Making the most of my Globalmapper upgrade
I'm getting closer to being happy with my New Zealand render. I've seen some renders from other programs using the blue marble virtual textures and finally got off my bum to incorporate them into a TG2 render. Running a cropped render at the moment, and attached a screengrab with a low res preview.
The data for this project consists of
- 6 terrains generated with SRTM3 data
- A greyscale image derived from 1km bathymetric data (maximum altitude set to -1m to remove low res landforms)
- Level 5 Blue Marble textures (approx 250m resolution)
.... all files are at their full resolution.
The low res bathymetry fits in well as it looks blurred compared to the landforms, although it would be nice to get some more detail in the very shallow water.
The water surface consists of a number of coloured shaders using variations of the bathymetry image to simulate different depths. 1 image (4,000x4,000 pixels), 6 colour adjust nodes with 10 connections controlling the blending and colour functions of the surface shaders. Colour adjustments include black and white level values outside of the 0 - 1 range and various gamma adjustments (did I mention I really like the colour adjust node?
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Landforms consist of 6 non-square TERs to minimise redundant areas over the ocean (241Mb total file size)
Landforms surface now consists of a single shader with 2 tiled images fed through a colour adjust shader for contrast matching (I did mention I really like the colour adjust node, didn't I?
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The clouds are largely thanks to nvseal with some minor tweaking. The water and atmosphere are two things that definitely separate TG2 from other renders I've seen of the Blue Marble textures.... and when you get closer, the fractal detail added to low res data.
