Ive nous illumina en ce 2009-04-24 05:28 -->
> I've never made a serious attempt on doing an outdoor scene so here is 
> my first try.
> 
> I'm no botanist but I did some research on what kind of trees could have 
> grown together in a mixed leaf forest on European hills during the 18th 
> century so we have here 'Sycamore Maple', 'European Beech', 'English 
> Oak', 'Red Oak' and 'Horse Chestnut'. Some of them where already in the 
> standard XFrog library and I did create the missing ones with XFrog - 
> which is in fact quite easy when you have some good reference photos.
> All the leaves where 'painted' in autumn colors within Photoshop.
> 
> There are also a few thousand dead leaves on the ground, not just 
> randomly distributed but with respect to the corresponding tree position 
> but sadly this is almost not visible due all the fog, shadows, ferns and 
> shrubs.
> 
> As almost every POVer I did create my own grass macro.
> As a side note: my first quite naive version of using single grass 
> blades and distributing them over the landscape didn't work out because 
> this did quickly require more than 2GB of memory. I guess because each 
> blade-mesh itself is instantiated but still requires its own 
> transformation to be be stored. So I made a macro for creating an 
> irregular grass patch and distributed those patches - and memory usage 
> dropped to 100MB for the same amount of blades.
> 
> The ruin is made of spline based isosurfaces and the gravestones are 
> also isosurfaces. Both made with the help of Christoph Hormann's 
> excellent IsoCSG includes.
> 
> I'm currently quite unhappy with the distribution of the shrubs and 
> bushes. I'll have to find some better 'rules' to pseudo-random 
> distribute them.
> And the overall look of the woods is too clean, what I have in mind is 
> an ancient forest - so there is still a lot of research and work to do.
> 
> anyway, comments and recommendations are very welcome, especially since 
> I spend almost my entire live within cities...
> 
> -Ive
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
Very good grass!
I agree with you about the place been to clean.

Let see... An old forest should have dead branches, and some boulders and 
smaller rocks. Some more bushes and undergrowth would also seem appropriate.
The two bare trees don't need to be dead trees, just trees that loose ther 
leaves faster. But they look to symetrical to the ruin. just displacing one a 
bit should do the job.
I'd also slightly reorient the camera somewhat to the left.
As ther is a ruin, there shold also be some broken stone blocks, and some almost 
intact but partialy buried.
Tree bark tend to get rougher near the base of the tree, but some trees tend to 
keep some smoothness for a very long time. Maples and oaks tend to have very 
rough bark, with vertical grooves that can get to be an inch deep and sometimes 
more.

Where is the blue flower?

-- 
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
You know you've been raytracing too long when you look at waterfalls, dust, 
rain, snow, etc, and think: "If only I had a fractalized, vector based 
particle-system modeler with collision detection!"

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