Ben Nevis Challenge
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This page contains some notes and info for Oshyan's Ben Nevis challenge... To reproduce the following image(s) in Terragen.
The Original Pics
The original photographs were taken on a hiking holiday to Scotland in May 1998. Click for an enlargement.
Some extra info
Some info to help with sun placement using the Solaris plugin
- Ben Nevis: 56°48'N, 4°59'W
- Pics taken on May 12, 1998 (or near enough)
- Pic 1 around 4:45am
- Pics 2&3 around 5:30am
Elevation data and terrains
- 90m SRTM elevation data
Other Pics
Some more reference material... and some completely irrelevant reminiscing...
I
spent 3 days and two nights on Ben Nevis, camping at the peak and just kicking
back and relaxing. Here are some other pics I took during my stay. Many people
thought I was a bit weird camping on the snow... but then what's normal? I
watched people competing in the three peaks challenge arrive and leave in
freezing conditions with low visibility. The army team were coming first.. but
then you couldn't call them normal.. ;-) and the guys with the red
wigs... Some of the officials stood along the edge of the north face to
make sure no one went over the edge.
Others tourists arrived with varying degrees of preparedness.. from the fully equipped to a guy in jeans and a t-shirt carrying a plastic bag. Regardless of what anyone said... I had a warm tent and sleeping bag to retreat to when things got nasty... which it did a few times a day.
I
can't really complain about the weather though. I'd been in Scotland for 7
days and hadn't been rained on yet. Snowed on yes... but no rain.
Including my stay on Ben Nevis that made 9 days without rain. I even drove
through Glen Coe in blazing sunshine... and regretted not reading the bit about
stopping and going for a walk if the sun was shining. When I returned it was
back to "normal".
Had
it not been for some Swedish tourists reaching the peak at 4am I would have
missed this sunrise... but when I stuck my head out of the tent to see who would
be mad enough to get here so early in the morning I saw this wonderful dawn
unfolding. I quickly got dressed... well about as quickly as you can put on so
many layers in a confined space... and got out to start taking photos. I spent
the next hour taking shots between two locations, photographing the view to the
south and the north face.
A
band of low clouds approached from the east, creeping over each successively
higher ridge in its path. I'd never seen clouds like this before but there was
something about them that made me pack up and get ready to move out. Sure
enough the weather returned to "normal" for Scotland later that day.
It rained for the next seven days.
My Results
Click images for enlargements
Pic 1
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Sun's too strong, and too much red... but getting closer. Oshyan's camera placement is definitely better than mine was. New render in progress... |
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Fixed the atmospheric blue to correct the distant
mountains. The red decay is the tricky part of this particular image. The wot goals of reproducing the correct lighting for the sky (low band of red/magenta) and the correct lighting for the snow (almost neutral sunlight colour) counteract each other. |
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A little detour. Using the same world file as above but looking back to Ben Nevis from the west. |
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Cropped the data to create a new DEM and "crawled around" to find this camera angle. Getting closer but the sunlight needs more red and the shadows in the foreground need a stronger blue (without screwing up the sky, the surfaces or the distant blue). Finished some extra work on surfacing. There are a few other things I could do to make these more "realistic" but most of them require a higher resolution terrain. |
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Increased redness of direct sunlight and saturation of blue in light from above and reverse light. Here are the files for this image. If you can make any improvements based on these please send me the tgw file. |