Triad Redux

[RichTwo]

That last one of mine was narsty, and no one needs to tell me that.  I felt a sudden urge to bang something out and that's exactly what I did.  More tweaking went on here, and yes, there's quite a few items that could stand improvement.  But I'm less dissatisfied with this than my previous.

Titled "Triad", because I'm envisioning a triple planetary cluster.

Any suggestions are welcome.

[TheBadger]

I like the surfaces, but the image looks like the exposure could use some tweaking.

[RichTwo]

Hard to disagree with ya, Badger.  I got a souped-up laptop I'm using to render.  Kicks butt on the time, but I've found the screen brightness and contrast is not what a desktop monitor would show.  Really, it looks good here but when I see it on a desktop, I'll be going "ouch!!!"  And yes, the brightness here is up all the way.  Maybe I'll need to compensate by imagining it's not the colors everyone else sees.

[TheBadger]

by imagining it's not the colors everyone else sees.

That could be a complex way to work! 

[efflux]

Nice work Rich. It looks a little like a planet I was working on. Did you use voronoi on the steep bits in the foreground? That's a great look because it looks quite like natural erosion.

[RichTwo]

Actually, Efflux (Ryan?) it's done with a power fractal with an obscene displacement factor hooked into a warp shader.  There's also a couple of strata outcrops thrown in but they go in between the fractal and warp so they become part of the warp.  Somewhat of a caveman approach, but I got something going on - sort of.  I'd like to see if I could make voronoi make more blocky features.  Just getting the scale / displacement / distribution on the mark is a task.

Thanks and if you have any insight feel free to offer!

[choronr]

Super stuff Rich, I especially like the lower part where the erosion forms. The upper part is very good as well. You are on to something here that inspires creativity.

[efflux]

Yes, my real name is Ryan. The terrain works well. I really like it as I do the terrains in a lot of your renders. There is nice variety of scale and form. Are they all created in a similar way? I think you posted a file ages back but I've not got back into TG2 heavily enough to take a look at that.

As for the exposure. I'm not exactly sure what people mean here. The shadows are quite dark but it's not got a lot of atmosphere. Nothing wrong with this though. It opens up the space in a way that Mojoworld more defaulted too and I like that look. One thing you could do is increase the haze exponential so higher up you still get clear atmo but lower you see slight haze in the valleys. This could be tricky though if the terrain moves around a lot in altitude and valleys aren't so easy to define in terms of altitude. You can end up with incredibly thick mist in some valleys.

[efflux]

I think what you've done is hit on a combination of not hugely complex nodes that get you nice results. Sometimes this happens if you have a lot of detail in the terrain fractal and some other function pushes it around enough to add the extra contrasts in a pleasing way. It's cool when you get something like that because the renders can go on forever with slightly different POVs and always still interesting.

[choronr]

Hey Rich, would you consider sharing this terrain?