snowy forest with different moods

[kremiansky]

Here's a render of a snowy forest I've done, if you browse the other artworks on the page you can also see other lighting versions. What do you think? https://www.artstation.com/artwork/N5E9oz

[seandunderdale]

Love it. Really impressive. Good job dude!

[kremiansky]

Love it. Really impressive. Good job dude!

Thank you!

[francomanko]

Yeah very nice, how did you make the snow on trees, with particle emit?

[Rusty_Hazelden]

Amazing realism Dmitry!!!

Would you be able to give us a ballpark idea what the render time and memory requirements were for this scene?

Cheers,
Rusty

[vlado]

Very nice! I’m really curious how you did the snow on the trees and what the materials are.

Best regards,
Vlado

[^Lele^]

fantastic stuff!

[kremiansky]

Amazing realism Dmitry!!!

Would you be able to give us a ballpark idea what the render time and memory requirements were for this scene?

Cheers,
Rusty

DON'T REPEAT AT HOME!

Because I applied vray fur to almost every object in the scene, and everything had displacements, and I didn't expect to be rendering animated camera (sssssh don't tell anyone) I didn't optimize the snow- so I was rendering it at around 40-60 gigs RAM usage, which is way higher than it supposed to be. I used progressive render for all the iterations and the final image. Whilst doing iterations I was isolating regions and hiding a lot of stuff, so it was really quick, but every time I wanted to render the overall thing I would close all the programs in background, start rendering, and go to buy some groceries or something/watch movie or a couple of family guy episodes, and after 30-45 mins I'd have a relatively clean result. For the final image I just set the time for a few hours, went to sleep, it was relatively noiseless when I woke up, so I stopped the render, and saved the image XD

If I needed to do it for work- I'd do the needles in model rather than vray fur, and instanced them with every tree, and optimized the snow way more, and would've aimed for 20-40 ram usage, I think 2.5 hours on one not amazing computer per frame would be reasonable time for this to look good.

[kremiansky]

Very nice! I’m really curious how you did the snow on the trees and what the materials are.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thanks Vlado!

On the first render- the evening one, almost all of them are just almost white vrayMtl, (the FG branch is fastSSS2) with no reflections whatsoever XD. It was working well enough just with diffuse and displacement as long as while grading you slightly brighten the shadows (and because everything in this scene supposed to have some degree of SSS in real life-trees, rocks, ice, snow- it's fine to do it globally). If I had character in there, or a motion in the camera that would've done the trick probably also with the other setups.

On the second render (sunny) with direct lighting I decided to make it actual SSS, so I used fastSSS2 on everything that had snow on it, (rocks, terrain, snow on trees) with same map plugged into different remaps and into different channels, and a mask where there isn't snow plugged into diffuse to reduce SSS'ness on less transluscent stuff, with almost no reflections on most things as well, as it was looking not as good with reflections. You can see how it's less "sharp" than the first image, especially on the ground.

In the "morning" scene it's the same fastSSS2 shaders.


I think the "secret" of good snowy scene is not the shader, and not even the displacement map, but rather the model, as it seems that very often amazing shaders are being applied to some blobby geo, and it makes it look bad. I think I'll do a few more scenes with snow and ice, and hopefully do one day a breakdown