Hi, the project is not finished, but this image of the project can be considered to be finished… until further improvements ! My projects are never enough finished for me !
More and full size here :
http://3d-synthesis.com/48-Mountains.html
Fantastic!
And just the right size for me to use as a desktop 
Thanks ! I’m happy that you like it ! I’m planning to enlarge the scene, and add more props. I would like to add some characters, but I’m too bad at modelling humans !o)
I would also like to make an animated screen saver with a bear appearing in a corner or a wolf passing by… and the ranger looking at the window ! But that’s an other story, and not on my plans in a close future.
I really like the snowy mountain images too! What method did you use to make the mountains so nicely?
Well, I recently followed “The Nature Academy” course by Andrew price, and discovered a very interesting trick with some materials nodes driven by a sun lamp ! This allows to project materials in the desired direction, and the material distribution is adjusted by the slope of the terrain ! A bit complicated, but very useful. For the texture, I used my own procedural setup. I also experimented a lot with trees to achieve finally two models of firtrees that I’m rather happy of…
New images. Smoke made in Particle Illusion and added in Photoshop Elements.
On the image below : Foreground rendered in Octane, background rendered in Blender.
Color grading in Photoshop Elements for a good blend of foreground and background.
Smoke and lighting inside the house added in Photoshop Elements.
That’s awesome! Great work. Keep up with the emprovements
Nice house I wish to live in something like there of course with internet, TV and PC with installed Blender on my computer
I like it.
Wow I love the trees, I need to try making something like that.
Thank you guys ! I am currently enlarging the landscape, with mountains inside the same Blend file, instead of compositing.
I have had to bake the textures onto the mountain meshes in lower poly, and as I need to scale up a lot the mountains, the texture is a bit too low resolution so far,as well as the meshes.
Stay tuned !
Looking forward to it Philippe, what you have now looks really good. I especially like the snow on the trees.
Very nice. There are lots of elements coming together nicely. I like your snow, I also like your smoke effect added in PSE.
Did you also model the vehicle, if so, it is really impressive!
Did you also model the vehicle, if so, it is really impressive!
Yes, I always make everything myself, thats one of the reasons explaining why my projects grow so slowly ! I used the Land Rover that I had modelled previously for my desert scene, but I modified the front part of the vehicle in order to convert the Land Rover 88 Serie II of before 1968 in a model built after 1968, with front lights placed accordingly to the new US laws, and I removed the electric winch.
This night, I have tested the billboards for distant trees, and they work fine while requiring few memory amount, but the new wide landscape is not enough subdivided and makes a big visual difference with the ground around the house. I have to work more on this point. I also encounter a big bug in converting particles into real objects in 2.59, not allowing to export many particles at the same time.
Now, the smoke is also rendered in Octane, but I have to rotate the textured plane in the 3D view for each camera angle, and re-export for rendering. Adding the smoke in post production is easier !
This is a very pleasing scene, but may I suggest a little further treatment of the front of the house? There would be some bluish white light bouncing up from the snow. This would be a mostly-specular light. There would also be some cloudy-white sunlight coming down from the front, being clipped softly by the eaves (the more clouds, the softer). It probably wouldn’t be yellow, i.e. direct, sunlight in winter. The sun would be quite low in the sky. On the side of the house (in the first render), the white snow on the banister would cast an ever-so-slight but noticeable white band on the walls of the house.
I feel that the earlier sun-position was better because it gave better illumination to the side of the house. I know that you changed the lighting partly to get rid of the shadows on the front of the house, but IMHO I’d use the original sun-position and sun-color and handle the illumination-balancing issues in a much more subtle way.
Subtlety will be what makes this render “art,” and what will bounce it to the gallery.
In fact, the first renders were done with Blender internal, and the last in Octane; this explains the big difference in lighting; As I aim a realistic look, further renders will be done in Octane, except if I can’t export correctly my scene.
Currently I’m strugling to get a very large ground model (4kms x 4kms) with as few polygons as possible, and it is very difficult.
Just a low samples render of the last trial (There are 14500 billboard trees in the scene, but only few are currently visible beacuse of the huge surface ) :
I think that I would have to make several scenes with trees only where they are seen, but if I want to be able to make an animation with a flying camera, I will really need trees everywhere.
Some pictures in low samples, of the current trials with billboard trees.
The lack of shadow caster materials in Octane doesn’t allow the quality I wanted for the trees.
I have to use two crossed billboards , but the one used to fill the shadow can’t be made unvisible.
Finally, I should have posted in the WIP !o)
First render with new 2.5D trees : modelled trunk, few low poly naked branches on top and textured distorted flat branches with 9 vertices.
Rendered with Alpha, and sky composited in Photoshop Elements.
952 vertices per tree. 1000 trees in the scene. These trees are a bit too “bald”. I plan to make other textures for the same branches with less transparent parts, and also an other kind of branches to be used vertically, instead of horizontally. They should look better for heavy snow seen frm distance (like the high poly trees beside the house).
The current scene weights 1798.8MB/2879MB available on my GPUs.
8 800 198 triangles.
I can enlarge the scene a bit , and add mountains on an other side to allow more camera angles. I can also add few more high poly trees here and there in interesting places where I can put the camera, to get an high poly tree in foreground. I also have to rebake the mountain texture to get one with higher resolution (in fact three textures for Diffuse, Normal and AO).
Hello Park Rangers ! Welcome to station 27 !
I have built a terrain of 32Km² with 12500 firtrees of several kinds from very high poly to medium 2.5D and low poly X-billboards (crossed billboards to get correct shadows). Modelled in Blender, rendered in Octane. The images are still grainy, because I let them render only 200 samples per pixel.
Collection of various points of view and lightings. Sometimes I changed the North direction to get more interesting shadows !o)