C&C desired on this room in my game

[TerranRich]

i've been here well over a year and have never posted anything in this forum...until now.

I have started designing rooms for Chapter 2 of my game, and I've done one room so far.



Forget for a minute that all the trees look identical. That will be fixed shortly. It was just a temporary thing to plan the scene out. It is obviously at twilight, as I wanted it to be dark, but still enough for the player to be able to see things. By the time the player walks out into the urban area of this world, it will be fully night. I am also going to try to make the mountain texture match with the ground texture. They are technically the same texture, but the slopes in altitude in the terrain causes darker colors to appear. I'm going to have to find a better texture than that.

What do you guys think? Anything I could add/change/remove? Hmmmmm???

[Quickstrike]

It looks like a scene from "The Wrath of Kahn".  It looks wonderful, except the ground looks too flat.  Add a few small hills and some rocks, then it will be perfect!

[Neole]

It looks great! Like you said trees could be differnet and aso make them different heights.

[Miez]

Great scene! the ground could use some detail (unless it is covered in low groundmist, which could be very nice as well) and maybe add some tiny lights to the dropship/shuttle thingy (unless of course, it is completely shut down). I'd love to see a game made using graphics of this quality.

[Synthetique]

the trees in the back makes the mountain look a bit too small.. but i like the rest of the pic..

[SLaMgRInDeR]

Perfetion at its best (apart from the trees)! i cant wait to play this game! if you;re starting chapter two, why not elease a demo of just chapter one?
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[Ali]

Trees are tricky things aren't they? I think you should get rid of most of them, and only one or two - that'd look more bleak. Either that or add loads more to create a real forest look with a lot of variety in height and so on.

I think it would be quicker and more effective to get rid of most of them though. The whole image looks really great, but the trees look very much like they've been equally spaced across the scene.

And just to be really picky: The shadows might look a little more natural for a panoramic scene if they were softer.

These are only minor points, the scene is still better rendered than some of the commercial games I've played.

[agsking]

Very cool, It has great atmosphere! Is that ship floating
or did it crash? It looks like it's hovering.

[SLaMgRInDeR]

i thonk it must be hovering as its shadow is not joined to its edge on any sides.
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[TerranRich]

i thonk it must be hovering as its shadow is not joined to its edge on any sides.
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Actually, the bottom front of the shuttle curves down, and it's really touching the ground.  :

Here is a new version of the room:



This time I made the flat terrain not so flat, got rid of some trees and changes others, and gave the shuttle a more realistic tilt to it, to make it look like it had crash-landed, which it has.

Whadda ya think?

[scotch]

Looks better,  I think perhaps you should put a little fog in, at long distance.. and maybe tone down the jaggedness of the foothills so they blend with the ground better. I like it as it is though

[agsking]

Yeah a little fog would be nice but it's still good now like scotch said.

[Neole]

The new ground looks great! Shuttle looks very unfomfortable though, off-balance.

[TerranRich]

The new ground looks great! Shuttle looks very unfomfortable though, off-balance.

Unfomfortable? Do you mean uncomfortable? If so, that's because it crashed...it's supposed to be off-balance and half lodged into the sand.

Hmm, well I tried adding fog to the scene but it wouldn't work. Does anyone know if it can be done in Paint Shop Pro, and if so, how? As for the jaggedness of the mountains, I'll fix that.

[Privateer Puddin']

fog would be done in the 3d render, surely?

[TerranRich]

Well, all the terrain is too high for the fog to appear. I would have to find a suitable 3D object, then apply a fog volume texture to it, which would take hours to render. I'll do it post-render

[Synthetique]

move the mountain waay back so it seems big enough..  

[ratracer]

Terran, good work. From my own experience and problems, I also must say that I quite like the camera angle, simple but effective.
The terrain is  very greyish, but that's gives a desolate and deserted look to the planet, which is probably what you wanted... but perhaps a few small rocks scattered around would make it better... I don't know.

At the present moment I am also trying out a desolate landscape (without spaceships) and yours is much better - I guess I'll "steal" some ideas...

[TerranRich]

Here it is with some fog. This took over 2 hours to render! With a brand new 3D nVidia 32MB video card!

As for the mountains, if you looked at the scene from an alternate perspective, you'd see that the mountain is WAY too big in scale with teh shuttle and trees. And I did not intend to spell "the" that way just now.

[Scummbuddy]

Man, this is so beautiful.

Hehe, there is a shadow for a tree that no longer exists in the bottom right...

If this ship made an emergency landing there recently, then I would suspect some dragmarks in the sand, and some sand blasted around the ship, but since you didnt make that, I guess it has been there for awhile.
I dunno, I just suppose I'd think about how the ships been there, and how the wind works on the planet, and then I'd make the sand go up and settle on different parts of the ship.

Very nice atmosphere.

[BOYD1981]

i thought that was a crack in the ground, if you look at the original picture you'll see there was a never a tree with a shadow in that area... perhaps some wormy thing is gonna jump out that hole!!!

[Archangel (aka SoupDragon)]

Terran: video card has nothing to do with rendering a picture by raytracing, that's all done by the processor.

[Privateer Puddin']

i thought that was a crack in the ground, if you look at the original picture you'll see there was a never a tree with a shadow in that area... perhaps some wormy thing is gonna jump out that hole!!!

Infact, the trees at the back in the original pic did have those shadows, and in the latest one, it kinda looks like the tree is floating and therefore the shadow being further away

[ratracer]

The fog makes it better,since it lets you concentrate more on the spaceship... I like your picture a lot, specially the spaceship!

Keep up the good work - how many backgrounds to go?

[Erwin_Br]

Amazing, your 3D modeling talents rock!

Nice lighting, great fog effect...

The only thing I'd change is highering the mountain on the right side, where there's currently a 'gap' of sky.

--Erwin

[TerranRich_StupidIE]

Thanks. Yeah, I just figured out that that tree is actually floating. It's hard to set objects down to the ground if the ground is really a terrain with bumps and hills.



The above is what I see while editing. As you can see, I can't see where the terrain begins or ends, so it's all by guesswork and constant moving and rendering, moving and rendering.

While I'm editing it again, I'll add some tracks in the sand, though I don't know how well they will come out.

[Beldin]

Nice work, (even though I hate Bryce 3D Images  )
The video card does not have any effect on rendering speed (except in realtime 3D games and the viewport), it's all in the CPU and RAM.
Bryce has a REALLY slow renderer because it uses raytracing in the whole image, but using scanline rendering with selective raytracing would be much faster. 3ds max would probably render a scene like that in a few minutes.  :o
If you increase the detail in the wireframe view you can see the surface of the terrain easier.
If I remember right, the detail switch is on the right toolbar.

[Archangel (aka SoupDragon)]

Why on earth would you use selective scanline? When by definition the bits that require raytracing (volumetrics and reflection) are the bits which take up all the processing power.