Idea Everyone Here could do

[zionner]

Hey all

Sorry, i wasnt sure where to put this.

Ok, anyone who has done any planetary Pictures will know that Planet Shader is great to get Land, Mountians and Oceans. But this is quickly done and has all been generated randomly, Which is All fine and good. But what i was wondering, is if anyone here is willing to get together to try and hand make a full planet (Yes i know Power Fractical Generates Terrain For the whole planet) but i think it would be quite interesting to see what we can come up with, by hand making the whole planet ourselfs.

What do you guys think?

[cyphyr]

I think this has been discussed before, I dont know how far they got. http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=754.0
Richard

[zionner]

No, thats a Detailed Planet Maker...This is just a group of people hand Making a single Planet (all Features hand made)

[Will]

interesting idea but currently we can't rotate heightfields and so doing it around a planet would be kind of rough, I tried it once and it didn't work out too well.

Regards,

will

[zionner]

Well...What if We..Started off with a Power Fractal To Generate the Planet, Then Scaled it down so it looked like flat land, then for mountians we could use Alphine Fractal?

[Will]

how do you plan on making them separate?

regards,

Will

[zionner]

umm...through Scale?

[Will]

hmm could work, that the only other problem I could for see was how water is handled currently, its doesn't wrap around the planet so it might take some work getting it right but otherwise looks like an interesting project.

Regards,

Will

[Oshyan]

Only the lake object doesn't "wrap". This is not the only way to get "water". For planetary scale simply use the Water or Reflective shader and flatten low-lying terrain. You can use various methods to achieve this.

- Oshyan

[zionner]

well.....If That shader would be a bit hard, maybe the twist and shear shader might do it?

[Will]

Hmm interesting, I'd been on board if we wanted to start a community project.

[zionner]

Yeh i think we shoutld..it would be interesting to see how it would come out

[semaj]

Sweet idea there. I was thinking of trying to do that my self, but it seemed too overwhelming. Another point with multiple people is how to make the separate terrains seamless.

[zionner]

well...We can gradualy Change colours through terrains, and say for mountians, slowly Slope Them, and water + Coaslines will be easy

[nvseal]

I attempted a similar project recently. The biggest problem I found is the water. I used the same method Rob did in his terracell project which was using a water shader on a sphere object. However, the problem was that mountains would always stick up through the ocean and destroy the realism of the coastlines (as can be seen in the attached image. the colors are the different altitudes). If there was a way to "flatten" the terrain to create an ocean this problem would go away -- although the water shader would shoot render times out the roof if you ever got close to the surface.  Interesting idea though, a community effort might be able to overcome some of these issues