While the written lesson was short this week, there was a lot in it, so I spent more time than on any of the other lessons. I do wish Terragen had a way to select just a section to render. I spent hours rendering an image, only to see that the terrain detail or something else was off and I had to go back and redo things. The details were not seen in smaller renders.
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I created everything in this from scratch - terrain, surface, etc. to give it a moody, broody feeling.
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I bumped up the atmosphere to give distance to the hills in the background. While these are more sun streaked clouds than
sun rays, the lighting effect on the terrain was much better than when I actually had the rays present.
Getting the rays is pretty frustrating, as you
must rely on sheer luck for your clouds to line up correctly for the effect. Sure, you can move the sun, but those pesky
clouds still determine most of the effect. Oh, for a real cloud editor, rather than a generator...
I created this desert surface with a bit a greenery around the water.
Decided to take another stab at sun rays and came up with a couple of interesting, if not very pretty things.
The first is scene using 2D clouds. Looks sort of like a canopy, doesn't it? The only thing changed on the second image is
that I used 3D clouds. It looks sort of like fireworks. Neither looks much like clouds, but I did get rays!
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The same scene, but with more realistic clouds and (yippee!) rays.
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This one came out waaaaay over the top, so I decided to go with it. (grin) I kept the lurid reds in both the sky and water. I used a light surface to reflect back some of the red. I went wild with post-processing, too. I softened the image a lot, plus added sun rays. Since my sun was cloudless, I also edited in a cloud across it.
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I decided to go back and redo my sunrise. This time I attempted to simulate icebergs.
Did you notice that I used the same terrain for all my images this week? Check out the shape of the background hills. I also used pretty much the same camera view, as
I wanted to see how much I could vary things by using different surfaces, atmospheres, terrain and water heights, etc..
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