Hi !
Today, I decided to start an ambitious project. Have you already seen this amazing video (two years old) ?
The question : Is Blender able to render something of this quality ?
Let’s try…
here is a snapshot of what I got so far:
Is that image a render from a blender project, or a terragen project?
AWESOME!!!
i´m looking forward to do a projekt like this too. But have to much work to do at the moment. Hope you share your knowledge about this huge projekt you started.
I like it!
I think that it could do with more geometry…
but I like it!
@MorichalionThis is a render from blender. The only thing done externally are the lens flares effects, in AfterFX with a very cool plugin called Optical Flares. It can be found on the videocopilot web site (http://www.videocopilot.net/products/) I strongly recommend to buy it if you need to create realistic (or not) pictures.
I will post the differents steps showing the progress of this project. I would like to get a maximum of different feedback to continuously improve the quality
More different trees will be added. I plan to reach 15k of instanced objects in the scene.
It means that my biggest challenge will be the optimization.
Does someone has already tried to create such a heavy scene ? I would be grateful to get some advices about:
-how to save memory usage
-how to automaticcally hide unvisible object to screen
-how to control the LoD based on the distance from the camera
There is currently 13millions tris in the scene. I need to reach the billion 
Here is another render.
21millions tris.
I diversified a little bit the trees.
Next step is to add some stones, bushes and grass here and there.
Then the clouds. A good opportunity to test the volume material 
a new render. comments and critics more than welcome
Still to do:
-volumetric clouds
-trees…moooooore trees !
-penguins flying in the air (optionnal)
there’s a serious ammount of dof or focal blur going on here. otherwise looks pretty damn good!
Detail looks even better on that last one. No real crits here,… keep going!
Seems you are onto a winner. Can’t wait for more updates.
Looking very good 
Would you mind posting how you set up the Snow/Rock material please. I have seen how Andrew Price set his up on the mountain tutorial, but was wondering if there was a better or different way of setting up the textures, and also would it work with a little tweaking for different types of terrain/landscapes?
Looking very good so far, very realistic. Looking forward to seeing the final image.
The trees seem to be very hot. Not a single snow flake on them
Thanks for the comments; I really appreciate
there’s a serious ammount of dof or focal blur going on here. otherwise looks pretty damn good!
Actually, it’s because of the vector blur fx. The camera is following a path through this landscape.
Looking very good Would you mind posting how you set up the Snow/Rock material please. I have seen how Andrew Price set his up on the mountain tutorial, but was wondering if there was a better or different way of setting up the textures, and also would it work with a little tweaking for different types of terrain/landscapes?
I have not seen Andrew’s tutorial, so I can’t tell if I used the same technique than he did. I’ll post some screenshot of the material and the textures slots, but basically it is a quite simple setup. Even no material node involved here.
The trees seem to be very hot. Not a single snow flake on them
This is something I plan to add, at least to see if the picture gets better.
But now that I reduced the altitude, it is absolutely plausible that the snow melt faster on the trees than on the floor (based on the references images I saw).
I am currently rendering a 300 frame animation. Only a preview, but it still takes 5 minutes a frame to render… I let you calculate the sum
More images will follow very soon 
Here is an image picked from the preview animation I’m currently rendering:
The color of the sky is not good, for now. And the trees…still not enough (okay on this frame) !
Maybe I will add some mountains in the background to get more depth
And also; I don’t like the shape of the hills on the right
Did I forget something ?
This is looking awesome…
My only crit is that it could do with some fine detail… the snow is just too smooth and there’s not enough fine grain on the rocks… the very last render looks like you may have addressed this already but with teh blur I can’t quite see yet!
Just a subtle amount of bump would add a lot to the realism in my opinion…
It’s great as it is and I’d love to see the animation ( i think with the motion blur it will look really tidy!)
but with teh blur I can’t quite see yet
Intentionnal 
You’re right. Details are missing right now. Maybe it’s not due to the amount of bump, but it’s a lack of geometries as you mentionned it in your first post.
Now I am working on creating a beleivable haze effect. Not easy I must admit…
This thing is awesome! I can imagine Lord of the Rings music playing during the final animation.
I recently restart the scene from the very beginning, based on what I learnt from the first version. I only kept the trees.
Here is what I got (without vegetation, for now):
The first results are not as good as the previous version, but the scene was entirely designed to be much bigger (75km wide, for now, which is ten times bigger than the version 1)
Materials and textures where also reset. Only procedural and nodale.
here is a screenshot, for the curious:
The first node generates bump.
The second generates the color of the mountain (by altitude, green to grey)
And the last adds snow on the top.
Now I am working on adding the trees. I wrote a py script that changes objects level of details based on their distance from the camera. That saves a lot of RAM !
I’ll share it once stable. it is quite useful
good work dude… i have tried something like that some times ago… in blender and i come up with this … so i must say you are going on right way dude… keep it up…