Ancient Technology: The Light Trap

[Simius Strabus]

Work in progress, C&C please

[cyphyr]

Good and interesting, no real comments, intrigued where your going to take this.
Richard

[Dune]

Very nice concept. I recognize some procedural technology  I like the colors and subtlety very much, although I would shift the trap slightly off center to the right.

[Simius Strabus]

I need to apply the golden rule: place your object of interest at about 1/3 off center.

[TheBadger]

OK! How did you go about making the obelisk glow? I cant see from this distance, is the glow shedding light on the surface?

Very nice effect! Cool image/idea.

[Dune]

Luminosity is the key word, Badger. I expect it to be in this case, anyway. Either from default shader or surface shader.

See here: something to play with...

[Simius Strabus]

Its actually a translucent surface. I want to add 4 smaller thin/narrow columns to the pyramid, but the extra columns don't render well. They are clipped halfway.
This hapend to me before, when using a very rough terrain, with huge displacements. Trying to solve this...

[RArcher]

You should be able to fix the cut off spires by changing the "Displacement Tolerance" value in the Planet 01 node (or whatever your planet node is).  Use very small value increments until the cropping is fixed.

The image itself is really interesting, nice to see something out of place in the forest.

[Dune]

Ah, translucent.

Try increasing the displacement tolerance in the planet node for your clipped of displacements.

[Dune]

You beat me by the second, Ryan 

[Simius Strabus]

Thanks for the advice
Increasing the displacement tolerance did the trick. Making a cropped render right now. I'll post it when its done.

[Saurav]

Looking forward to where this heads.

[TheBadger]

Oh wait, wait! Those are procedural structures, and not objects?!? That does make a difference.

@dune
thank you for the file! Im in a long render now, but I will look this over very carefully when the renders are finished. This all goes to the stuff I posted about illuminated objects and I want to get back to that soon. So i'm glad to get a better understanding here.

Thanks guys.

looking forward to more, Simius

[Simius Strabus]

The whole thing is a stack of simple shape shaders. BTW, increasing the displacement tolerance is having a tremendous effect on render times....

[Simius Strabus]

Update: I removed the troublesome panels/reflector sss and used 4 objects instead.
Added a reflective layer to the panels, some trees in the foreground. Still something missing.

Thinking of creating an animation. The reflectors are closed at first, slowly opening, moving away from each other as the obelisk slowly emerges from the pyramid.
As the obelisk reaches it final position, it starts to glow, reflectors tilt outward to their final position. Hmm....