Rocks, sand, dirt

[Martin]

A few night renders.
I made some Geonosis rocks from star wars- and ugh, the Rebels show just had  Geonosis in it yesterday night.
Also another alien plant in the valley render , another planet with light render.
There are a few errors in these renders, but the new versions are rendering right now.
I just love terragen. In Attack of the clones , all of Geonosis was a miniature (the rocks, the sand, the arena etc) And now I can make them at home on my pc in hours: )

[Martin]

Also a tweaked basalt field render.

[KlausK]

They all look very good, no doubt about it.
Sometimes I wish there would be some sort of real world reference sized object in the scene
in the pictures posted of others as well. Just to better understand how detailed - or not - those
structures are set up in Terragen. I almost always find it much harder to "construct" a terrain in
smaller scale with the camera close by and just 2m high above the ground.
Some of the shaders tend to break up on me and leave ugly artefacts behind I cannot get rid off.

For example the last one: basalt field.
I have trouble to tell if the camera was really close or rather far away pointing at larger structures.
Just so I know if I do need to try harder with my small scale scenery Great work, anyways!
You know you`re way around in TG pretty well, I think.

Cheers, Klaus

[bobbystahr]

I find I agree with KlausK re: reference objects. That's mainly why I often inject man made objects into my scenes.

[Martin]

I find I agree with KlausK re: reference objects. That's mainly why I often inject man made objects into my scenes.

But in my alien planet- ancient volcanic landscapes , a man made object would be ....odd. Not to mention terragen is not the best at rendering obj files.
ONe of the reasons I would never use obj trees etc.
Though I think I can put together some star wars style machinery in maya or 3ds max, but I'm not used to not using normal maps etc.

[Martin]

Also bad news. IT seems 5 renders at the same time was too much for my pc. win 10 don't get slow when you don't have enough memory...it goes gray. So I can see the cursor but everything has been gray for an hour now. I think I lost 5 6 hour renders:S

[bobbystahr]

Not to mention terragen is not the best at rendering obj files.
ONe of the reasons I would never use obj trees etc.
Though I think I can put together some star wars style machinery in maya or 3ds max, but I'm not used to not using normal maps etc.

au contraire..I use many .obj files in my renders (it's polygon handling a noted strength of TG) and have little if any problems and they render at least as good as any other renderer I've used and better than most. Doesn't have to be man made, could be an actual alien wandering along the ridge of a volcano basking in it's warmth....

[Martin]

Not to mention terragen is not the best at rendering obj files.
ONe of the reasons I would never use obj trees etc.
Though I think I can put together some star wars style machinery in maya or 3ds max, but I'm not used to not using normal maps etc.

au contraire..I use many .obj files in my renders (it's polygon handling a noted strength of TG) and have little if any problems and they render at least as good as any other renderer I've used and better than most. Doesn't have to be man made, could be an actual alien wandering along the ridge of a volcano basking in it's warmth....

hmm not sure about that.Every model has spectacular maps, normal maps , bump maps, subsurface scattering, etc. How does terragen handle those?
And what about the proper GI? It seems to me it has a problem with small details. at least compared to other especially physical based renderes like Maxwell render.

[Oshyan]

TG is definitely not as good as something like Maxwell or Vray at rendering objects, but it does a decent enough job, especially for larger-scale scenes with many objects like trees in a forest. Subsurface scattering is not available at present, but there is a simple translucency function which approximates some of its effects and is valuable on trees and other plant life. Specular and bump maps can already be handled well.

- Oshyan

[Martin]

Tonight I remade the renders I lost yesterday.

More tweaked Geonosian rocks,
Another valley render,
voronoi cell cliff render(I need a new texture node network)
Made a simple sand dune scene, and saved the node network, so no I have quite a nice library of different rocks, sand, dirt, cliffs etc.It's easier to create new scenes:)
And a new terrain with a lot of fractal warp. That wall in the background is around 10 km tall.Using several big fractal warps as a terrain can create some really nice interesting and unique landscapes!

[Martin]

--the rest--

[Martin]

and the rest

[Oshyan]

You are remarkably prolific! It's almost a bit overwhelming. geonosis 9 and 10 j are my favorites. The "fluting" on the lower parts of those formations looks very much like erosion on hoodoos in Bryce Canyon, which is quite difficult to emulate I think.

I'm curious if you'll pick any particular image or scene to spend more time with. I know (if I recall correctly) that you are using the free version so you have some limitations, but still I think you could bring one of these to a more "final" state that would look superb. Many of them already look great, but perhaps lack a focus or "narrative", if you will. You could even consider rendering at higher resolution/detail on PixelPlow...

- Oshyan

[Hannes]

ONe of the reasons I would never use obj trees etc.

Hmm, as Oshyan said, there may be better and more specialised renderers for that, but if you take a look at all the images here that contain objects and especially trees, you might agree, that it can look very natural, if you spend some time tweaking the settings.

[Martin]

You are remarkably prolific! It's almost a bit overwhelming. geonosis 9 and 10 j are my favorites. The "fluting" on the lower parts of those formations looks very much like erosion on hoodoos in Bryce Canyon, which is quite difficult to emulate I think.

I'm curious if you'll pick any particular image or scene to spend more time with. I know (if I recall correctly) that you are using the free version so you have some limitations, but still I think you could bring one of these to a more "final" state that would look superb. Many of them already look great, but perhaps lack a focus or "narrative", if you will. You could even consider rendering at higher resolution/detail on PixelPlow...

- Oshyan

Thanks!
I was surprised how well my idea  worked on that geonosian spire. And it's really simple, just a perlin billow noise with no gully smoothing  and low roughness stretched in the Y vector as a negative displacement masked by a voronoi billow noise! (plus another really tiny voronoi billow noise for detail)
For a narrative, maybe I can model a new spaceship and render it in 3ds max and composite it into a picture.I always try to find interesting  compositions and cloud formations, etc so I'm not sure what else I could do.  PixelPlow looks like an interesting idea. Never used renderfarms before but it might be a goo idea for one or two bigger pictures.