Apparent distortion on parts of rendering

[Elatric]

Hi all,

I've been playing around with Terragen 2 for a few days (2, actually...), and I noticed a weird distortion effect on my latest rendering of a snowy mountain in a sea of clouds. I have attached said rendering to this post:
[attach=1]
As you can see, something is just not right... it seems to me as if someone took a second copy of the mountain and shifted it to the side, yet upon closer inspection, there is no such copy. Can anyone shed some light on any possible solutions to this problem?

If it helps, I used the Alpine Fractal to generate the mountain.

Feedback on the other aspects of this project would be greatly appreciated as well, as I am still a Terragen novice and would love to hear how I can improve.

Thanks,

Elatric

[cyphyr]

Interesting and a great scene. Looks like a kind of double exposure. I can't think of an explanation at the moment. (I am viewing on a mobile). Can you post the tgd file?

[Elatric]

Hi Cyphyr,

Here's the download link for the .tgd:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/oq7yz8axaqzhb17/Sea_of_Clouds.tgd

-Elatric

[cyphyr]

Thanks I'll take a look in the morning (midnight here )
You can upload to the forum if you like as well, just so you know

[Oshyan]

This is likely due to your fairly strong Intersect Underlying settings. Try reducing some of those numbers a bit, or just disabling Intersect Underlying and see if you prefer it without.

- Oshyan

[Elatric]

Hi Oshyan,

Thanks for the advice! I was also questioning my overzealous usage of the 'intersect underlying' setting (it looked pretty!  ), but I don't have access to Terragen 2 right now (My main computer is in use).

I'll be sure to see if that fixes the problem when I revisit the project tomorrow!

Thanks for the help,

Elatric

[Elatric]

Hi Oshyan,

After reducing the 'intersect underlying' setting to 0.5 on the rocks shader and 5 on the snow (is that still too high? I noticed the problem seems to be mainly occurring with the rock shader). Although reducing the setting helped, something still doesn't seem right. Here's the modified render:
[attach=1]
And here's the modified .tgd: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ziaf2va37q92iyp/Sea+of+Clouds%282%29.tgd

I suppose it's just a side effect of the terrain generator or something, because it looks fine when closely examined. No idea what's going on with it 

Also, can anyone shed some light on the path of blue, cloud-esque snow to the mid-right of the picture? Fixed that.

Edit: So I'm currently trying to find a way to get a rocky mix without using 'intersect underlying.' Will post a render if successful.

Thanks,

Elatric

[Matt]

This is caused by "smoothing" on your Rocks and Snow layers. Smoothing tends to produce this repeating pattern, unfortunately. It is less of a problem if the terrain is much smoother to begin with and the rougher displacements are added after the Compute Terrain node.

Matt

[Matt]

It looks like you're using Terragen 2.0. That is a very, very old version. Please update to Terragen 2.5. It is a free update

Matt

[Elatric]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the help! I'll be sure to go back and upgrade (then fix the smoothing) as soon as I finish my current render.

Edit: I updated to 2.5, and got rid of the smoothing. That eliminated the problem, as you can see:
[attach=1]

Thanks again for the help!

-Elatric