Final Renders

It all worked out pretty well, the fur grass still needs work but this is the first time I used it. I really don't like the bush I made but I just did not have the time to make it any better.

Trying some new techniques

Did a lot of experimenting since I was not happy with a lot of the elements in my scene. Decided to go with a HDR image based lighting as a base light and did a directional and a bounce light. Tried out fur grass and the first results are not bad, learned how to tweak it a bit but I don't have any renders of the newest version. Also learned about z-depth and using it in photoshop to achieve depth of field and distance fog with out having to increase my render times. Some of those results are in the pic. A friend of mine ran a water simulation using real flow which we exported as a mesh and adjusted in zbrush. I think it really feels like the water is interacting with the environment.(not in this pic). And I was able to get a hold of Crazy bump for a while and ran all my textures through them, the normals are vastly better than those I made with the Nvidia plug-in. I don't have renders of the most current scene because the comps at school can not handle the file, They run out of memory when trying to render. So I'm rendering at a friends house because he has a awesome comp, You'll see what I mean in class.

New water and layered shader

Added some more plants and some new water. Had to ditch the old layered shader for the terrain, mental ray does not support it. I used a mix8layer shader and used mia materials. Deleted light set up and tried again.

Update

Added water, which still needs a lot of work. Experimented with a layered texture to have the rock/dirt/grass blend into each other.

Redesigned Terrain

Here are some renders of my redesigned terrain. The old terrain was just to big and did not have enough flat spaces to work with. This new design should allow me to work much faster and with better quality. I'll probably post again before class with more assets in the scene.

Little More Work

I started some more vegetation and started adding grass to the scene. With my back hurt last week I wasn't able to sit in front of the computer very long. I'll be playing catch up this weekend, I'll try to get some renders soon.

Tree Update

I made a new branch texture and added it to the trees for some variation. I also created a new bark texture and used an overlay to make some trees look like they still have some bark on them. Here are some pics.