Adventures across the 3rd dimension

He looks slightly confused by his own lighting.

I'm definitely gonna have to split this into multiple renders.
Been trying to get the foreground grass to look a bit more varied, and less rubbish, but the textures/materials are taking so long to compile that Blender's becoming almost unusable.
I really don't know how games manage to do this in real time while my inferior efforts are creaking under the pressure.

Oh, and I think the too-blue problem may be down to the transmission value being too high.
Not that it looks any better by lowering it. It just looks... less blue.

It's a bit like translucency. Or something.


Anyway, here's today's "progress"...

 

Still looks like a load of separate cut-outs at different depths like a "special" "effect" from way back when.

For this one the grassy foreground is particle hair rather than scattered meshes. I think the shading is better on these but it's harder to control their orientation. Of course I could comb the grass to shape it, couldn't I?
And the ambient world light is blowing out my shadows again.

One of the last things I did was to make the mountain more pointy.
And it was stretching the texture a bit much too, so it may indeed be better to tone it down.
I had hoped that a towering mountain would add scale and depth to the landscape but it isn't working. I just cannot get the smooth transistion from foreground to middle to background. Everything looks a little too close and nothing seems to belong together even though they do have the same lighting.

I may ditch the surrounding volume domain and instead try to do the mist manually. Perhaps having more control over where it goes will help. Or not.

Yeah, I would have liked some of that mist to be in front of those trees as the "shaded" part is way too dark, especially with the washed out shadows of the dinos. But as it's generated by random noise it's hard to put it where it needs to be.
Hopefully the manual mist might solve that. I'm also thinking about doing some foreground trees with that Sapling generator if I can work out the settings.
On the plus side that may help with the depth but my experience so far suggests that it'll just be another different element that will look out of place.

Ditches World Gradient for Dynamic Sky!
With no shadows in Eevee.
Switches to Cycles!
(10 minute render)
And now some of my trees are reflective/transparent/grey?!



Also been playing around with the Mist Pass. And that looks pretty good... if you haven't already split everything into two separate scenes.
I may just start this landscape again from the beginning.