This is a piece I have been working on the last couple days. I’d never tried doing a landscape before and thought it would be a fun little project. This is what I came up with. I’d love to hear any comments or criticisms you may have.
A few statistics about this piece… This is particle system hell (or heaven I guess). It’s the craziest I’ve ever gone with particles. I have 7 particle systems going in this scene with a fairly high number of total particles.
200,000 blades of grass
20,000 trees in the valley
15,000 leaves on the tree
2,500 hairs
500 leaves on the ground under the tree
200 leaves in the air
100 flowers in the grass
238,300 total particles.
This was done in Blender 2.5 with the internal renderer. It actually renders surprisingly fast. 10 minute render with 3 steps of full sample motion blur, so about a 3 minute render with no motion blur.
i think slightly brighter grass would just make me adore this picture, but perhaps it is just my laptop monitor… otherwise a very pretty picture! love it
Could you perhaps save it as a PNG instead of a JPG? And also a bigger render will be good too. It’s just that the JPG is compressing it and making it look low-quality.
Thanks for the comments, I thought I’d post a couple of viewport shots for anyone wanting to see how the scene is set up. You’ll notice the valley looks a little mutilated. When I was doing the trees in the valley I just started removing large portions of geometry that wasn’t going to be visible so my particle system would bunch the trees up closer together. Also I posted some statistics in the original post for particle counts and render times if that interests you.
it’s nice, but I kinda have to say the thing hurting it for me is the color grading. It’s a shade or two farther in the blue direction then seems natural. Which is also killing the color of the foreground grass, and so the skin is a unnatural color as well.
on the same lines I noticed it’s a bit dark. looks to me like a monitor level thing as I’ve just recently calibrated my own monitor to true color. (yeah, my family owns one of those fancy calibrator things.) so gamma adjustment helps as well. I can post what I did if you’d like.
Hmm… you may be right. I think I might have been pushing a little too far with the color grading. I was trying to push the sky to a fairy tale pink-blue sunset look and I think it went too far. I’ll pull it back a bit and repost.
Much better, you can see more the details everywhere. To be nit-picky though, I think the skin is still a little to purple given that all the bounce light hitting it should logically be ether blue from the sky, or mostly green from the ground.
As another idea have you thought of or played with over-glare, or better yet, atmospheric light rays? I think that could, even very subtly, add a lot more of that dreamy feeling you are going for.
Yeah, I was actually fighting with myself on the light rays thing. I’ve used atmospheric lighting in my last 3 projects and was trying to avoid it on this. I’ll give it a try and see what I think.
