Ring World

[cyphyr]

Well this one is entirely down to Avkhatri's question and Gom's answer. Thank you very much guys. I just got intregued and ran away with the idea for a while. The scene has 19 light sources, 2 enviro lights (GI & AO) and no sunlight. The atmosphere is at 128 samples, could go higher but render times are getting quite high as it is. C&C welcome although I doubt I'll be persuing this one much further for the time being.
Enjoy
Richard

[Henry Blewer]

Very interesting project. I think this needs more vegetation. I like the shuttle car very much.

[Zairyn Arsyn]

i like this a lot, ring worlds have been on my mind for a week or so...

would be cool if we could get the populations to conform to the to the angle of the terrain so they wouldn't all be standing straight up.

[Kadri]

It has a nice refreshing feeling , Richard  
You say you doubt that you will pursuing it further but the only thing i would add is , that it feels a little incomplete !
Not much! Maybe 10-20 % if we can measure such things of course ! A little more plant , ground and ceiling variation and their texture
and a little more dirt on the metal texture too maybe ! It is good but it can be great ! You are almost there Richard come on  

[Mahnmut]

Great!
it looks naturally grown (or dug out of some big asteroid or whatever. I like your lamps/atmosphere generators, thats what they look like for me.
I tried to make a Dyson-sphere some time ago, I used procedural vegetation because populating the inner side of a planet wasn´t easily possible.
When I look at your image, I think maybe looking along the perimeter is more interesting, I only wanted to have my central lightsource in view.
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10796.0
Best Regards,
Jan

[Dune]

Very intriguing, Richard! I really like this idea of an inner world. This reminds me of Myst again. Might do something of this myself...

[RArcher]

Very cool! The lighting really makes it.  I hope you don't give up with this and take it a bit further.

[inkydigit]

looks really impressive Rich...keep at this when you have time!

[dandelO]

Very cool, Richard. You must have had to place all those ceiling structures with the lights inside them manually, eh?

[Tangled-Universe]

Very creative and cool work Richard!

Very cool, Richard. You must have had to place all those ceiling structures with the lights inside them manually, eh?

I think so too (the lights for certain), although he could have used a population for the structures which has no variation in the spacing-settings.

[cyphyr]

Thanks for the feedback guys:)

I see what you mean about "incomplete", an earlier version had a lake/river that followed about the long inner curve (a slightly altered version of Gom's file). It was a render hog and I had trouble getting the "shore" texture to flow along with the curve.

Images like this throw up all kinds of issues, the primary ones being that its trying to break almost all the rules upon which landscape rendering software work by.
For example atmospheres don't work this way! All the software I've ever come across assumes that the atmosphere thickness decays as you get further from the centre of the planet. Well in this image the planet is hidden and is above the bent planes that form the tunnel. So the atmosphere is decaying in the wrong direction! It's not that noticeable in this image. Another issue is that the light sources on an internally lit structure like this (its the same for a cylinder (Eon) or sphere (Dyson))create a very even shadowless light, quite flat and uninteresting with rays coming in from all directions but mostly above.

Populations will of course only work in the mid to near distance (close enough to not notice the curve)

I'm in London for a few days so I've set it to render a larger version, higher detail and AA and better quality, the vp has also been moved.

When I get back I'll  post the result.



Richard

ps: Oh the light placement. I made a model of the Generator unit (in its final position, y=-137 km ish) and another model of where the light would be. The generator was imported and copied and pasted with a rotation of 0.3deg in the z? axis (the last one). This gave a curve of generator units. The same was done with the light model so I had a small bounding box where each light was going to be. I then simply moved individual lights sources too cover the modelled lights and then deleted the light models. Simples

[dandelO]

You could always add an extra small sphere primitive to the model and give that 'part' extreme luminosity values to create the light sources, saves on the trouble of matching up 19 independent TG light sources, and will work just as well with the GI to provide the lighting. Although, I kind of like the graininess from the TG lights here, they look really electric.

ps: Oh the light placement. I made a model of the Generator unit (in its final position, y=-137 km ish) and another model of where the light would be. The generator was imported and copied and pasted with a rotation of 0.3deg in the z? axis (the last one). This gave a curve of generator units. The same was done with the light model so I had a small bounding box where each light was going to be. I then simply moved individual lights sources too cover the modelled lights and then deleted the light models. Simples

Ah, right.

[cyphyr]

You could always add an extra small sphere primitive to the model and give that 'part' extreme luminosity values to create the light sources, saves on the trouble of matching up 19 independent TG light sources, and will work just as well with the GI to provide the lighting. Although, I kind of like the graininess from the TG lights here, they look really electric.

I initially tried very high luminosity setting to light the scene (the pylons originally has a light emitting surface at the top before they became a mono rail). I dropped the idea as it was getting very grainy everywhere, not just about the light sources. I've learnt a few tricks on the way so I may try it again.



Richard

[Dune]

As I said, intriguing, so I went for it. Not wanting to hijack your topic, though. I used 2 planets, elongated perlins, and each can be populated easily, just turn the objects 180 degrees. The light is a sun at 10 degrees right in front and only 0.2 atmo density at 32 quality. No grain, well hardly. 3 additional light sources somewhere in the 'tunnels'. The tunnels are not good enough, but ok, it's a quick setup. And some lightsources, which I did place manually.
I think using a crater shader + an inverted one for the other planet, plus some sinus function, some redirect, etc would give a better sloping tunnel perhaps.

[cyphyr]

Intriguing indeed
And I'm laying the blame for this one firmly at Goms and avkhatri's feet, sorry guys!
So is this two planets just very close together, almost touching, or have you inverted one of them, possibly the lower one?
I'm asking because theres the age old issue of weather one should model an object exactly as it is (within reason) or if close enough is good enough. I certainly believe in this case since we have no referance we can get away with the latter. Did you also play wit hthe AO and GI light sources. I found getting a ballance between the two quite problamatic. Dramatically differant results depending which was the higher value even with settings in the 100's. Hmm I like the idea of using two crater shaders but what I'd realy like to do is find is a way to do a propper π (Pi) based function rather than a sine based one as I've used from Goms. What I have at the moment gives a bell curve an whereas a propper circle would be much more useful in this case.

Richard