Joshua Tree National Park first WIP

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Greg,

You should be able to do it with Intersect Underlying alone, see some of my examples below:

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,6272.msg66508.html#msg66508
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,11967.0.html
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,6366.0.html

If you like you can send your file to me, my e-mail is in my forum profile (just click on my nick for the info).
We should be able to sort it out.

Cheers,
Martin

[gregtee]

Yes Kadri, that's him.  He used to write custom Lightwave plugins for me a long long time ago.  He'd charge me $20 for each one and write them on the 40 minute plane ride from Los Angeles back the San Francisco.  Some of them later became part of his Polk collection.  He wrote one once that he called "Disgusting", which was this huge panel that had probably 100 sliders on it and a small viewer window.  That little window displayed what all the fractal patterns were doing, and they looked pretty much the same as what TG's math nodes do now.  He never did sell that plugin.  I don't know why, it was very powerful.  He also wrote a lighting control plugin for us for Lightwave that later he sold called Gaffer.  He made a bundle on that one.  After than came FPrime.  That was a huge hit.

There was another guy back then named Ken Musgrave that worked at DD at the time.  He and Worley were friends.  Ken later went on to write Mojoworld, but when he was at DD he wrote the code for the pyroclastic clouds rendered for Dante's Peak.   I still talk to Ken off and on to this day.   I haven't talked to Worley in years. 

Those were the days.

[gregtee]

Hi Martin,

I'll send you the whole file.  I tried intersect underlying and it didn't seem to make any difference, but odds are at this point like a lot of things I've discovered in life, I'm probably doing it wrong. 

I'll send it out soon.

Thanks for your help.

-greg

[Kadri]

Thanks Greg!Don hesitate to write about such memories.
Don't know the others but i certainly would not be bored to hear more

[mhall]

Hey, I still have all of the procedural texture .dlls that Worley wrote for Imagine 3D way back in the day (mid-90s). His name popped up in another thread recently on adding new noise types to Terragen ... at least I assumed it was him - some of the noises had Worley in the name. Glad to hear he's still around and doing stuff.

[yossam]

I have used FPrime with Lightwave............that plugin used to amaze me for some reason. 

[Dune]

Are you sure you need all those nodes for the rocks and sand you want? It can probably be done simpler, IMHO. Anyway, it's computing tediously slow on my machine, so I can't do much at this moment. But adding a surface layer right at the end and using the displacement intersection to add the rocks, playing with the settings (even coverage influences things, try 0.1 or 2) and using the compute terrain patch size (and perhaps smooth terrain) might get you somewhere.

[gregtee]

I'm having that problem too right now with the render times.  It's agonizing.  I don't know why it's taking so long at this point other than I've probably got too much going on at the moment.  I'm going to try and strip it down again and see what happens. 

Martin is also giving me a hand with it so I'll see what he can figure out. 

Learning, learning, learning...

Thanks again

-greg

[gregtee]

Here's Chinaski's sand layer with a couple modifications to the fractals.   This took about 8 minutes to render on my machine, which is a 3.4ghz quad core with 12gb ram.  Somehow when I start plugging in the rocks the render times go berserk.  Looks like it's going to be a late night.

[Dune]

Your rocks may have too many small displacements, and may be way to complicated in terms of nr. of nodes to build them.
I did this yesterday (on my other machine, an i7 2600k 16gig memory) and it took 17 minutes with detail 0.7 AA4. Just testing some stuff, nothing serious.

[Hannes]

Holy cow, that sand looks fantastic, Greg!

[gregtee]

Hey Dune,

Your scene looks great and the render times are well within what I would consider acceptable.  Let me ask you, how would you keep the sand ripples from rolling up in the stones?  Whole most of your rock structure seems to sit nicely on top of the sand, I'm seeing the same problem I'm having on some of them with the rocks looking like they're "growing" out of the sand ripple.  It's like the sand is morphing into rock.  How do you keep a very discreet boundary between the rock structure and the sand base without having two planets?  That's the problem I can't seem to crack at the moment.

Thanks!

-greg

[gregtee]

Thanks Hannes, but Chinaski really deserves the praise for that last one.

[gregtee]

Now I'm getting somewhere render time wise.  This image took about an hour and a half.  For a 2k+ render that's this clean, I consider that a pretty good render time.

I'm still seeing the sand rolling up the sides of the rocks in an unnatural way over on the far right background formation, but overall it seems to be behaving.  I'm wondering if there's a way to smooth out the sand base planet layer to it doesn't so closely ride the displacements of the rock formations.  I think at this point I also need to start thinking about how I want the sand to look.  It's a little too extreme right now.  I like what Dune did a few posts up so maybe I'll try for something like that.  Overall I really like Chinaski's sand nodes he posted.  They took a lot of the mystery out of making these structures. 

Onwards...

-greg

[Chinaski]

@Dune: Very very very nice!

@gregtee: I tried to understand your build with what I can see on TG2 (half of the nodes are missing, and a lot of connections are broken)...

The principal issues I can think of:

First, the scale of your scene. Very small (when I work on small details I personnaly use a x10 or x20 scale). And if you reduce too much the scale of my build you're going to have a lot of problems with rocks, micro-displacements, sand... and your render time going crazy.

Second, you have negative altitudes. That's never good in my point of view (TG2 user), can mess up with a lot of things (merging in particular). So I generaly try to compensate and have only positive altitudes.

If you try to solve this two issues, you're going to destroy your scene (lose your POV, which is very nice, change your terrain, also very nice, etc.). So I think you should stop here with this technic on this specific scene...


Now, if you want to know (maybe for futur works) how to integrate my nodes in a scene... I took a similar relief, but with positive altitude and a bigger scale:





The file is here (contain some notes). See? Classic. Just define a zone to texturise, add a surface layer, plug in, and you are done (in a perfect world, in reality you have a lot a little adjustements to do). The merge shader do its work perfectly. No need of a second plane to simulate it. No interaction with outside the zone. The cut between rocks and sand is clean. So far so good. You can define a second zone, with other textures, and work for hours! \o/

Now, with this first image there is two issues :

- In the bottom right there is an odd displacement. It's because a "rocky" part of the texture is on the border of the zone. There is several ways to solve that properly (modify the blending/breackup of the zone, create a transition zone, smaller, to blend the rock branch before merging, paint a little, etc.)... And ways to ignore it (change the rocks seed, adjust your POV, etc.). I was lazy, I changed the rocks (all in the file, as an example).








- Second issue (and it's about render time)... There is a small zone (background right) where we apply a very complex sand/rocks texture for nothing (nobody can see a sand dot 2km away). This kind of complex texture is for closeup only! Because the render time is 34 min at 0,8 on a 2001 bi-PIII 1ghz with 2 go ram (3 min on a modern computer?), I did nothing about it (it's bad, very bad, I know). You should.