Yeah it needs a bit of fine-tuning here and there, thanks Oshyan.
The colour variation in the population, it's just one population so far of Manuka-trees (XFrog Oceania), is 75 metres in feature scale and 25 metres for small scale.
I may scale it down? It's tricky, because what you see here goes from 1000m water level to ~1900 metres up.
So based on that I thought something like 75 metres would give me about 10 changes/shifts in diffuse colour vertically.
This is how it's set up so far:
High colour = 0.625 gray
Low colour = 0.4 gray (I then set multiplier for diffuse to 2 in the colour tab of the population)
Contrast = 5
Roughness = 0.5
Maybe I should try a contrast of 3-4 and similar roughness.
I need to play a bit with this and see what looks good and what works.
The colours too saturated? I haven't touched the saturation, only added a wee bit of vibrancy to pronounce the colour variation in the trees.
To my eyes it doesn't look that saturated, not even as saturated as some of the sceneries I have seen in New Zealand last month (see my FB photos).
This is all processed on my new Eizo SX2762W with 100% RGB and 100% AdobeRGB coverage after calibration.
I'm pretty sure what I see is correct, technically, but perhaps the colours aren't balanced well enough and there's of course always the personal taste side of things
During my holiday I have been thinking about this and I may try to tackle the colour issues with TG in a future designed test.
I remember Luc mentioning a long time ago it's difficult to get vibrant/saturated colours straight from the render. I don't really agree with that, but I think I feel what he meant.
The colour input vs output has a strange "curve". If I look at my surfaces of all my projects then all the colours are super-dark and unsaturated, relatively (never beyond 50 using HSL).
You can't use luminance beyond 50 either and pure black doesn't render black at all, hence the very dark colours I use for getting "normal" results.
I once tried blurring a photograph in Photoshop and sample the colours using the colour picker and then use those colours straight in TG.
The whole thing looked like a lightbulb and yet the sky was normally exposed.
It just doesn't make sense and I must get to the bottom of it some day, if I feel up to it
If anyone is interested in the World-Machine terrain then just shout, it's basically a kind of ridge noise with 4 or 5 (thermal) erosion devices after it.
The water's a simple trick. Substitute the water shader's reflections with the reflection of a reflective shader with really tiny bit softer reflections and there you go.
Cheers,
Martin
