Adventures across the 3rd dimension

Append?

If I hadn't made some scaling errors the other day when separating them then that would indeed work.

Unfortunately at the moment I've got the back four landscape meshes in one file which I render out and then use that pic as a background plate for the grassy foreground/dinos in another file so the mist pass doesn't transition between them.
And when I try to append objects the grass suddenly goes crazy because of... reasons.

Last night I did create a decent looking transparent mist plane but didn't save it because I accidently messed up the grass too, but I wasn't worried because I'd be able to recreate it today.
And... I'm unable to recreate it today for some reason.

This is frustrating and tiring.

Instead of failing to get all those noise texture nodes working I simply painted a blurry blob on a layer in ArtRage and imported that as a plane. After duplicating it around the landscape I now have control over my mist and I replaced the gradient sky with an HDR...

 

I wish I could get darker shadows to fall on the grass.

You can add darker shadows in artRage later

I could use that to tone down that distant saturation too.

But I'll try to do it all working Blender first. I think I might be able to boost the shadows with a color-ramped AO node set to multiply.
Another option is to abandon the grass and have a dirt/rock foreground which would catch the shadows more clearly. That might be more accurate too considering the ongoing debate of whether any modern grass existed in dinosaur times. But grass is an easier thing to generate quickly.
After posting this I also experimented with different camera positions to move the viewpoint closer to the ground for the final and that looked much better.

Don't like the leaves.
Not sure about the ground.
Mist still isn't quite right.

 
 

I like it, but the dino now looks much larger than he should be 

Racing dinos need something to run away from....



 

 

Don't worry. When you take into account how long it takes to generate and render smoke simulations they'll have plenty of time to escape, evolve into birds and then fly to a safe continent on the other side of the earth.

EDIT: And this is the tutorial I was following for this, and yes, his PC is clearly better than everyone else's.