They rode far in the first day so that they had passed the foothills completely and now could see the three major mountains of this region: Carhyrad, Matyharis, and Denaityr. First stood Carhyrad; they would reach its feet tomorrow and hopefully pass by it in the course of the day after that. After Carhyrad stood the tall, white peaks of Matyharis and Denaityr. […] Jeanne stood at the top of the rocks, looking toward their peaks as the last daylight reached from behind her and bathed their snowcapped crowns in red and golden splendor. […] For a moment, she felt as though she were someone else, long, long ago that had stood in this same place… looking toward the future, but the feeling passed before she could understand it […] — The Fairie’s Daughter
Today my classes broke my brain. By the time I got home, my mind was so miserable over a myriad of items conspiring to stress me that I felt like there was only one possible course of action: giving in to the little, insistent voice that demanded I attempt rendering a particular Faerie landscape. Well, because tensors are evil, I gave in. The final result didn’t turn out quite as I’d originally envisioned it, but I’m pleased, nonetheless. This time I rendered two slightly offset images of the same landscape and Photoshopped them together into a wallpaper for myself (or others, if anyone has a particular interest in the landscape done like one of my photo wallpapers).
The quote above served as the inspiration, but those will a careful eye will note that this view is actually in the opposite direction of the one Jeanne’s looking at in the passage. The largest mountains are to the west of the camera, whereas Jeanne was viewing them at sunset from the east. And, yes, I realize that I’m ridiculous.
3 responses to “Sunsets Not Seen”
I’d like to see that snow layer have a height minimum applied so there are actually some snowcapped peaks! The only other thing that bugs me is that TGen sometimes gets cranky with the 3D clouds, and you get funny pixellated edges (particularly around the sun in that image). Taking a blur brush to that would help a lot.
You can also get some neat compositional effects by changing the sun’s disk diameter and corona size–big suns are great for sunsets.
Yeah, I think I enforced coverage rather than a height minimum on the snow. (And even then, that may be rather more snowy than Faerie would be; Faeries dislike the cold.) And the sun thing occured to me, too, once I’d finished everything up. I kicked myself about that. Hopefully I saved all the files necessary to do a bit of editing on that later.
For now, though, I must resist the urge and do real work instead 😉
By the way, a good description of the surface map options (which are not always totally obvious from within TerraGen…for instance, “coverage” doesn’t mean what you probably think it means) can be found here. You’d be interested in sections 5-7.