I would post this in the gallery except for the grainy scan line problem with the aura on the lightening. Kixum assures me that Eovia has been informed of this problem. Hopefully they will fix it soon!

Nice image! Maybe if you doubled the resolution and then downrezzed you would get a better effect around the lightning?

Looks fanastic, rather un-Cararra-like. The water is great too! Do I see foam on it? Is it a shader with displacement mapping? Are the lightning strikes actual geometry with a glow shader? Or did you cheat by putting a bulb somewhere over there?

This is excellent work. Would like to know in more detail, how you did it.

I second the above, i'm new to carrara, hopefully I won't drown in my own water

I have been trying to get something like this out of Mojoworld, but now I am going to try it in Carrara. Awesome work.

Fill us in on how you did this. Thanks :)

Very cool, what a great image. memaci

Thank you all for your comments, here is the scoop on how I put this together...

The clouds were done using the new volumetic clouds in C5. I did crank up the flat bottom setting and the accuracy settings and I significantly darkened the texture. There are only 2 different cloud master objects in the scene, I just copied and rotated them to make them look different. The rest of the sky is a simple realistic sky with the sun low on the left side horizon.

The lightening was built using a few simple spline objects that were pieced together. The lightening texture was very simple, consisting of a color (mostly white) placed in both the color and glow channels. I used Anything Glows as a controllable light source for the main pieces of the lightening. I also turned on the aura effect, thus the aura graininess problem.

I did augment the water reflection using 2 spot lights, each placed at the lightening location about 3/4 of the way up and pointed at a spot in the water in line with the camera. I added a sunlight with a setting of about 60 or 65. These were the only lights used in the scene (ambient light set very low, maybe 3 or 4).

The water itself is actually a terrain built using the fractal noise feature (I find the ridged noise option works well for simulating water). I used very small feature size and height settings.

Yes Hoofdcommissaris, there is foam on the water, simulated foam anyway. The water texture (with foam) is done entirely with a procedural texture that I built some time ago and have been using in different projects.

To get the lightening to not look like simple dashed lines in the final render, I rendered at 1280x1024 with the object accuracy set to 1/2 pixal.

Message edited on: 03/15/2006 14:30

Very creative. I don't suppose there is any chance you could post the tree for that foam texture? I have been trying to do one like it for a long time with no luck.

Ditto sparrow & thanks Gavotte for sharing :) Well done :)

that is great!

This is a great render. Keep it up! -Kix

Sparrownightmare - I would be happy to share the water texture but it is very complicated and I do not know how to go about showing all the various settings. I even tried pulling it up in C4 and expanding the tree but it extends over 3 or 4 screen heights so a screen capture only shows part of it.

If anyone has any idea on how best to share this, let me know.

Oh - the water terrain uses the perlin noise option rather than the ridged noise, but I think both can be used to make a decent water surface.

What has happend over here, people attached shaders (in the box below the reply field), but changed the extension from .cbr to .txt (the system does not allow a lot of file formats) After downloading the file, people can change it back to .cbr But then everybody can screw it up and say it is your fault...

Nice!

I didn't even think of renaming it and attaching it. Good idea!

I should have thought about changing the extension and including it as an attachment... thanks for the reminder.

I am at work right now but will post it tonight when I get home.

for the water texture, you could allways submit it to free stuff...

I tend to tweak it a little for each picture. If you make any improvements on this, please let me know.

YIKES!!! There is a lot of stuff in there.....never seen anything like that before. Thanks :)

Was this a mac or pc. I can't get c5p to load it.

I was wondering if this was cbr. Sure enough I didn't read well enough. Loads ok.Cool.