Artisitc Merits

That third one seriously made my jaw drop. You have to convince me it's not a photo....

Cheers Halfy! I'm rather happy with that one myself, it had a lot more work put into than the other two truth be told, its actually the same grass models and stuff as the others but I went into shaders and stuff and had a good old muck about, and it has a few other tricks in it too that worked out quite well.

Did you get Terragen downloaded and installed Azriel? Tutorial is on the way- but adding all the subtitles is taking too long, so you may have to decipher my dulcet drunken tones!

Oh, was I meant to do that ?? Sorry !

nice. is that real?

Thanks Figg. And no, its entirely fake.

If I had the time (and if I've still got the saved project) I could even animate it-make the sun set or rise or something, fly the camera about, that sort of thing.

WIP- this a test render- first time I've tried rendering out in full HD because it so bloody slow to do (only reason I could do it here was there are no atmospheres to render which is a huge time saver) unfortunately for some reason youtube has uploaded it at 720 instead of 1080 Still watch in HD if possible seeing as it's the first HD render I've done.
Its only 2 seconds long (but thats a render time of roughly 10-14 hours!)

That was great !

Cheers Azriel. Just a shame it takes so long to make. But then again this is why in Who and stuff cgi shots are usually only a couple minutes long at most- and I've only got a home pc!

I think IL appreciate CGI a bit more if I know what goes into it, ( cant ever forgive peejers tho !!!! )

10 to 14 hours that's crazy, I didn't know it took so long.

It has do to a ginormous amount of maths, its got to work out where every little stone and pebble is, then every time the camera moves its got to recalculate how the light hits everything, and then its got to work out the depth of field, and then it has to work out how much blur to apply versus the speed of movement of the camera and tons of other stuff.
The program I'm using has been used in films and tv for landscapes- but they use a render farm- which is just hundreds of pc's basically all hooked together doing the work, can still take days- when they were rendering Gollum for TT they left their render farm to do it over night, sometimes days just for one sequence.
Processors have got faster since then, but graphics have also got more detailed so the speed is sort of cancelled out by the extra work. In other words it still takes days even with a render farm to produce long periods of cgi of any sort. Which is why its expensive and shows like Doctor Who have to use it sparingly- most cgi shots in Doctor Who are less than a minute long.
You take the vid I made above, intercut it with shots of a crew in the cabin and some dialogue and that 4 second effects shot becomes part of a two or three minute scene.

In the hobbit spirit of giving present on your birthday here's a picture for you all.
I was inspired by the god rays photos I took yesterday to see if I could recreate a similar effect using Terragen- this is the result-

It's all well and good to see this in a movie, where you know the lunatics are safely chained to their workstations in the asylum. But to know somebody's out in the wild doing this stuff...

its lovely a bit weird & creepy but, its got its qualities

It's cool to see you still doing renders, Petty. Your Forumshire rendered videos are among my favorite creative works ever posted here.

a bit weird & creepy but, its got its qualities- Azriel

The picture or me!

You really wanna know ??

A lot of this went over my head but I can't stop giggling.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2015/10/05/renoir-haters-picket-outside-museum-fine-arts/e0ybbZMdhVclxN01wfmaYM/story.html

I'd love to read it, but refuse to sign in to anything that requires facebook.  Shaking hands with the devil.

It let me read it without any sort of registration. Then again, maybe it can tell I have a Facebook without me doing anything beyond being signed into FB in the same browser.