Red Rock Canyon

[AndyWelder]

Never got good results from playing with the Strata & Outcrops shader, not even with the aid of the guide posted somewhere on the forums here. But then it dawned upon me that this could be a matter of scale... I knew what I wanted to achieve: Rock strata I once saw in a canyon somewhere in Luxembourg (Luxemburg) so I did load the "Fern Gully" file, removed all objects and anything else I didn't need, used a larger value for the negative displacement to deepen the canyon and threw in a S&O shader. First result my camera was buried deep in the terrain because of the default settings of the S&O shader so I moved the camera up. Then I had a good look at the scale/ values, compared them with some of the values used in the terrain (like the depth of the canyon) and started lowering some of them, lowering them a lot: Most significant the values for 'Plateau buildup' (0.1125) and  'Hard Layer spacing' (0.25) That gave a good result but only on some of the canyon walls, some canyon walls were not (visibly) affected. That 's why I decided to copy the S&O shader and turn the 'Strata tilt direction' about 90 degrees. That almost gave the result I wanted and is what you see in the image.
To ad more "umph" I threw in a PF so there would be outcrops on the canyon walls and rocks on the canyon floor. Fiddling with the values and seed gave nice results except that the canyon walls still appeared flat somehow. I knew this was a matter of lighting so the sun's heading and elevation were changed. Not fully satisfied with the results I also made some adjustments to the 'Enviro light' and camera settings.
After that I planted a couple of populations and fiddled with their distribution settings till I had the right amount of light and shade and it was time to render a .GIC file because I know how 'Global Illumination' can influence the render.
A render with the .GIC file enabled and my default "Final render quality" settings took about 40 minutes and because this did look good I decide to start an "Overnight render" at nine times the size (1920x1440 compared to 640x480) thinking the render would be finished by the time I'd get up.
Wrong thinking.... : The render was about halfway and four buckets in the lower center part were slowly being filled. And still being filled that evening, and the next morning. At the evening of the second day one was finished and so the render went on with an OK speed for one bucket at a time. Hoping the other three buckets would also finish soon I went to sleep only to be deeply disappointed in the morning to see two buckets still being filled. They finally finished somewhere last nigh, after almost 79 hours of rendering....
I know the culprit is the "Outcrops" PF I used and I will have to change its settings. But there's also something with the light: The tree trunks are very dark with almost no detail visible and yet the rock is almost glowing so there should be more light bouncing around to lighten up the vegetation I'd think.

Any ideas on how to improve this render are warmly welcomed.

The cleaned .TGD will be posted in the File sharing section soon.

[Bjur]

I love your picture as it is. The look is a special, cool colored and expressionistically one for me. 

[Saurav]

This looks really cool, has a unique look to it. Only thing distracting me is the forground rock structure. You could possibily add more textures on the strata rocks to give it greater variation. Other than that I can't think of much more to improve this. I have to sat this is one of the more refreshing renders I have seen of late.

[Dune]

You have achieved something very nice, but I think the extreme displacements (very sharp angles) are the culprit of your long render time. Perhaps if you'd use a XZ stretched strong fractal as displacement or redirect you can get these 'strata' maybe quite as nice (but different), but with less render time. But that's only a guess.
I really like the whole scene!

[Henry Blewer]

I stretch my displacement power fractals along the x and z axis often. You can get very fine control. I also use a small amount of smoothing when I work on the rock face colors. 0.2 is enough most of the time.

[choronr]

It is hard to take my eyes off of this one. There is a place here in the USA called the 'Wisconsin Dells' that is close to looking like what you have created here. Specifically, the northern part of that system looks like your creation. Excellent one Andy.

[choronr]

Here is that Wisconsin Dells image taken by my son Ken last summer.

[AndyWelder]

Thank you all for the comments.

Only thing distracting me is the forground rock structure.

Yup, it's totally off indeed. That's also the region that took so immensely long to render. That's where the PF went out of control I figure, and where PF's go wild there's no way to control the look of the surface in my experience.

Perhaps if you'd use a XZ stretched strong fractal as displacement or redirect you can get these 'strata' maybe quite as nice (but different), but with less render time. But that's only a guess.

I stretch my displacement power fractals along the x and z axis often. You can get very fine control.

In this case stretching the Outcrops' PF along the XZ axis only made things worse, even with minute changes in the order of 0.05 to 0.1.... Slightly different values for 'Feature scale' did the trick but I lost the overhang on the left side in the process.
Working on a new render now, with a different POV, focusing more on the rock in the center because changing the values of the PF did create some very nice outcrops there that also shouldn't take too long to render.

The shape of the strata I didn't want to change too much  because, as I mentioned, they are inspired by what I once saw in that Luxembourg' canyon: Thick slabs of slate, weathered by thermal erosion: Heat and cold causing the slabs to crack.
Strata with softer, more rounded features are most of the time caused by fluvial erosion: Water or dust carving the softer parts away over time.
* End of geology lecture* 

That's a great picture, Bob! Very nice example of fluvial erosion and another place I'd like to visit once I'm a millionaire