Artisitc Merits

That's probably it.  Facebook permeates everything like an insidious miasma. It's probably giving up all the goods about you to every site it grants you access to.

It's like that old Onion video about Google's opt-out village in the mountains, until you remember that was in 2009 and think about everything that's changed (or that has become public) since then.

http://www.theonion.com/video/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-protect-privacy--14358

I was mucking about in Terragen and rendered this glen, took about 6 hours to render, about 2 to set up-



I quite liked it and decided to do an animation fly through of it, but sadly as obviously 6 hours to render a single frame is a bit excessive I had to do so at considerably lower settings (I think I got it down to about 13 minutes to render a single frame), but movement hides some defects!

Slower version-

that's pretty cool. Does it synthesize music for you too?

nice. why does it take hours to render? I don't understand what rendering is btw.

Well according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

'The processing of an outline image using colour and shading to make it appear solid and three-dimensional.'

Although another applicable definition I'd argue is:

'An artistic depiction of something'

And on a personal note I'd add:

'A pain in the arse '

But I shall try to explain the process, maybe that will help (not to worry Figg I'll include pictures )

First I do a lot of complicated stuff in the Terragen program to create a 3d landscape, like this :



and this:



then i place a camera in that landscape, and then I add shaders (I colour in the land) then I stick stuff on it, like rocks, bushes, grass, trees and stuff (its like dressing a film set, there is no grass or trees behind the camera or over the hills, as it would be a waste of computer processing to plot them all if you cant see them).

Then comes the rendering bit- this is where the computer has to work out al the tricky maths stuff, like how much light gets through the atmosphere, where is it falling, where are the shadows ect ect.
It does this by first making a lot of dots- the more dots and the closer together they are the higher the quality and detail settings- thjis one is the same quality as the video render, but at 1080 instead of 720 resolution (its bigger and has more detail).



Then oit starts filling in the detail, first the terrain itself with nothing on it, then it adds in objects, and finally it does the lighting and atmosphere-



And keeps filling it in like this until its finished the whole thing (see finished picture above)
But to make an animation I need a minimum of 24 frames per second. Or more accurately 24 renders per second.
So for an hour of rendering I got roughly 4 frames. Oh and it eats up my processor so about all else I can do is browse or write whilst its doing it.

This is why I don't do these type of animations very often!

rendering is like what Norc does after she draws an outline.

Yes but my explanation had complicated looking pictures

crikey that looks hi-techy stuff.

Basically rendering is the same way they made Gollum- only in that case it was a figure they were rendering, instead of rendering the underlining land, it rendered the skeleton and muscles, instead of surface shaders it had skin shaders ect- but same thing- you can imagine at the quality they needed to do it at just how much computing power they needed- they had a warehouse of processors rendering that stuff, and it still took hours or even days to do a few minutes.

The glen video looked great to me, Petty. Granted, I didn't have it in fullscreen, but I was pretty impressed. Always love seeing your renders.

Thanks Eldo. Trying a fixed camera version with it covering from dawn till sunset. If I can get it right it should look like timelapse footage. Only got about 1 seconds worth rendered but its looking interesting. When it finished and turned into a video I will post it up. Eru knows when that will be though! Bloody rendering

how does the computer know what rocks you want?

You have to tell it.

In Terragen there are three main ways of doing this for rocky stuff- surface shaders. Displacement shaders. And a 3-d object.

Surface shaders- these are bvasically painting. So say I want a cliffface. I make a surface shader and I can give it a range between two colours- so lets say I make it quite a dark grey colour, to an even darker grey. Then I set its slope angle, so it only shows up on the steep cliffy bits.
Then I make another surface shader the same way but this time I make it a light grey to a darker light grey.
As I made this one second it goes on top of the dark grey one, covering it up, so I would change its coverage to about half- that will give me alight grey outer rocky look, with a darker grey rock underneath.
You can repeat this to give the effect of different surfaces types (make the surface shaders brown, then put green on top reduce the coverage of the green bit to let some brown show through- you have a dirt ground look with grass).
Its just painting in layers on the terrain surface.

Displacement shaders are abit like surface shaders, they cover the terrian the same way only instea dof paining a colour they make fake 'displacements' on the terrain. One of these displacement shaders is the 'fake rock shader' you can create different sizes and shapes of 'fake' stones and colour them as you like.

3-d models are actual rocks made by people in a 3d modelling program. You can load these into Terragen and place them in the scene either as an individual rock, or as a population of rocks across the terrain.

The scene I made above of the glen uses all three techniques- the smallest rocks are a displacement shader, the cliffs and stuff are surface shaders, and the largest rocks are 3d models.

well I undertand the 'you telling it' bit. so that's progress.

"Rendering" is the process of throwing all the nasty bits from a butchering into a giant cauldron and boiling the **** out of it to recover the fat as tallow or lard.  What's left gets fed to the hogs.

(Unless you're a Scotshobbit, of course. Then you skip that step and put it all straight into the haggis.... )

Here to help!

mmm yummy renderings

rendering frame 165 of 240 so far of the timelapse animation of the glen-



Bollocks its taking forever!

Well only took about 35 hours!

like the clouds its a shame it takes so long to render though if it was quick you could really go bananas.

I admire your tenacity & patience Petty ! That was a great clip tho, liked the choice of music also, It all looked very real.

I enjoyed the render, Petty.  I couldn't quite tell, was the vegetation supposed to be moving in a breeze or was that just the changing light? I suspect the latter since I'm sure movement would exponentially increase the rendering time, but I was just curious.

was the vegetation supposed to be moving in a breeze or was that just the changing light? - Eldo

Its caused by me not being able to render it out at high enough settings (in particular atmosphere settings- the static picture of the glen I did has an atmosphere setting of 164, the animation only 54) it creates a few glitches.