New Project.. Golden Hills

[photoman]

The whole premise is that of a midsummers day shot of the hills. I got the idea from the hills next to my house. Here are some sketches.

 

The Windmill that is going to be in the semi foreground area.

 

The overall layout of the shot.

 

I am going need some help though on configuring AM hair to get that grass look. (Gold with white tips)

More stuff soon.

 

 

-Photoman

[photoman]

Update!! Worked for the past 2 hrs to get the basic landscape. I decided to alter away from my sketches a bit.

 

Here is the view I am going to use.I adjusted the lighting to get the colors I wanted. (Yellow and deeper blue)

 

I started to make a whole area to see if there were any better angles. I just made a grid and adjusted the cp's to get that.(With much copying and pasting)

[photoman]

Another update! Only got about 3hrs of solid work today but... I'm happy with the results!

 

Here is the shaded render of the shot. I used the decal method to get the colors on the "grass"

Here is the model for the Telephone pole that runs through the scene.

 

I am still trying to get the grass a more real feeling to it. Plus the scale is way off lol :-). I'm still deciding whether or not to model the windmill though. If I was to put it in it would look cramped and the perspective of openess would go away. Or... I could model it and put into another similar landscape.

 

 

Comments and criticism are welcome.

 

 

-Photoman

[Rodney]

Your scene is starting to shape up quite nicely. Keep it up!

I first thought when seeing your render... "I want to go there".

Don't ask me why... that was just the thought I got.

It looks like being there would be very relaxing.

 

You can get away with a lot fewer splines than what you have now.

If you were dealing with polygons you'd probably need that many cross sections but with splines you can adjust the geometry just the way you like. Use the Roll Handles as necessary to adjust the magnatude.

 

The areas I'm thinking of in particular where you could trim out some splines are in the valleys of your landscape and the telephone lines. But you could remove a lot of splines throughout.

[photoman]

Update!! Didnt get much work yesterday (None to be exact) but today I got some in. I mostly updated the models(Changed the Telephone pole a little and added the fence) and I Textured everything. Most of the textures are darktrees though... :-)

Here is the next updated shaded render. Its at the aspect ratio (3000x1600) I'm going to use. Lol its a 9x9 Multipass shaded multipass. :-)

Here is a Final render of the top of the Telephone pole. The green things are the insulators and they did used to be green like that.

Here is the texture and Final rendered fence.

 

 

 

I'm having trouble with A:M and render though. I tried doing a vga render of my scene and I started it but A:M crashed halfway through :-(... Is this b/c Im using 3+ darktrees? Or is A:M just buggy on OSX?

 

 

Thx

 

-Photoman

[photoman]

Update! Managed to fix my render problems(lol hair density was at 4 and width was at 1" instead of 0.1"). I tinkered with lighting and other things... Thinking about doing a skydome with IBL but that seems like a lot of work . Besides that I did a bunch of little tweaks here and there (adjusted placement fixed on parts of models and deleted all extra cp's that weren't used or in view).

Here is the final shot without the grass. The dirt texture is the Terracotta texture that comes with A:M. Added fog (That needs to be adjusted). Thinking about doing depth of field. 42 min at 1 pass with Fog, Particles, and shadows at 3000 x 1600

Here is a render with the grass. Still needs alot of tweaks and for some reason the colors are off (Maybe lighting). Also I turned off the Dirt texture to save render time.

 

 

If you have any tips or notice anything wrong please reply

Thanks

 

-Photoman

[Eric2575]

Nice job so far. Here are a couple of tips: 1) instead of the dirt material, substitute with a color that matches the overall hue of the ground. Right now it looks as thought the ground is white under the grass. 2) Do something to differentiate the fence from the grass. In the last render, the fence blends in too much with the grass. There might also be a scale issue with the grass and the fence. 3) If you look at a real electrical pole, you will notice that the boot holds are spaced much further apart than what you have. Minor tweaks, but will make a real difference in your render.

 

A skydome is not hard at all, do a search on the forum on how to do it, it will improve your sky ten fold. Looking forward to your next render. Keep up the good work.

[jzawacki]

Even smaller crit... the boot holds don't normally go all the way to the ground.. to keep people from climbing them. For good reason, I'd probably be dead. For some reason, I have always wanted to climb a utility pole.

[photoman]

Havent gotten much done. I started doing test renders to get the grass right and lighting when I decided to add a tree. Made the tree on a seperate project (To load faster) and exported it. BUT when I tried opening my main project file A:M would just load and not do anythin at all. Since I have it where A:M will open the last proj it loops like that so A:M doesnt work.... Fixed it by changing the the defualt opening projh by editing the settings ini file.... So instead of opening it (Fear of freezes) I decided to do a quickie random scene wehich is rendering right now. But I am afraid my main proj is corupted. but whatev

[photoman]

Heres the quickie pic I made 1.5 hours with preview renders (9 min each x 3 = About 1 hour without renders)

3000x1600 4 pass with particles, fog, shadows, reflections. 48 minutes.

 

 

Lol I love the treez plugin :Dl. The bark is a darktree.

 

 

-Photoman

[AniMattor]

I think you should make the hills overlap at leas slightly rather than seeing them both begin in the valley. It will add depth. and another layer of hills/mountains in the background would be great, too. Keep up the good work!

[photoman]

Update. First thanks everybody for the tips they really do help. I did a ton of render test on the grass. The diffuse map I put on it seems t darken to a brown rather than a gold so I have to fiddle with that. I edited the telephone pole some more too by moving some of the steps. I got the lighting down which includes 5 sun type lights. 1 at warm yellow/white at 85% and the other 4 at cool blue at 10 - 25% to get the bounce light.

Here is the lighting. The grass looks grainy b/c its a small 750x400 render. It will look more clean at the final render.

Here is a moody lighting at twilight-ish. Light color and direction is off looks cool though.

 

 

I may update the landscape by adding more hills for more depth and grandeur like AniMattor recomended and I will add some big oak trees to it too. More soon.

 

 

 

-Photoman

[Eric2575]

I'm still having issues with the scale of the fence and especially the telephone poles. A pole can vary from 20 to 60 feet, but the majority around my neighborhood seem to be around 40 feet. The attached pic shows the scale of height to width pretty well. I also did a search of telephone poles on Yahoo and found that almost none have the boot holds. Most pole climbers, at least out in the country, have the spikes on their boots to climb the poles.

[photoman]

Update. Worked yesterday, didn't get much work but the prohect is almost done. I added the oaktree to it.

Took out the dirt texture to render faster b/c I was in a hurry.

 

More soon.

 

-Photoman