Ship Over Extraterrestrial City

[fuzzyEuclid]

Greetings. Instead of the usual question or what-have-you I figured I would try to deliver a pleasant image for both the curious and those stumbling into this thread by accident: you belong to me now muahahaha!

This started out with a question: could I rough out a quick concept in TG(4) faster - or in roughly equivalent time - than I could via 2D digital painting. [Full disclosure - I'm an IT guy by trade, not an artist] The answer is not really, but it was close! And if I knew my way around TG better, then I believe the answer would have been YES. With the TG version coming out much, much nicer

There's plenty that could be done with this, but as usual my time to play is up (hours ago, actually). It's almost all TG, except for the spaceship (a nod to an old 70s design that has stuck in my head since I was a child, and the concept itself is not too far off from that memory either) and the city lights, which are just a group of 2D disks run through a populator and given extra luminosity. My original thought was to run a Simple Shape Shader through a populator, but I hadn't much luck with that and stopped trying after the second failed effort - fired up Blender in the interest of keeping with the speed of development and crafted a light pattern fairly quickly.

Of note: Whenever I would tweak the color of the light obj, the luminosity would reset itself to 1. This caused a short but puzzling moment for me. This because I had to push the luminosity up a bit to get the brilliance I was looking for. Tricky in that too much would wash out the color to white, but I managed a satisfactory result after some trial and error, then tweaked colors until luminosity+color=light of that color. Also, non-triangulated 2D disks caused TG4 to crash during render effort. I triangulated them in Blender and re-calculated the normals as an extra-mile step, which that worked like a charm. I have not tried to recreate the crash, and honestly am not sure if exporting as OBJ automatically triangulates a mesh or not. I may revisit this.

Final comments: Real Time Preview is awesome. I love it. And Easy Clouds are also awesome, and I love them too   Unfortunately by the time I found a good "shot", and a nice seed for the clouds, I certainly had no time left to really take them to task; for this, I hope I am forgiven.

[Dune]

Nice scene. The lights could have been more easily done with a procedural dotted mask, IMO. And yes, when changing the luminosity color, it resets to 1, you have to keep remembering that. I don't know why that is, but well, just remember it.

[ajcgi]

Interesting image
And it's an interesting thing what you say regarding matte painting. The matte painters here seem to be fascinated by the possibilities of Terragen, saying what you do there, that it has great potential at the start of an image.

[fuzzyEuclid]

Thanks for the comments!

Master Dune: procedural dotted mask? Wha- wha- what? I couldn't figure out how to manage that.  But now I think a PF with the contrast cranked up, offset cranked down, roughness to tweak? Or is there something I have missed? I know - totally hard to believe, but I will admit it can happen 

[Oshyan]

The luminosity probably resets to 1 (indeed any RGB value would) because RGB does not allow for values above "1". TG allows you to set higher values, but when you go back into a traditional RGB color editing process you have no way of accommodating those >1 values. So it resets to 1.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

Try this, fuzzy. And you can mask the dots by any other PF or whatever, of course, if you add it as child on a surface layer.

[fuzzyEuclid]

That thump you just heard - my jaw dropped and hit my desk!

That's totally awesome Dune - thank you! Very much appreciated. This is something I've had more than a few uses for. Now I must control myself and wait for my lunch-hour so I can play....