Artisitc Merits

Yep.

{{Thanks Azriel and Halfy- though I think the green might be too vivid, could maybe do with some soft yellows or muted browns in there too- what you think? }}}

the trees are perfect, it's the grassline along the water that looks a bit bright. Pulling the brightness back a bit and mixing in some brown as you suggest would make it look more real. Dark yellow is rather brownish, so yeah, that too.

For me, I think, just the line of grass on the left hand side of the pic cud be muted just a tad, otherwise its a great pic

{{Muted greens version, what do you think? Better or worse? }}}

the green strip in the foreground is perfect now. The background still jumps out a bit. The whole picture seems a bit murkier - did you change the sky as well? It had the perfect light in the original.

((No changes to the lighting or sky at all- all thats different is the ground shaders. }}}

Likely as good as it can get. Without knowing otherwise I'd just assume it was a photograph.

{{ I think it looks a bit duller in colour because whilst I havent changed the lighting how much it reflects back of the ground probably as changed. The brighter greens and yellows in the first one return more light. }}}

Yep, your right, change it back

{{{{{ }}}}

{{Right then- bloody piccy witches - steady Petty dont want to get toaded! - how about this one then- dulled down grass colours with post increased lighting. }}}

Better

Looks good, can you sharpen up the left hand mountain range in the background an incy wincy bit ??
{{{ And don't worry, my toad turning wand & spell book are safely tucked away }}}

can you sharpen up the left hand mountain range in the background an incy wincy bit ??- Azriel

{{{ Technically, yes, but would mean tweaking the amount of horizon haze and softness of shadows and stuff and would need to be completely re-rendered from scratch. }}}

Oh dear all that just for a tweak ? better leave it alone then Its a great pic nonetheless I like it

{{Yeah fraid so- some things I can do on the fly like changing the overall lighting, and I could artificially select that region and sharpen it in post, but it wouldn't be quite what you are after and would probably look odd as it would be a blanket effect it would equally affect the clouds at the hill level as well. So to change the background properly I'd really need to re-render it.}}

I think the last one is much better.  Previously it had looked a bit dark for the grass in the background, now it looks just right.

the mountains in the background look fine to me.  If anything, the reflections in the water look too clean; sharper than the originals above them!  Probably because they are set against the sky, but I haven't noticed this effect in real life. Worth looking at some photos - I think in real life the water is not so smooth and clear.

I really like that! To Halfy's point about the water, I've seen mountain lakes on a calm day where I've said "Wow, how can the reflection be sharper than the object it's reflecting?" Optics are fascinating! So to me, that water says, "Not a breath of breeze," and so I imagine the clouds as perfectly stationary. If you had a tool for adding ripples or waves, my imagination would automatically make the clouds drift (or fly) across the sky.

The clouds show a bit of wind shear with the tops being blown off more to the right. From 20 years of looking at clouds with respect to hang gliding, I'd estimate light but nonzero winds at the surface. But the lake is small and surrounded by trees, so it could well be zero at the water surface.

It's impressive to me that the rendering has enough physics in it to show consistent wind shear in the clouds, but we have a small enough sample it could be randomness that just happens to line up right.

{{Some examples based off the water effects based off the above picture.

First here's how it was set to render the picture above.

Waves tab first, as you can see its barely got any surface roughness and the largest wave size is set to 0.1m.



On the reflections tab the reflections are at max of 1. I left the rest default.



Lastly I reduced how transparent the water seems by decreasing both how far light will decay into the water until it goes dark, and how clear the water seems by reducing the transparency (I did this because I wanted the water to seem deeper than it is, reducing the light passing through and transparency conceals the bottom of the river, and the fact, as you will soon see, the stone shader I used there for the river bed doesn't actually reach all the way to the camera- no point rendering what you plan to cover with dark water! ).



And all that looks like this-



On this one I have increased the roughness, the wave size and mostly the wind patch effect- this is how representing ripples n the surface caused by gusts of wind.



And that looks like this-



In this example I have greatly increased the roughness of the surface and the wave size-



Which gives us this-



You will note it is still however very reflective, so lets adjust that by taking the master reflectivity setting down a good bit-




Now we get this-



This is still quite reflective however, and the reason for this is the water subsurface- the less light passes through the water, the darker it is below, the more will be reflected, so although reflectivity has been reduced, its been offset by the darkness of the water sub-surface.

So lets change that too and make the water clearer giving us this-



You can now see the bottom of the river and the stones on it, though the stone shader doesn't actually extend to the camera as noted.

We can take this to an extreme by taking waves, roughness ect to 0 setting reflectivity to max and decay distance and transparency to max.



If I also put a blazing noon sun above it the water becomes even more transparent-




Obviously you can do a lot more with the water than this, but this is just to give an idea of the basic ways you can alter the effect.

Halfy- clouds I will deal with later!

But for an idea of how complex terragen can make clouds watch this short example-

okay, so the clouds are fully fluid dynamic, but the wind in the clouds and the wind on the water are adjusted independently.

'the wind in the clouds and the wind on the water are adjusted independently.'- Halfy

{{Um, to give the very uncomplicated answer to that, yes! The slightly more complicated answer is that there is no 'wind' effects as such, there is no 'wind' tab for example to adjust settings in- rather the effects of wind can be created by careful adjusting of the node network for water or for clouds. For clouds especially this can be quite complex.}}}

Love this one I wouldn't fiddle with this one