Lonely Lakes

[efflux]

Here's a first render from a new planet I'm working on. All planet wide procedurals as usual including the water. The planetary wide terrain makes it very difficult to get nice terrain. Here I've used a variation of something in the Stepped Terrain thread. Only one step and subtle. It's not perfectly horizontal either but breaks up the terrain enough to provide better realism. Displaced fractals always create a strong vertical look which isn't cool so we need to break that up.

Fake stone on here for once. I haven't used those for a while, mainly concentrating on other ways to create rocks which are also in here. Fake stone work best for smaller stones and rocks.

Exported as exr which is slightly exposure edited in Blender before going to Lightzone as tiff for further tweaking.

Next phase of TG2 exploration will be more colour and surfacing. I'm getting quite happy with the terrains now.

[choronr]

I like your experimentation and results ...keep on.

[efflux]

Thanks. I'm trying to keep things simple and efficient. My progress with TG2 is slow due to this, the fact that everything is procedural planetary scale and some technical limitations in TG2. If this scene was rendered without surface colours you'd see that it's very clean and smooth and very few surface displacements. You'd probably not be able to find any artefacts. I try not too focus just on details even although there are details that need improved. This way I focus on trying to bring all the elements up in a fashion that if you were to fly around in an animation with hugely changing focus of scales, it would work really well. I don't concentrate on certain POVs. I want the whole thing to work so I can explore and there will be lots of good POVs.

[inkydigit]

Excellent work, and as ever, your methodology and explanation is totally inspirational!
Cheers
Jason

[TheBadger]

Great terrain design. Looking forward to seeing the details added in.

[efflux]

Here's another high altitude shot from this environment. This terrain has subtle stepping. Distorted steps along the lines of what is discussed in the Stepped Terrain thread. The cliffs you see here and there are created with this method but it's deliberately subtle. I didn't want huge even steps all over the place. This shot demos a downside of hillocky all over perlin when viewed at this scale. I am working on that to increase the sense of variety at this scale.

[mhaze]

Very, very impressive. I really like the subtle transitions and colours in your work, it's something I need to work on.

[efflux]

When I get back into my Windows system again I'll get a screenshot of the graph for this planet. The reason for this is to show how simple it actually is but with some tricks to get interest. Steps is one as I have mentioned but some of the surfaces also have altitude blend distortions. This is by far the easiest way to get the surfaces slightly messed up so to get the variations you see. It is a very simple surface arrangement. I think the rocks have very slight shininess as well, if I remember correctly. Some of my older planets are needlessly complex. The more you can do with less, the better.

[efflux]

I moved the camera bit further in towards some hills in that last shot because this area shows how the steps are working. Small cliffs with ledges and coves appearing here and there. Not dramatic, just subtle. Somertimes a small cliff will plunge into a water pool. You can see that happening near the top right.

[efflux]

Here is the graph. I said it was simple and essentially it is. Forget the Rocks, Rocks 2, Fake Stones and sand. You can see some of the larger rocks at height but it's the general set up within Terrain and Ground that matters. That is quite simple but with the steps and altitude blend distortions it creates more complex forms. The steps graph may be different from one I put in the Stepped Terrain thread. I'll have to check on that.

[Tangled-Universe]

That looks pretty good. I especially like it's artifact free. No weird spikes or other unexpected features anywhere.
The only element which doesn't really go along with this is the underlying rocktexture. It's a bit noisy.

I find this one of the hardest things to do with TG2. Getting color variation to work nicely for every distance.
A good example which shows this is when you map a tile-able photo of a rocktexture on your terrain.
In the foreground you can see contrasts of colours and details, as in the photo.
However, in real life, over distance, those details and contrasts blur out and the rocktexture gets a monochromatic look, as if it is mostly 1 colour.
Not in TG2 though. There the texture gets noisy over distance.
I hope this improves greatly with future TG2 releases. I don't know why this happens. Perhaps it's because AA is based on luminance and still tries to preserve the highlights from the texture which makes the details. Or it is because of texture-filtering somewhere in the render-pipeline.
Reading this may seem to make it look like a good thing, that it preserves the contrast and detail, but in case of large-scale texturing it is a big pain.

[Tangled-Universe]

Here is the graph. I said it was simple and essentially it is. Forget the Rocks, Rocks 2, Fake Stones and sand. You can see some of the larger rocks at height but it's the general set up within Terrain and Ground that matters. That is quite simple but with the steps and altitude blend distortions it creates more complex forms. The steps graph may be different from one I put in the Stepped Terrain thread. I'll have to check on that.

Thanks for sharing, interesting graph and info.

How fast does this render?

[efflux]

Yeah, I've been having trouble with noisy textures. There are three contributing factors. I think Lightzone makes the noise slightly worse. I'll have to look at the settings there. It has things like "detail" but Lightzone is emphasing what's already there. The colours are possibly not subtle changing enough but then again when you look at the texture close, it looks fine. The other problem, which in fact doesn't apply in the case of these renders, is that on some environments I get noise when I'm really near ground. Actual black noise. I have one planet where that happens at POVs really close to ground. It was TG2 that was causing it. I did start a thread about it. However, that problem doesn't seem to occur on this planet but I haven't really rendered much yet.

I may see what can be done to create steps by acting on the fractal's displacement output rather than colour. Anyone examining my graphs on the Stepped Terrain thread will notice that the terrain is being created with the fractal's colour output. This is an easier way to do things as far as I can tell.

[efflux]

I find this one of the hardest things to do with TG2. Getting color variation to work nicely for every distance.
A good example which shows this is when you map a tile-able photo of a rocktexture on your terrain.
In the foreground you can see contrasts of colours and details, as in the photo.
However, in real life, over distance, those details and contrasts blur out and the rocktexture gets a monochromatic look, as if it is mostly 1 colour.
Not in TG2 though. There the texture gets noisy over distance.
I hope this improves greatly with future TG2 releases. I don't know why this happens. Perhaps it's because AA is based on luminance and still tries to preserve the highlights from the texture which makes the details. Or it is because of texture-filtering somewhere in the render-pipeline.
Reading this may seem to make it look like a good thing, that it preserves the contrast and detail, but in case of large-scale texturing it is a big pain.

Yeah. This is true. It's something that I found doesn't happen in Mojoworld. Mojoworld does in fact reduce surface displacements at distance (that's not too good but you can adjust it = longer render times) but there also seems to be a softness which gives the scene a sense of great distance. TG2 seems to retain noise going into distance which spoils the sense of distance. I don't really know why and what the solutions are.

In TG2 the noise is there no matter if surface has displacement or not so that's not the issue. It's colour.

[efflux]

I'll make a Mojoworld comparison here. Check out this vertical crop from a Mojoworld render. Mojo doesn't have GI so you'll notice that effect is not there but notice the quite complex surface texture in the foreground and with a lot of specular highlights. Notice that hill on the right in the distance. It really appears to be very distant and there is a sense of space going into the distance. Another factor is Mojo's extremely lyrical fractals flowing across the landscape but it's not the only issue here. TG2 is spacially flat compared to a lot of other apps when you move into something that looks like it has a lot of distance and I think one contributing factor is this texture noise whatever is causing it. You get a better sense of space when you use flat colours in TG2.