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n i i i i c e .....
Gorgeous!
@barbult, that is a lovely image and I am thinking of Easter and Bunnies and Eggs and little kids in Easter dresses and suits running through it.
(One Easter south of Athens Greece when my son was a toddler. Minus the Bunnies.) Thank you for triggering that memory.
I can see how you got that memory from the image. I substituted yelow and purple crocus flowers for a lot of the grass. I never worry about making things authentic. I mix whatever plants strike my fancy.
SUCCESS!!!! All the warning signs are gone! Water has now appeared and look at it! You could swim in it! The 'filter' dropdown has now appeared in features and water tabs, water level has appeared in the build tab and rebuild scene is now an option. Thank you so much to everyone who helped me out but especially to Barbult, my own personal Yoda in this process!!!
Congratulations and beautiful renders and, yes, Barbult is amazing.
Wonderful news! I'm so happy I could help. Remember to never install anything related to UltraScenery with Daz Connect!
Another experiment with UltraScenery 2
and postworked version
Where all plugins are concerned, Daz Connect is dead to me! Dead to me! :D Thank you again.
Plug-ins cannot be installed through Connect anyway. Scripts can be, and could be written in a way that worked but that would be very hard to test until a store package was done, which would be rather late in the day to find issues.
@johnbuckeridge your renders of the bridge and the purple flowers look great. Now that it is working well, I look forward to seem more of your images.
@Artini you made a nice terrain with the ship on the water. The image is especially enhanced by the groups of people on the shore. Are those LowPi? They really look nicely arranged. I prefer the original render over the post worked one in this instance.
Here is an UltraScenery render I made last night with a more rugged terrain from a height map. The terrain width is 128 and the resolution is 512. I added a couple LowPi on the path along the river, inspired by Artini's image with the people on the shore. The lighting is 8:30 AM sun sky lighting. The terrain is River 04 and the ecology started as Pasture 03, but I added Oaks, River Pebbles and River Rocks biome layers. Then I used Alienator Pro II to swap out the large oak trees for MJF Hawthorn trees. I liked their more rugged look. I also swapped out some medium and small oaks for various plants and swapped out some dandelions for flowers. The cloudy sky is an image in the Environment pane. I rendered a version with DOF and one without. Which do you like better? I like the DOF one, but the flowers are more identifiable in the non-DOF one.
I attached the crazy terrain height map I used. I added some smoothing to it in USC2 to make it less jagged. It is fun to try crazy things.
@barbult another great render ... I can't believe that height map resulted in the rough terrain you have here. That's really spectacular. Its such a believable scene. The entire techique you ue is very creative. Using the cloud image is very cool as well.
Here are a couple I did last month for a render challenge, had to wait till now to post them.
Both were done using US2 with US1 Features and ecologies with the terrain scaled to 128, I used one of the islands with pines and one of the lake options with willows.
Please click to see full sized
Those have interesting lighting. Are those ice chuncks in the first image?
Thanks, I really struggle with lighting night scenes so having a challenge that was "moon over water" really made me work lol. No its meant to be foam off the waves in the first one, I don't think I really nailed it but I am not sure if it was the shader, mesh, lighting or some combo of all of the above
That terrain looks quite different, depending on the camera view. It turned out to be quite versatile. The river modifies it to gradually slope it to 0 at the water height.
Thanks you very much, @barbult
I have use the props from https://www.daz3d.com/low-rez-crowds
I am still not enough familiar with the usage of LowPi.
You are also right about postworked version - looking again at it I see the weak points with the image.
@barbult, your posted images are excellent.
Your height map and usage of Alienator Pro II makes very nice image.
I still struggle with the decoration of US2 terrains made with custom height map
to look them more interesting.
I just rewatched the Hulu movie Prey (As in Sci-Fi Predator set in 1719 with Comanchee Indians) and there was a striking scene where the protagonist is in a field of tall grass (wheat?) with a forest on the left side. I wanted to do an image "inspired by" and this is what I came up with. I LOVE UltraScenery, and don't get me wrong, but man, I struggle to get anything decent out of USXT - I guess I should watch some videos on it, or take the UltraScenery course I bought, but still... In any case, I got a foreground image using two UltraScenery 2 landscapes, one a grassy field, and the other pine forest with Aspens. Struggled all day with mountains in the background and finally just used Photoshop Generative Fill to create background part of these scenes. Also, used Orestes HDRI Skies. I actually love using MULTImedia technology and methods in my images.
P.S. These images don't do the movie scene ANY justice, but I love being inspired by beauty wherever I find it.
The Joy is in The Work!
I love your experiments! I have a question though, which stone surface did you use and how did you apply it, I seem to not get a nice stone structure in the rougher places, esp what you have in the left lower foreground, does that change much with the resolution, or did you add stones as props to the scene there?
A lot comes down to luck some times, when playing around with these things.The stone in the rougher places is just the terrain map from USC2. I started with Pasture 03 Ecology and it loaded USC2 Terrain 05 Mat for the terrain material. The foreground rocky places are just that terrain map; I didn't add any stone props. If you select the UltraScenery2 object and look at the Surfaces pane, you can see that the Base Layer uses a 2K map for the rock face. The original UltraScenery only used 512 pixel square maps, so this UltraScenry2 2K map can hold more detail. Did this answer your question?
Edit: Oh, you asked about resolution. I am using Resolution 512 in these images. The higher resolution does create more detail in transition between high and low areas. So yes, resolution can have an impact. I did add smoothing to the Height Map settings in USC2, otherwise the sharp edges were way too sharp for what I wanted. It is all a balancing act with a healthy dose of luck.
If you don't check the Iray Preview box in the Optimization section of USC2, it is pretty easy to view just the terrain with DS Iray Preview in the Viewport to see the near realtime result of changes to the terrain settings. (The unchecked Iray Preview in the USC2 pane prevents the plants from being rendered in the viewport when you select Iray Preview draw style for the viewport.)
Edit 2: The darkness of the foreground rock in the lower left is because that area is in shadow. Agian, luck, because of the early morning lighting I chose for the scene.
Here is an example of the affect of Smoothing in the Height Map settings with my resolution 512 crazy height map. The are smoothing 0,1, 2,and 3. In my scene I used smoothing of 1.8, but I don't think 1.8 was noticably different than 2. (Note that I am using Terrain RESOLUTION 512, not WIDTH 512. Width is only 128.)
Thanks a lot for the detail information, Barbult, that is great to know, time to get back to the experiment phase
@barbult - when you say you used a sky image in the envoronment, and that you used sun-sky lighting at 8:30, how do you get both to exist at the same time? When I use sun-sky it turns off the ability to load an image.
Here is an example the difference resolution can make. These images are resolution 128, 256, and 512. In all cases, width is 128 and I used Height mAP smoothing value 1. You can imagine that once you start experimenting with different resolutions and different smoothing levels (previous examples), there can be a huge variation in results with the same height map.
Ah, look again closely at what I posted.
"The cloudy sky is an image in the Environment pane." Environment pane is the significant phrase in that sentence. This is not the Environment section of the Render Settings pane. See the screenshot. Daz confused everyone by calling two different things "Environment".
UltraScenery 2 with the crowd.