Quote from: dandelO on June 21, 2011, 04:13:46 PM
I like these structures, Martin, very complexed, I especially like the vertical 'creases'.
A couple of things bother me, though. There seems to be no distinction between the walls and the ground-plane stones and, it seems overly specular, I'd expect to see some glinting here and there but, as the wip is for now, it appears somewhat plasticy(sorry, I mean no offence, can't think of a better word right now), or a bit 'sweaty'(Jeez, and that's an even worse choice of words! 
).
That ^^ all sounds horrible reading it back but I don't mean any harm. I'd just expect it to look a bit more dusty with some specks catching highlights on sharp edges and such, instead of so shiny all over.
And don't you just hate the effect of specular in shadowed areas within TG? It really is a tricky thing to balance well, I think we spoke of that some time before, didn't we?
No problem with the way you've put it in words Martin
The specular setting is quite low already.
Reflectivity = 0.5
Highlight intensity = 0,15
Roughness = 0,1
I may need to lower these even a bit more (it's actually a tad bit less on the stones already)
I agree with you that the speculars in the shadows are a tough thing in TG2.
In generally I find that the specular implementation of TG2 is missing something like controls for falloff and such (in Blender you can increase your falloff without affecting the brightness at the centre of the falloff....this would be awesome for especially water and to some lesser extent rock work like this).
There's actually not much going on displacement wise.
A heightfield DEM terrain, redirect shader, 1 strata shader and about a dozen of surface layers. And the cracks of course. That's it!
I agree I could add a bit more dusty feel about it and I already gave it some thought, just need to try to translate them into TG2
I don't really agree with the fake stones not being "distinct from the walls". If you look a lot of references you'll see that talus/sedimentation of rockwalls have the same colour as the rocks, simply because they eroded off from the walls.
This is why I often choose to feed the whole shading chain of the terrain as colour input into my separate fake stones surface shaders.
I need to revise the fake stones as they churn up too much rendertime. I think the densities (too large) create a lot of invisible intersecting/crossing displacements and that that is creating an overhead somehow. They are so damn slow and I don't know why other than that (since they have no displacement or whatsover added, only colour).
Cheers,
Martin
