Canyon WIP Crits welcome

[efflux]

Great work.

I'd say the first one is better for colours because they look much richer. Probably partly due to lighting but those rock displacements and colours are very nice. Possibly the purple could be reduced slightly but I'd say that's not a major issue.

The next images have nice larger rock features and the water is cool. One rope bridge is a better idea in my opinion and high up. You want this to look big. The clouds are good and there seems to be a better sense of distance at lower level.

Overall this is very interesting because it's moving TG2 in a different direction with the canyons and cool displacements. I love this sort of stuff.

[cyphyr]

Hi Gang
Well I think I have nearly finished this one, only a few bits to add to it and the prospect of a weekend long render to get it up to a decent size (lol). I think the tropical water adds  dramatic element to the image and the clouds certainly add to the sense of scale. You can still see a few spikes here and there but I'll clone those out in the final version, not worth trying to track down the culprit only to find that its controlling something else I need in the image.
Enjoy
Richard

[Volker Harun]

The water's colour bites my eye - but it keeps the focus within the scene. I like this version most.
I like the transparency effect - postwork or rendered?

[rcallicotte]

I know you didn't necessarily savor the Myst allusion earlier, but I love this look and this reminds me of the game as well as the books.

[efflux]

I still prefer the richer colour combinations in the first image but the terrain in the later ones is better. Artifacts are always a problem. There are various ways to reduce them but it's a compromise. Reducing detail in the terrain by increasing smallest feature size or reducing displacement detail can help. There are some other methods in TG to smooth out overlying displacements but I haven't experimented much. I tend to like to use overlying displacements for detail rather than rely on the terrain fractal alone but it's difficult. Also, I discovered that the alpine fractal is great for gorge like terrains using canyon style functions because it seems to be voronoi style basis. The gorges are all long and hooked up in a network. The trouble is that the alpine fractal slows rendering down a whole lot. Using a straight voronoi noise function graph can work for terrain if you build up lots of other detail. I have used this. It is part of the terrain in my Planet Spinner renders in this forum. The trouble is that larger features tend to look similar since it's not a proper fractal with all it's scale variations.

Keep it up. This is an interesting direction to take things that will get some great results.

Also, here's another thing I would suggest. Don't get bogged down in one idea and from a single POV. Move on and use what you've learnt. Keep moving around the planet or you'll end up with a planet that looks good from one POV. TG2 is not a stage set anymore but that's the beauty. You want something with endless views to explore with tiny features like sand or big like continents. Things that may not even be seen in many renders. In many of my planets there is sand but the renders don't even show it much.

And another point I know of from using Mojoworld. When you create a planet try to keep everything in similar scales. Sand is sand sized on every planet for example. Then your clip files all become very easily moved from one planet to another. The more work you do the faster you develop new planets from old. It's easy for the scales to get all out of sync. I fall into the trap of making everything too big. I suspect a lot of people will. Remember we are working on a sphere. Too big features will show up the spheres curve more. It will not look like earth in scale. I'm working on getting everything smaller.

I hope my points are of some use but my Mojo experience is good for TG2.