Ray traced landscape scene thoughts

In my quest to produce better and better lego renders, I'm slowly getting sucked into a whole range of rendering things. It seems like ray tracing and terrain generation is right up my alley. The technical description, in a nutshell, for it is mathematically representing real world imagery through light tracing and fractal generation (for terrain) with less "artistic" concern or skills. Yup, that's pretty much me. I'm finding myself wondering how a certain cloud pattern I see on the way home would be mathematically represented, and what height field I would use (would it be 2 cloud layers or not). How did they (don't ask me who they is) get that cool light ray to shine through the misty cloud scene, and noticing how the snow is scattered on just one side of the mountains from a directional snow storm, and could I do that in terragen. Whoa...too freaky.

So, next, I'm looking for ways to get povray to render some of these height fields and landscapes rather than having to render them in Terragen, then match from the Terragen lighting to the pov render and mask off the model pov render (as well as shadows), which never looks "quite right" when the shadow is on a flat white floor, rather than the actual terrain, and combine all that in a post-process image alpha channel merge. It would be much easier to find a better way to render the whole scene (landscape and all) in povray. I know Forester can pull in simple model objects from povray and can render Terragen terrain files (though none of the surface map textures or clouds and cool water), but it is not nearly as good as povray or Terragen can do with the various objects separately. So, I'm looking for better ways to get believable landscape and cloud/water scenes rendered in povray. Looks like Christoph's Landscape of the Week is exactly what I want/need. Also, some more work by Jaime at The Persistance of Ignorance page. I'm going to have to spend some more time with it (and I even found some include files for believable lightening and rain effects for povray). Also, this is some pretty simplistic code sample for some random mountain chains that might work if you fix the camera in the correct place...just very specific and no clouds, or snow).

Scene Renders page

Got a new render with the fallen Rebel Soldiers and the Stormtroopers (without the helmets, still) put up on my Render Scenes Image Gallery page. There are also images there of work in Terragen landscape scenes.

POV-Ray Lego Renders

I finally got some time this weekend to go back and work on some Lego POV-Ray renders. Unfortunately, it looks like a LOT of star wars parts are still missing from the Ldraw. Namely, there aren't ANY stormtrooper helmets defined. So, it is going to make designing my openening scene from Star Wars IV: A New Hope pretty hard. Grin. I got most of the set done for the part where Darth Vader strolls into Princess Leia's cruiser after blowing a hole in the access hatch and the Storm Troopers fight it out with the Rebels, while looking for the stolen plans to the Death Star. I'm going to add some mini-fig "place holders" until I figure out what to do for storm troopers...



POV-Ray scene.pov

One thing I'm finding with ray tracing, is that lighting is everything (duh...not sure why that didn't occur to me before). It was sort of obvious when doing the X-Wing in space before, but it is really becoming obvious with this latest render attempt. I really am having a hard time with how reflective the lego blocks are (I remember seeing this on the Snow Speeder too). I get too much texture shadow on some bricks (making them appear gritty/grainy, like on the upper slopes) and too much reflected light on others. I am going to try to add some ground fog, and maybe some smoke effects, which may help disperse the light a little, but the way this renders right now, it looks way too clear and reflective. Sigh. Below is an example of the original scene and my attempts to match it (full size is a 2.35:1 aspect ratio 1405x600 anti-aliased scene). I have to get this right before I can even THINK about annimating Darth (which I also did a quick little work on shown below)...this is going to be a lot harder than I thought.



My initial attempts to add some variable density scatter media to the full scene ended up taking 9 hours of render time to get through just 33% of the scene on my P4-2.8GHz with 2GB of RAM (with no real noticeable improvements on what I was seeing), so I canceled that. White fog just makes everything look like a flash bang went off. I think I'm going to have to spend some more time learning about POV-Ray and working with the lighting sources.