Quote from: bigben on August 26, 2007, 05:35:24 AM
Nice image.
I'm just a bit curious why you render the sky separately and include so much overlap between renders?
There are a couple reasons why I render the terrain and sky separately. The first and foremost reason is because I usually do alot of postwork in the sky, and it is much easier to separate the sky (for masking reasons) by cutting out the black area on the terrain render, and then inserting the sky layer under the terrain layer. This makes it easy to paint/manipulate clouds, planets, stars, and nebulae in. Furthermore it is easier to paint into the landscape when it isn't bound by the sky (erasing into mountains and adding to mountains). The second reason is I find it almost faster to render like this. In most cases I have a bare sky so I can render at 1/10 the size I need, then I just blur the sky by a couple pixels and call it a day! For example, this sky is a 1000x750 render whereas the final stitch plate is over 7000px wide. It took like 2 minutes to render the sky, but if I had the sky in all of the 5000px wide plates it would drastically increase the render times (and create a stitching nightmare)! Another reason is sometimes Terragen does not render the skies in a high-resolution situation. I think it is because of some of my default settings or possibly my computer settings, but I have not investigated...
The renders have a 10-degree difference between each render (as you noticed). I do this because my "zoom" variable is set to a very wide angle. This really distorts the terrain on the left and right side. So what happens is between each render I have drastic terrain feature changes created by these distortions on either side. By stitching together renders that only have a 10-degree difference it allows me to "control" these distortions a bit more while getting the panorama effect. It is much easier to stitch together as well, All I really have to do is a quick gradient mask and some fast brushwork and it comes out pretty good (well at least on my monitor! I hope it's the same for you).
Thanks for the comment
.