's a really nice touch.

What could be a cool idea is to create an aerial shot out of this, like 30m from the ground and camera pointing down like 45 degrees. Then use a smoothly distorted voronoi to create the patches of dryland and the channels of water and mud between them.
In the style of this: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a1/07/52/a107523220959a48a95a5cfe58c7ee5e.jpg
I think this could look really cool if it's build around an interesting geometric pattern.
#75
Image Sharing / Re: The Rough-Hewn Shore
Last post by Tangled-Universe - March 12, 2024, 06:59:59 AM
For displacements like these with fine strata rendering with detail 0.5 is borderline sufficient and likely insufficient, but it might be worth trying.
The key message is that 0.9 in combination with deferred rendering is overkill.
#76
Image Sharing / Mudflats
Last post by Dune - March 12, 2024, 02:51:16 AM
They are called 'kwelders' in Dutch, the fascinating areas that exist where the sea eats the land. This started as a ground test for a commission, but I added some stuff to make it a scene.
The upper quarter veggies where pasted over from a partially done PT render. PT is nicer of course, but took ages on the lower part, so I killed it. Detail 0.5, AA 6.
I just thought it would be nice if you could mesh displace objects by the ground they sit on, so these dead strings of seaweed would bend with the ground. Would be awesome. In priinciple it would be possible I think, needs some testing.
Bike form the web, girl is DAZ with some additional MD clothing, just for the fun of it :P
#77
Image Sharing / Re: The Rough-Hewn Shore
Last post by Dune - March 12, 2024, 02:43:28 AM
For rough stuff like these rocks even detail 0.5 and AA6 (my standard) would do in my view, and beware of RT reflections in very displaced areas! Especially with path rendering.
I just did a rippled mud scene; complete RT render took 16 minutes, PT renderer was halfway after 2 hours. For PT rendering I'd wish there was an option to force non ray/path-traced reflections...
#78
Terragen Discussion / Re: New external drive Tg4 can...
Last post by Dune - March 12, 2024, 02:37:19 AM
My 2 cents: I sometimes have missing files, then use project gather and check find files with problems. Then you can find whatever needs a different string. If I have located the file, I just copy part of that string (the part that's missing/different), and paste that into the wrong string (first selecting the part that needs to be replaced), thus kind of text-editing within TG. But it won't search for files, you'll have to locate them first.
#79
Terragen Discussion / Re: New external drive Tg4 can...
Last post by Kevin Kipper - March 11, 2024, 08:28:46 PM
Currently, the script requires the current directory path be replaced with the new directory path.  Swapping out only the drive letter wouldn't work in this case.  For example, if the old folder path and file was "C:myProject/Project_Assets/myTexture.jpg" and you only entered "E:" for the replacement string the new filename parameter would be set to "E:myTexture.jpg".  Only image map shaders are supported in this script.
#80
Terragen Discussion / Re: New external drive Tg4 can...
Last post by Matt - March 11, 2024, 08:10:35 PM
Cool. Does this work if only part of the folder structure needs to change, e.g. just the drive (volume)? And what about other nodes besides image map shaders? I think it would be useful to have a node-agnostic string replacement.