Population with shaders

[Kranky]

Hello

my second problem for today is the following: I want to create a moon-like planet with a lot of craters, but I don't want to use bumpmaps for this, because of the resolution.

With the crater shader I can create ONE crater - but I want to create millions of different sized craters without adding millions of crater shaders. Is it possible to populate shaders? Or is there any other solution for my problem?

Jens

[cyphyr]

Hi Kranky, welcome to the gang
The simple answer to this one is it cant be done (yet). There was talk of implementing a "multi" crater shader for the final version but I don't know if that has progressed any further or not. However using multiple crater shaders to populate the surface of your moon object seems a very tedious way of progressing and I cant really see that resolution will be a problem if you use a displacement map (TG has no bump maps as such). If you create for example a 10000px x 5000px image map and wrap that about your moon using spherical mapping you should be able to create a very respectable cratered moon. Don't forget to change the mapping of your texture ti a spherical projection first http://photoshop.pluginsworld.com/plugins/adobe/224/richard-rosenman/spherical-mapping-corrector.html
Good luck
Richard

[Kranky]

I've got 8192 pixel large texture and displacement maps of the earth. From the distance (space) it looks really great. But when I zoom to germany for example, there are only a few pixels and it looks a lot to smooth and undetailed. From the Mars I've got also 8192 pixel large maps - but when I try to zoom near to the ground it doesn't look good

Reason for near and far images: I want to try a small animation sequence

[rcallicotte]

@Kranky -  this is why some people have been working with an in-house project called Terracell, which is to make renders of planets look great near and far.

[trailgirl]

Kranky, here's a crater script at http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=187.msg2610#msg2610 by 3DGuy