Any suggestions on how to improve this landscape?

Honestly? Add a texture/material.

Oooh! That's nice! I particularly like the foreground and left-middleground foliage. However, IMHO, the background leaves a little to be desired. My main crit would be the mountains; they seem too jagged for real mountains, and also too uniform in texture. The lower parts of the mountains, especially, could do with some texture graduating from splotchy dark/light green (representing both bushes and grass), through splotchy browns (representing unstable earth) to the final grey. Or something. (A little haze might also help). The shadows in the mountains look good to me - just the right shade of blue.. I also think the far river-bank could be improved, but find myself unable to phrase exactly what I find wrong, nor what to do about it. Great work so far though! Cheers, Diolma

derjimi: add texture/material where?

diolma: I agree on the mountain texture. I'm not good at creating my own textures and I couldn't seem to find an appropriate Bryce preset.

I was basing my image on the photo above, but also using artistic license.

Message edited on: 07/08/2004 16:22

Jasonmit, the mountains in the background need more texture in my opinion. J.

I'd make higher res, higher detail mountains as well as some more variation in texture.

Any better?

Much better, in my opinion! I would move away from the stock sky, spend a few minutes tweaking the clouds in the Deep Texture Editor, inside the Skylab... Also, turn on Blend Sun with Atmosphere, it's a neat effect. About the jagginess of the mountains, go into the Terrain Editor and increase the resolution, then smooth it once or twice... Here's an old mini-tut frame showing how :

The mountains are at the highest resolution already.

You could re-scale the texture in the TE under edit.......(make it smaller/finer)

I have to disagree. I think the mountain terrain is rather nice as it is, and some more atmosphere (ie. haze) would soften their appearance considerably. If anything, I'd hit them with just a touch of noise in the TE to simulate the appearance of trees. I agree with shadowdragonlord about the sky. Even the best tweaked Bryce skies have always seemed flat to me. As using volumetric clouds are generally murder, rendertime wise, I'd probably investigate using a photo sky. This is an excellent image already, and I look forward to seeing how it progresses.

give the terrain a couple of 2-3 click in the hieght and slope noise /add a channel or 2 (more blue marbles on top in dte)of stone or sand and see what happens/ ctl click the bumps for all of them .

"Any better? " Much better, Jasonmit! I like that texture a lot.

Also, you could experiment with duplicating the terrain putting a different material on the duplicate version, then moving the duplicate fractionally to the side and/or up a little bit. You can mess round with the duplicate in other ways as well, adding more noise like wildman2 suggests.

Changes made: Added sky created in Terragen Clicked slope noise once on mountains Clicked height noise once on mountains Better?

yeah, it's better :) but I'd still like some more mountain geometry detail :) bryce is good at that :) I also noticed a little nitpick, all the plants in the foreground seem to be in a straight line, maybe rotate them a little and also disperse them a little for some more variety.

I like it. I've never really tried a really realistic landscape. Maybe have a look at the water? In your source picture it's totally flat and still and is giving a pure reflection. Your water is maybe over textured? Unless you were going for a river feel rather than a lake feel I guess?

Yeah, the water is one of the things I would like to tweak next.

Aye, Jason, I beleive you when you say the texture is atit's maximum, but it's source still came from a low-res sample. What I mean is that if you START with a 256x256 image, then merely set the resolution to 1024x1024 or godforbid 4096x4096, you're not really changing the original image of 256x256, merely spreading it farther. So, you can smooth it a few times to actually create the blends on a pixel level, or run some noise or erosion like the others were saying. Or, you can run any Photoshop-style filters you want on it, and get rid of "the jaggies". I'll point them out real quick, they might not be so obvious... I'm often over-critical and always obnoxious, please don't take any offense :

Well, the texture is a Bryce preset, so would the low-res sample stuff even apply?

I'm not talking about the terrain's material, or surface texture. I'm talking about the terrain's texture inside the terrain editor... The greyscale height-map which gives your mountains their geometry. And if you were using a Bryce preset mountain, then the technique I mentioned above would DEFINITELY work to your advantage. And, as far as I know, all of the Bryce preset mountains are at 128x128, even though they come in at 512x512 when you add them to a scene...