Landscape and obstacles:
First I ran several terrain generations, before i found a good view placing the cam at one corner of the terrain (which is together with wide viewing angle the "cheapest" solution for generating a far reaching landscape) although not really visible in the present image i left this view, since I didn't want to alter the scene design again.
After that I made a large scale of 1/8 of the terrain for my scene, and again 1/8 of that with the obstacles. I decided to do so because the jagged rough look seemed to be right for the stones, and i had no drive to create stones in autocad or something (isosurface stones always seem to smooth to me or generate renderbugs or take some centuries to render - damn shure, thats my fault).
After they were looking like mountains (the ramtopps, he he;-) i decided to simply do a difference with another heightfield painted in IgxImg.
After that the next task was smoothing the landscape - last winter i encountered a way doing this using a macro for a blob-hexagonal field (well i was in need of snow that time) so I used this again.
Planting:
I used my dh-herotree.inc which is a collection of some macros I started to write almost 2 years ago for generating trees and plants.
The macros were written from scratch, only having NVIDIAs Grove Demo as inspiration (but it is a good one, telling trees are simple). The trees were the reason I "converted" to PoV, since Terragen couln't do trees and there was a proggy promising rendering Trees with Pov into TG-Images, altough it never functions at mine, i started to explore PoV and it's powerfull macros.
The trees consist of blobs and heightfields for the leaves. The blobs seemed to render faster than primitives (and i never understood why, perhaps intelligent grouping could have been helping, I later looked at the works of Gilles Tran and the other guys, finding they're using primitives as well). The branches have some spline addition and i also added a part called "borke" in my code (which is bark in english, but i never found time to search for until now). Originally I used meshes with transparency for the leaves, but I encountered the transparent parts visible in fog or media and no way to get rid of this, so i used heightfilds with waterlevel instead. The last mod was to use several unions of branches (sub-trees) as leaves to shorten parsing and render time (but making my gravitation/wind setup almost useless) and enabling really large forests...
The "B(ueschel)gras" (which is tussock in english) consists of spline patches as you may see.
All Plants are planted using my positer macro, which simply traces a ray to the planet. And their shape depends on the vegetation function, making them different according the point they grow. (Thats the reason I don't wanted to change the scene again)
Colors and Media:
Well, i took a really long time (and many many almosts), doing this right and giving the gate to the elves' world the right impression, perhaps you get the right idea, knowing this is version 18 of the code and image.
The worst bug I found was that the "circle" where (the transparent sphere which includes) the fog intersects with the blob and the heightfield gets transparent, so one could see through the ground, i found no solution for this z-fightling like effect, so i simply increased the size of the fog out of the view range.
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