I've got to get in on this contest. Terragen has been calling my name, and this is the perfect lure to drag my busy ass back in. For starters I've mostly been exploring POV's that could be interesting. This is the first one, but there's no guarantee that it'll be the last one standing for my entry.
Very nice start already :)
The water looks good and so does the base terrain.
Do you use a reference or just a picture in your mind after seeing references?
What is your next step for this?
What I find quite typical and probably suitable for this scene, is how "gritty" and rough many surfaces on Iceland look.
Looking forward to see the next iteration!
Martin
Thanks TU!
This view point is actually in Iceland at the coordinates 63.542434,-19.627433 looking North East towards the nearby hills. I got the terrain from bigben's reference material post and I've added some strata and fractal displacement.
My plan is to continue to explore Iceland until I find a viewpoint I really like and then I'll use reference pictures from that location to try and build a realistic scene.
The colors are quite nice. Good details.
Nice color and terrain. Great start
Good to see you back! Nice start too 8)
Finding another POV that I like better is proving difficult, so I've done some tweaking on the current one. I've done some work with the strata, foreground, as well as playing with the sun's position, apparently the old position was physically impossible.
Oo, awesome terrain, and texturing is looking quite nice too!
- Oshyan
Really beautiful terrain sculpting! The ridge line is being developed masterfully.
Already very crisp! Nice.
Exceptionally well done!
If possible, I would seriously consider creating some nice sedimentary erosion along the low slopes. The strata looks very nice were it is.
Thanks everybody!
ChrisC: Excellent idea, I'll have to play around with World Machine to see if I can get some good features.
Very nice terrain indeed.
The POV is ok, but perhaps it would provide you with more options if you were looking down at the scene? Just trying to think along.
Thank you, Frank, for your input! When making a scene I often get very focused on my "plan" for the image and get blinded to outside possibilities. Some sort of bird's eye view is something to consider.
I've gotten some erosive effects going from World Machine to give the terrain a more weathered appearance. Right now the fake stones are just confined by slope, but I'm going to mess around with some erosion flow and deposition maps from WM to see if I can get better results. I've also added some land in the foreground since it looked empty with just the water.
Getting better and better.
The last one has evolved nicely... Looking good....
:)
J
I decided that the atmosphere was lacking any personality and was far too plain for this competition. I've given it some ominous clouds to try and replicate an impending rain storm feel. I've also added more detail and texture to the foreground dirt as a prelude to adding some grass and stones.
Ominous indeed! Very, very nice!
It is coming alive ...very good.
>:( >:( >:( >:( Stop being awesome.
Holy crap. Um, well done sir. You are on the right track. :D
Edit: OK, after the initial "wow" I was able to look at it with a more critical eye, hehe. First, I assume you have plans for the relatively uninteresting yet visually notable foreground. So I'll ignore that. The main thing that stands out to me is the density and size of your stones in the distance. If they're that large, they had to come from somewhere and would probably be in greater number, or in a larger flow of stones. As it is it seems like you have stone sizes down to a point, but the large stones are not caught up in a flow or occasionally having rolled away from one, they're kind of isolated in a way. Like you need more scale variation. I think at this distance you could probably make it easier on yourself by just masking a rougher terrain in the same areas as these fake stones, with a smaller scale, and then texture it similarly to the rocks. Kind of a combo of what you have here and some experiments others have been doing with mask generation inside TG (though I guess you probably have WM masks to work with). So yeah, the stones are the main thing that stands out to my eye. Either make them more spare, or *more dense* (the latter I would favor, I think).
- Oshyan
I like this ominous look, makes the mountain stand out more. The power here lies in the WM eroded terrain, which is really awesome (wish that could be done procedurally within TG). Curious to see what you'll do with the foreground.
That looks really great already. Agree about the stones. They seem to be a bit out of place.
Thanks Michael; and, I think I'm ready for a brain transplant.
Breathless. What plans do you have in the basin?
You might want to think about adding larger stones covered in lichen and moss. A few plants here and there of course. ;) Trees maybe??? The sediment erosion channels should be masked to a color that compliments sediment material to what ever is common in Iceland. That might look neat.
Yes, exactly Chris. All good suggestions. I would especially like to see some nice larger stones with moss/lichen/etc., that could work well in the foreground. For example this photo I took: https://picasaweb.google.com/104300081531529253719/IcelandPart2#6088427915342847874
- Oshyan
Thank you for the comments everybody, there are a lot of good suggestions here! I agree that the stones look out of place at the moment, I'm planning on using flow masks from WM, but getting a nice looking result is proving troublesome; from the camera POV they tend to appear very straight and unnatural, so I'll have to mess with that...maybe even try different erosion seeds. I have plans for isolated patches of trees and shrubbery in the mid/background, but nothing to lush since it is Iceland after all.
Thanks for looking, all!
Sounds good. Btw we featured your image in a brief update on the contest on social media today. :)
- Oshyan
More updates! I've done some work with the WM flow mask for the erosion stones, but primarily have been focusing on the foreground shore. Sooner or later I'll get around to working on the mid-ground .
Yessss. You are on the right track with the rocks and other adjustments, definitely.
- Oshyan
I was thinking that I would participate in the contest with my picture I did but your render killed this idea instantly. :D
Those rocks...etc are awesome!!
You should make an entry and support the competition and you never know the judges minds.
Yeah, People do better than they think they do. We are all to hard on our selves sometimes.
Getting better and better Darth.
Fun to watch. Sometimes its better to se these develop in parts than to get one finished image. Can enjoy it longer this way :D
I like the groundwork.
Looking good, real good ^^
Very good progress so far.
Do go ahead with the contest, Archonforest! It's not all about a photoreality, it's also about the best use of Terragen features, composition, uniqueness, guts, etc. You'll think of something quite different than this excellent work, and still have a chance!
Thank you, everybody, for the comments!
Archonforest, I'll echo the other folks encouraging you to give it a go and submit an entry. There's almost two months left before you need to submit your image, so there's plenty of time to come up with something great. I really, really enjoy seeing people's creative process as they work through an image, so I guess my encouragement is partially selfish ;)
Quote from: darthvader1 on December 16, 2014, 09:39:06 AM
Archonforest, I'll echo the other folks encouraging you to give it a go and submit an entry. There's almost two months left before you need to submit your image, so there's plenty of time to come up with something great. I really, really enjoy seeing people's creative process as they work through an image, so I guess my encouragement is partially selfish ;)
Ok I'll send in my Iceland render... :D
Quote from: darthvader1 on December 14, 2014, 12:09:13 PM
More updates! I've done some work with the WM flow mask for the erosion stones, but primarily have been focusing on the foreground shore. Sooner or later I'll get around to working on the mid-ground .
Killer.... Superb, looking forward to the next tweaks!
:)
Cheers
J
Beautifully crafted WM work, really adds to the TG repertoire. The dramatic lighting works well with the terrain, looking forward to the mid-ground work. A powerful entry!
Yes, superb moody work. I'm impressed with the quality of your world machine output, mine always seems so much cruder than this.
Some small updates: I've toyed with the colors of the rocks, added another population to the foreground grasses, added an initial grass population for the mid-ground, and most importantly, remembered to turn on ray-traced objects. Thank you for all the kind words so far!
Very good! I've noted on some of the landscape views on the net that there are a lot of bright, yellow/green patches of moss; or, grasses of ground cover on the terrain.
Super image! Maybe (but you probably would have in the end) use soft reflections.
Great shot!
I like the colors especially.
Very nice, in this iteration background is better nevertheless I prefered middle part of the previous iteration.. because without visible plants the sense of scale was better imho.
luc
Quote from: darthvader1 on December 14, 2014, 12:09:13 PM
More updates! I've done some work with the WM flow mask for the erosion stones, but primarily have been focusing on the foreground shore. Sooner or later I'll get around to working on the mid-ground .
Wow that is amazing. Love the look of this. Very much a iceland look. Can't wait to see the background shore get it's foliage and stuff.
Great details there. You can sense that a lot of time has gone into this already.
I love the mountain. I love the lake. I love the sky. I love the palette. What I don't love is the composition. The mountain dominates the frame, and while it's awesome I feel like it's crowding out a lot of other potentially good parts of the image. Every time I look at your render I wonder what this would look like if it breathed a little more. I don't know if that means a wider lens or just pulling the camera back more.
Just a thought. Great work.
cracking render, I don't stand a chance :P
After much trial and error, and a Christmas break, I've finally gotten some traction on the mid ground vegetation. Some of the plant populations are still too large, so I'll have to adjust some scaling issues. I've also included soft reflections on the water which makes for quite a nice improvement on the water surface. The noisy water was getting on my nerves so I'm glad to be rid of it. I also need to add something in the foreground, like an interesting rock or bush to spice up the "blandness" of the grass. Good thing there's still time left!
Thanks for all the kind words and encouragement on this project!
Better and better all the time. :)
- Oshyan
This is evolving beautifully!
Near perfect... Loving the mood and the colours especially here!
Surface and light are topshelf Jeff. Really coming along nicely
What an improvement!!
More updates! I've primarily been working on the lighting and atmosphere of the scene. I added a low level cloud layer for atmospheric haze to make the distant mountain on the left seem more shrouded by the overhead clouds. I've also worked to make the atmosphere more blue to give better depth of color. I also added two more shrub populations and a grass population to the mid-ground to give more variety, but the grass isn't really noticeable at a realistic scale so I might remove it. Thanks for watching me work!
This is really looking great! But I think there isn't enough haze or mist in the air, which makes the scene look smaller imho. The mountains look quite close to the viewer like that.
The clouds are fantastic, and at least in my opinion some haze, mist or fog would make the scene look even more epic.
This is coming together beautifully.
You are making it hard for other contestants, though you never know who is secretly brewing something ;)
Really lovely surfacing, details and atmosphere. I keep hoping that you will push the dominating mountain further into the background or find an alternate point-of-view and really open the scene up with a great vista.
I agree with Ryan. A better balanced point of view might be needed.
Yes, I think a greater sense of scale and distance is needed. But the existing work that's there is fantastic. Highly realistic surfacing, populations, sky, etc. I think you can keep pushing your base realism like this and then maybe finalize your PoV a little later and fine-tune for that specific viewpoint. But if you want to really optimize around the PoV the whole time you'll want to make sure this is how you want the view to be for the final ASAP. I think a change of PoV might be good, but adding mist, etc. might also help enough with the sense of scale, there isn't necessarily one right answer.
- Oshyan
Changing the POV is worrisome to me primarily because there isn't very much interesting scenery outside the current FOV. ON the right there is an empty plane that stretches for miles and on the left the background mountain just kinda exists without looking overly interesting. I'll whip up a quick panorama of the area tonight.
I have a separate version of the file with only the base terrain dedicated to finding a more interesting POV, but I haven't been successful yet. In lieu of that I've been exploring the route that Oshyan suggested of optimizing all the shaders, objects, etc. and then incorporating a better POV when/if I find one.
That you for the constructive criticism, it is really helpful with forcing me to push boundaries that I wouldn't think of myself!
This was my earlier crit. I really like and appreciate the overall work done, but the composition doesn't really do anything for me. It feels like a crop in of a much larger frame.
I also want to encourage you to alter the frame.
And, is it just my monitor or has the image gotten much darker? (I hate this monitor, I am never sure of what I see). It looks to me that it got darker and more saturated. But rather than more color being added it looks like the color was altered in post... I think its not helping.
I for one like the scene and pov as it is.
Personally I would add maybe a rock or so to the foreground
and something like a house or some animal or whatever to the
opposite side of the water to have some point of interest the
eye can go to.Just my two cents.
Keep it up!
No luck yet finding a better scene or POV. The big problem seems to be that my entire setup is based around a scene built at this particular distance from the main focus, aka the mountain, and that most of the other potential vistas do not look nearly as good due to scaling issues. Since the deadline is approaching I'm probably going to stick with the current POV with some minor alterations. I'm increasing the FOV and turning the camera a bit to the left to show more background mountains and to give the scene better rule of thirds proportions.
Gulp! This is amazing. Since I enjoy looking at mountains, this POV seems just fine to me, but then again, I have no vote :) The details and variety you managed to get into this scene are exemplary. I would probably have the same issue, lots of the masking and surfacing (and populations) are dependent on what area the camera covers, once you move that there are many adjustments necessary. But you still have time given that you are already at this stage in the project.
Nice work so far, to say the least :)
I think the sense of scale would improve of smaller wave size and also some wind patches for added realism and interest.
What I also like about a lot of Icelandic scenes is the variation in colours. There's quite nice variation now with all the greens, but perhaps some more yellows or (gold) browns may work.
Difficult to explain, perhaps I should post an example.
Edit: Thinking about this part. I think there's actually too much coverage of the greens. How does it look when there's more exposed rock and grit and stones?Another suggestion is to make more use of the erosion patterns and their masks to do interesting things with terrain details and shading.
Is it WM erosion or TG erosion?
If it's TG erosion then you can duplicate the erosion node and set the mode to "difference (erosion field)" to extract a mask from the erosion.
If you're a nerd like me ;) you can also perform a subtraction of the displacement before and after erosion and derive the mask procedurally, allowing you to only deal with one erosion node. /nerd
Quote from: darthvader1 on January 20, 2015, 08:17:44 PM
No luck yet finding a better scene or POV. The big problem seems to be that my entire setup is based around a scene built at this particular distance from the main focus, aka the mountain, and that most of the other potential vistas do not look nearly as good due to scaling issues. Since the deadline is approaching I'm probably going to stick with the current POV with some minor alterations. I'm increasing the FOV and turning the camera a bit to the left to show more background mountains and to give the scene better rule of thirds proportions.
I often have the feeling, totally lacking any evidence, that many people use the default camera focal length and only move the camera around.
There's a lot you can do for sense of scale with camera focal length.
So perhaps there are possibilities you haven't considered yet, or may be you did?
Martin, thank you for your input!
The water could certainly use some attention since I've been largely ignoring it recently. Some wind patchiness could be a nice touch. Surprisingly, the surface shaders aren't "green" they're all browns and have RGB values with higher levels of red than green.
I've come to the conclusion that the green is enhanced by the blue of the atmosphere making the greens overpower the reds and browns. Some experimentation could be in order on that front. I could do some work to make the greens and object populations more patchy / restrict their slope, but in my initial tests in reduced the prominence of the strata so I kept it at the current levels.
The erosion is from WM and is currently being experimented with ,aka I have that file open as I type, and I hope to achieve...different results, more flow and less straightness in the erosion channels.
I've experimented with an ok variety of focal lengths ranging from about 30 to 65ish mm. One of my personal flaws in terragen is that I have a noticeable tendency to stick the camera at my eye level as if I were taking a picture while standing. Some more interesting camera placement could be in order ;).
Also, here is the latest render fresh off the hard drive. There is a curious anomaly along the far mountains which is caused by the thick cloud layer. It is at what, at least mathematically, should be the lower boundary of the cloud layer but I have no idea why it wasn't visible before or any idea on what is causing it. So much to do!
i love this image! congrats :D
Its a good one. Was good since the start. The grass in the foreground now looks much nicer to me.
I had a bit of a mid-contest crisis and decided that I really didn't like the whole atmosphere of the scene. I felt that the dark oppressiveness of the clouds didn't fit very well with the brightly lit foreground which, I think, contributed to the lack of a large sense of scale in the image. I've spent the last week or so trying to get better results and I think I've found something that works. Instead of oppressive doom clouds, it has the feel of fog and low level clouds being burned off by the sun. With the deadline approaching I better not think up too many more major changes ;)
Looking back at the previous image, the mountain looked as it had more brightness and highlights.Bit this current one has much better clouds. Sometimes working TG is bringing together compromises.
I preferred the previous setup.
Me too
I prefer this one, much more realistic, but only if you include the previous foreground.
I really like the scene! But I've got to say that I definitely prefer the darker atmosphere you had previously. It was more moody. And there was more contrast between the light on the land and the dark clouds, giving the image some drama. In fact, when I first saw what you were doing, my immediate "like" response was clearly connected to the darker mood and drama. But I tend to like somewhat dark imagery anyway. Other responses are certainly valid. By all means though, do what you like most!
Thank you, all, for your comments. Choosing to go away from the darker atmosphere was a difficult choice, but I feel that the image is ultimately better for it. I plan on adding some additional layering to the clouds which might give improved depth and additional variety.
Here is the full scene as it stands now. I'm still not satisfied with the wind effects on the water and I also need to do something interesting with the empty bottom left corner of the image. It's been a fun contest, thanks for all the support along the way!
I think seeing the full version allows for a better, more fair comparison. But I do have to say I was also partial to the darker version. Quite possibly that's just because I was there in a darker, bad-weather type season. I do think there are good aspects about both. You've demonstrated your ability as an artist to choose a good path and refine it, so I trust your feelings on the lighter version. I will only say that I felt the rockier foreground of the previous, darker version was perhaps more "Icelandic" in my personal view. Whether that is reflective of reality I don't know, just my personal impression.
Regardless of these critiques, it remains an outstanding scene and a beautiful series of images. Whatever you end up with will be great.
- Oshyan
excellent terrain features
i really like you reflections on the water.
previous set up.....absolutely fantastic
Whatever lighting/sky you will choose at the end, this is a very beautiful work !
On the latest version I am truly amazed by the far mountain on the left. My only critic would be about the image itself. It was definitely an improvement to pan the camera to the left, but I am sure it could be even better. Anyway, this is technically excellent!
8)
super detailing here, I too love the reflections, really great terrain too!
good luck with the next ones
J
:)
It is most definitely rich and fantastical, just like most of the real photos I have seen from Iceland. I do like it a lot. Hope I can get this kind of detail in on mine!
Here is my final entry for the contest. It's been a long road getting here, and my computer deserves a nice long break for his countless hours of rendering. Thank you, all, for your help along the way and for taking the time to follow my progress. Good luck, fellow contestants!
And, good luck to you ...this is very good.
Really a beautiful end result. On one of my monitors it's a bit dark, but on the other it's perfect. :)
- Oshyan
This will be a tough judgement, seeing what's being showed here until now. Looks terrific!
Outstanding result, a truly beautiful scene.... Really well detailed... Congrats on this final, also good luck too!
Cheers
Jason
:)
I like the mood in this picture and the scene, was worth the work! :)
Good luck!
Walter
This is an outstanding image! I really like your mountain and the way it is lit. The whole atmosphere is nice. And the overall composition works well for me. Great work!
Very nice work !