So, I suddenly realised the one type of fractal I hadn't been playing with today was the Mandelbrot.
I got from a picture from Google images and adjusted the levels and did some touch up and blurring in Photoshop, made it greyscale and saved as a 2048x2048 .tif.
I loaded the saved .tif into World Machine and added an erosion. After building the world, I output it as a .ter (it got BIG) and loaded it into Terragen.
It was REALLY spiky. I added a smooth erode. It still looked like Billy Idol's fringe. I dialled it up...
Somewhat better, but still not right although technically I suppose there isn't a "right" here. I added a heightfield erode.
I ran into some problems with "black holes" that GI supersampling, etc didn't help. So not GI related? Lots of sharp edges/corners on the heightfield, despite those 2(3) erodes. That? I dialled up the smooth erode more.
I added a fractal terrain and cycled a few random seeds until it looked right.
The whole scene needed "atmosphere" and knowing clouds murder my machine (v2/v3, doesn't matter) I thought I'll make it a night scene. I cheated by using dandelO's background node v2 and tweaked it's gamma.
I had a rock texturing clip (can't remember who from) but it was mostly greys. I plugged that in and changed them to more dirt or sand colors. I plugged it in again and added the greens.
Water. I need to study the behaviour of water. So, I put liquid water in there for only the second time ever! The thought occurred to me that there'd better be no mistakes because that would mean that with the reflection, there would be two of
them, I need to think about things less.
I used the Atlantic.tgc that Mr_Lamppost shared in the Water Library post. I deleted the foam layer. It didn't look right and I couldn't be bothered tweaking it.
I added a altitude limited surface layer and a child with white/grey to (in my mind) look like minerals left behind from the evaporating water. It's probably way to subtle and way too zoomed out to see it, but i know it's there. Tried a test render.
The black holes problem has come back. Added the heightfield smooth after the last erode as opposed to before.
I increased the GI cache detail/GI Sample quality to 12/8 to better stamp out those "black holes" This was probably too much. It seemed to mostly work though, and didn't add a appreciable amount of time to the render from my tests so, meh.
On to the rendering and such...
Some, although not as much as I expected, time later.
I loaded it into Photoshop & added a lens blur and some film grain, gave it a vignette, I like vignettes...
Levels adjusted and such, and that's it done.