Some of you may have already seen this posted as the banner image over at Blenderartists, or in the featured gallery section on cgcookie, but I thought I’d post it here to hear some feedback from all of you.
The piece was put together for Andrew Price’s “The Nature Academy” end of session competition.
There are more than 60 hours in this project, not including render times, and it was easily the most complex render I have ever attempted. The final scene consists of 412,297,837 vertices, 798,977,249 faces, and 10,036,000 strands. The final render time was slightly over two hours and 45 minutes. I chose to render the project out at 4k resolution at 3996x2160px.
Multiple render layes with individually set atmospheric falloff composite nodes were used to simulate depth. The trees in the distance are made up of a volumetric material as opposed to real geometry or billboarded images.
I would have liked to include shadows along the edges of the grass. The grass is currently rendered with “Strand Rendering” which cuts render time. With this option disabled, I was unable to complete the lighting calculations after more than 50+ hours of dedicated processing time. Perhaps a solution would be to apply yet another particle system only along to the edges and median of the pathway, which would have the strand rendering disabled.
I would have also liked to include real volumetric clouds. I have been unable to find a suitable graphic for the sky. At least not one that conveys the amount of distance I would have liked. Volumetric clouds could have helped in this aspect, but I believe the increased render times for this would have been intolerable.
More info on the piece, as well as the original 4k rendering, can be found over at my website.
The scene feels pretty nice, not sure about the lighting…or maybe it’s the materials/textures in some places. There are areas that feel totally artificial to me, like the entire fence (it’s too smooth, tones are too even across the entire structure), the gate, the door, and the surface of the bark on the tree (the tree looks painted).
I would suggest you rough it up some more: peel, age or weather the previously mentioned areas (paint especially could use attention) and more, ruffle up the grass in different areas so it looks more wild and has a less consistent length overall, and I agree that the sky could be better. I think your render looks most realistic in the grass that is being shadowed by the tree branches and overtop the windows. The leaves on the tree look nice, but again, it feels to me light there’s some kind of lighting disconnect. Like leaves photoshopped over an artificial CG tree.
I would personally like to see you give it a go in cycles…
It’s a really good picture. Perhaps a little lacking in contrast overall, but still very good. However, the jpg compression kills it. Please change the picture into a link so we can see the whole picture.
Sorry about the compression. Thats BA’s own server doing that. The full 4K render is available in the blog section of designly.net. I’m being denied posting a url in the post itself.
A lot of the details mentioned in posts above are completely lost in the low res version.
I too would love to render this out in cycles, but due to the particle grass, and the volumetric trees, it’s currently impossible as the scene is now.
It’s a great picture, you obviously put allot of work into it. If you want feedback i would say that the grass could need a bit of colour variation or more defined strands, some of the grass looks allmost completely green and plain allthough when you zoom in it looks allot better. The pebbles stand out from the road and they are very evenly placed. Great work on the flowers, allot of variation there and they fit in the picture.
This is nitpicking, but the gate could use a normal map. And you could connect the branches on the tree to the actual tree mesh and even it out a bit.
Most of this infact is nitpicking, the picture has a great first impression, great work!
That’s an immense amount of detail and a very beautiful image (people should be viewing the image in its native resolution to appreciate it), I would agree that probably the easiest improvement would be to do a little work on the lighting and post processing to give it a real summer feeling. Great work though.
