Quote from: PabloMack on February 20, 2013, 10:34:01 AM
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on February 19, 2013, 10:24:03 AMWhat is your question?...
After my original problem was solved I wanted verification on a question which I will now reword as a proper question: "How do I know that my Global Terrain Scaler's output is interpolated smoothly between the scaling image's pixels?"Ignore the rest of what I wrote in my last post as it just confuses the issue. Recall that my "Global Terrain Scaler" was implemented using an Image Map Shader.
What I did was to first spend a few minutes rendering with and without the box checked. I couldn't tell a difference. So I unchecked it and I made two special maps with high contrast (black and white). The first map is a checker board and the second map is all black in the southern hemisphere and all white in the northern hemisphere. I probably spent an hour navigating the perspective camera around looking at the surface of the planet trying to see if the edges where the scaler map went from 0 to 1 because of the sudden high contrast of the maps. I decided that the checker board was pretty useless so I concentrated on the map that was upper-white and lower-black. My findings were inconclusive. I didn't find a sharp drop off at the equator where the scaler map suddenly when from 1 to zero. You can't even see the scaler map directly anyway so it is like groping in the dark.
I decided that the image was unaffected by the little check box because that section of the shader's menu panel was not being used for the way I had its node plugged in to the node network and had little understanding for how it worked.
Ok, good, I think I understand now.
Richard replied to this pretty well, especially from an artistic point of view.
I agree with him it's more important to focus on shading of the terrain, rather than the displacement/texture of it.
But, to get back to the displacement issue, since that's your question; What did you try more besides checking/unchecking the "apply displacement" checkbox?
There's a multiplier adjacent to it which tells that a white pixel (colour @ 1) will be displaced by 'x' metres, where 'x' = the multiplier value.
So if you kept it at default then it's no wonder you couldn't see it.
Also don't forget that for spherical projection you need to specify the planet's centre for proper projection of the image on the earth's surface.
Just to make sure/doublecheck you did that.
Quote from: PabloMack on February 20, 2013, 10:34:01 AM
I also did a lot of other stuff that I will not elaborate on here. So, in conclusion, the effects of something as simple sounding as turning a switch on or off is not necessarily as simplistic as seeing that a light is on or off. And the effects of making a change can be so subtle as to be very difficult to even detect. The turn around time to randomly try this and that can be quite time consuming so it is often much faster to just ask an expert how a control in a menu is "supposed" to work. By randomizing controls with add hock exploration I have found that I can totally screw up my settings and never be able to figure out how I destroyed my project and just have to start over from scratch.
Would you agree with me if I would summarize this part as "I don't want to spend (much) time on exploring options and parameters if I can also ask people how to do it?".
Please forgive me, but this comes accross to me as if you're just being lazy?
You're asking help, because you run into issues, which is fine. But not willing to elaborate on the tons of stuff you also did, which could potentially be part of your issue, makes helping hard and the whole discussion not so transparent.
Do all the stuff you do at one thing at a time. Take it slow and do not try to do tons of stuff of which you can't tell what it does or how they may affect each other.
It's also really impossible for us to help you then.
The randomizing and ad hoc exploration parts translates to me as "I don't know what I'm doing so I just push and pull every setting and if it doesn't work I'm going to say on the forums that it all doesn't make sense".
This is also fine, as long as you push and pull
one parameter at a time and
not multiple in a random / ad hoc fashion.
No wonder you don't understand what's happening if you don't keep track of your experimentation
If you want to learn this, then be systematic and especially dedicated instead of lazy
All the so called experts here, as you name them, are all
very keen on helping here, but not on spoonfeeding or feeding someone's lazyness.
I'm at least speaking for myself here, of course.
So start from (semi-)scratch and build up your scene step by step using the pre-defined terrain->shader->planet workflow, post your results here and ask for directions on specific issues in unambiguous specific questions.
This way we can help you best and you'll learn faster and understand better.
Don't get me wrong here, but I'm mostly saying this because I see some history repeat itself here
