Headland

Interesting. Before the advent of the Dazstudio plugin I experimented with a few different ideas for creating human body parts. I tried everything from metaballs to terrains. Faces seemed like something a terrain should be able to do well, but in the end it was not very feasible for the reasons listed above. Noses, lips, eyes, and ears were impossible. Metaballs fared much much better and in the end probably could be used to some limited degree.

Cool David, you've got it. A lot of people don't know that a flatbed scanner is focused to several inches above the glass but the light bleeds off at the square of the distance. I din't do it, but if you were up to do it right, putting some skin ointment or oil on the face and then putting some flour on it so it sticks would probably do the trick. As for the bearrd, I think shaving would help but it might not be an option. Since my sideburns are white, there was no problem.

Height maps of face. Tricky. If there is no beard to contend with, then mostly skin is the same brightness, so hovering your face over a scanner (which has poor depth perception and weak lighting) provides quite a good height map (but your nose will squash) - and you will need to adjust for the whites of the eyes which will illuminate better with the scanner light. Beards cause more problems, if dark they "recess" the face. I suppose a solution to this would be to cover the face in some uniform substance, but I don't know what. Grey cammo paint maybe? But certainly I've had some sucess captureing height maps from scanners (in the dark) since anything too far from the glass does not get very well lit. I'm sure you grasp the theory.

Too glossy, agreed! The horrible colour combination was meant to make all this uninviting giving even more reason to escape from here. Agreed too, that the inset head would fit better to richter's ?Ancient Gate? (see http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=356). And, yes Rashad - though I think my water almost always fits nicely, I do have a problem to get the wave size correct. And there is no surf, again right. Question: how would you create a hight map of your face? I mean the nose higher than the eye sockets and so.

The face, while well integrated into the scene, is still somewhat disturbing. The more distant island seems to fare better in realism terms than the closer, which for some reason seems overly glossy. The smaller golden face/mask would not look out of place in some jungle adventure in the style of Indina Jones. The water works well, the orange haze I'm not so keen on in conjunction with the black and white clouds and the tirquoise sea. While the lighting looks good, I can't reconcile it with the sky, which appears too dark to explain what appear to be glossy highlights on the land - but which could well be light patches in the terrain, I can't quite tell. Interesting piece clearly, since there is plenty to say about it!

Terragen is such a unique program. It does so much and it does it for free. It does better grass, skies, water, and surf than almost any other program out there. Terragen is the bomb! But Terragen would make a mess of the above image, Terragen does not have enough advanced lighting features.

Vue can do surf, Carrara (with plugin) can do surf, Terragen can do surf.. Bryce need this option too. Hope that DAZ will add it in future.

I like this theme you've hit on lately with these height maps. In our Daz forum discussions on the future of bryce, I feel like mentioning that the terrain editor is one of those features that will keep bryce alive for at least a little bit longer, it is so capable as you demonstrate here. I am not in love with this color scheme. Orange and green do not go well together in my view unless it is a green plant with orange flowers. But not every image is intended to be "pretty". So on the other end I do like the over-all contrast. From this angle the sky lab clouds will look flat which seems to have been your goal. The water is really great. I love the wave break pattern in the bump. The scaling of those waves seems a bit large to me but I could be wrong. The diffussion of those sails seems a touch high, but again it adds to the contrast and adds some neutrality to the scene as all other surfaces are heavily color saturated. Funny, I can feel the indoorsiness of the hdri image. It gives the scene an intimate feel.