Twisters

[efflux]

Here's my latest:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/media/folder_152/file_1519979.jpg

First of all, thanks to cyphyr. As a lot of you may know the clouds are a tweak of something cyphyr came up with and shared here in a thread called Voronoi Cloud Studies. The effect is awesome.

I messed this one up slightly. The seed like surfaces were not meant to be distributed everywhere. Redistributing the displacements would have been easy enough but I later realized they were influencing colour everywhere which will be more difficult to fix. This planet is covered in these mushroom like forms. In fact, this POV shows relatively few of them.

Although this looks quite extreme you'd be surprised how simple it is. Apart from the clouds, I have function nodes providing the small voronoi patterns and sine, then one perlin noise bringing out the big displacements - I wanted just plain noise that wasn't going to cause artifacts everywhere. The rest is simple. the terrain is just one power fractal without much spike limit or detail and some tweaking of the various effects inside the power fractal to get it spikey. You can see the sine effect more in this crop of the full scale render:



This should be my last image for a while but I've said that before and not been able to keep my hands off this app. I have so many other things to do that are piling up.

[NWsenior07]

Impressive. Different thats for sure but cool none the less.

[efflux]

Actually I forgot to explain something important. there is something complicated going on here which is crucial to the displacements getting bigger at altitude. there is a thread here:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1414.msg14163#msg14163

I'm still working on various tweaks from these ideas.

[Oshyan]

I love what you come up with - so different from almost anything else people are doing.

- Oshyan

[efflux]

Thanks Oshyan.

It's because I'm coming from Mojoworld so I'm applying things that Mojoworld used to be the only app for.

[Oshyan]

Yeah, I know, and it's really satisfying to me that TG2 is not only capable of doing that stuff, but even excels at it in some ways. I have been very glad to read your praise for TG2 as compared to Mojo, the missing elements aside. This is essentially a version 1 product of a new engine, akin to MojoWorld 1 in many ways. Just imagine what TG3 and on may hold. For now it's great to see you stretching the boundaries, and I hope other Mojo'ers will join you.

- Oshyan

[efflux]

Yes that's what I'm thinking. What is TG going to be like in the future? It's so good already.

I've found a few things that are much better in TG2 than Mojoworld. For a start these techniques for changing things with altitude are not all possible in Mojoworld. You can not change feature scales with altitude. I did find a way of increasing or decreasing displacement result scale after years of using Mojoworld! Although, the feature scale changes in some of these node set ups in TG2 are still confusing me and I think this is also why it's difficult to work out how cyphyr's technique works.

Also, TG2's handling of extreme displacements can be made very smooth without ending up with loads of artifacts. A few artifacts are OK but often in Mojo you'd have jungles of them.

[efflux]

There are other points as well.

TG2 does not diminish displacements with distance the way Mojo does. This is an important point. In the distance in Mojo you terrain gets smooth. This is bad if you have big displacements, obviously, but it has other knock on effects. If for example you have specularity then this really shows up in distant hills where they are smooth. The idea was obviously to speed rendering but I'd rather wait longer for a better render. Then another point is that big displacements slowed Mojo's render engine to a crawl and ate masses of RAM. Not nearly so much the case in TG.

There are other pluses in TG2. The really big obvious one is the UI. Much better.

However to give Mojo credit. Apart from fairly minor things like a curve graph, colour gradient, other basis functions (things that will probably be added to TG) it has to be said that Doc's fractals are very nice. Not necessarily more realistic but they are very visually appealing. I don't know the full technicalities as to how they are different from what TG2's power fractal does but in my opinion they are much nicer. There are quite a few powerful fractals in Mojo. This is not the be all and end all though. Mojo has too many other weaknesses now.

[cyphyr]

Excellent, looks like alien lizard skin close up:) and in the full size image over at Renderosity the effect blends in nicely. Just keep pushing that envelope. I'm interested in how you used the sine function, I haven't been able to get a noticeable result yet.

This should be my last image for a while but I've said that before and not been able to keep my hands off this app. I have so many other things to do that are piling up.

No no you must never let the real world and commitments impinge on our explorations of the terragen worlds !!:D

keep on rendering

Richard

[dhavalmistry]

AMAZING!!!.....you are very close to getting to "Hells Bend"..keep on going....you will eventually come to it....now that you are almost there, its hard to miss.....love your clouds too....keep up!

[efflux]

Thanks guy's.

I've got to sell a house and then move. I've done major renovations to it but still not finished it. I'm not the sole owner so I've got to get this sorted. It's been dragging on for a very long time. The good news is that I'll be moving to a house that I own. No mortgage. This means I keep up a part time job and have tons of time for TG2 and other things but I'm not there yet.

I posted about the sine or cosine functions here:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1916.msg18839#msg18839

If you go to the message where my graph screenshots are, I give an explanation of some sine or cosine functions. The nodes are simple. The screenshots reveal all. No need to even supply a tgc. You'll be able to work it out. Just set up TG the way I describe and you should see the effect. These functions are very useful because sines are simple and can be used for a variety of effects, often quite subtle.