Creating "Spires" and Heavy Displacement (Mojo-esque)

[efflux]

Next intermediate hack but not how I want yet and too be honest the displacements are too over the top. Asking for artifacts. I was hoping to have this solved before the end of tonight along with a pile of gradient experiments. Way too ambitous. I'll have to give it a break now.

[moodflow]

Now this is really cool!  Nice work.

[efflux]

One last render. I couldn't resist. The lava towers are now inside the craters and glowing.

[jo]

Hi,

Wouldn't it be cool if we could use something like this to control cloud shapes? Or can we? I should know, shame on me, but I seem to recall last time I tried to control a cloud layer in 3D it wasn't very successful.

Regards,

Jo

[efflux]

I think it's possible to control just about anything imaginable.

[Volker Harun]

After the divide scalar, it is nice to make a square of the result to get some blending to the ground.
Else, I am trying to get a workaround for large displacements near the ground and small displacements to the top.

So some silent exploring here ,-)

[Volker Harun]

Hi Jo, anything used for these functions are scalars.
So the perlin could be used for the clouds' distribution and the displacement-functions for a 'blending-shader'.

Old Blaggard would intervent due to rendertime issues.

[efflux]

Hi Volker. I'm trying to work on colour gradients at the moment. Not so easy especially since I am not am mathematician (I will have to improve on that). The reason for this angle is that colour gradient control could do a lot easily that otherwise we are having to use resort to maths for. It ties in with issues here as well.

This is without question my top wish for TG2. It's possible to create gradients with nodes if you know what you are doing but a nice easy to edit colour gradient would improve TG2 more than anything else at the moment. However, apparently we will not get this feature for some time so other methods will have to be used. A curve graph can do stuff even a colour gradient can't but that's still second on my list. For example in the circustances here, if we used a curve to control the original perlin we could shape the spires better e.g. where it meets the ground.

[Volker Harun]

Shall we split this topic again???

[efflux]

No don't worry about that. I'm not digressing anywhere but all things link and yes the square root is the thing I was using to smooth voronoi - which I mentioned before but had forgotten how I did it. You may find that improves your actual towers (softens them) if you are still using voronoi.

[Volker Harun]

I went your way, using perlin noise.
About the gradients - we exchanged a bit before on that.
I did not give an answer, as the possibilities for gradients are tremendous in TG2. Not always easy, as you stated.
I am thinking now of a powerfractal, its inversed version and the lovely merge-shader ,-)

Volker

[efflux]

Im working on altitude controlled displacement. This is easy but not so easy to merge functions with shaders - this is always what confuses me. You can take an altitude node, divide it by a suitable amount and then use this to blow out displacements. For basics, if you plug this into the displacement input on our last surface shader (instead of that power fractal) it will blow the displacements out to giant balloons but that's not really how we want to utilize this except maybe via a different route to inflate our initial towers a little - that can be cool. I'm working on it. Actually, with the scales we're working on here, simply plugging in an altitude does the trick but we'd need to control it if the spires are going to be shifted by upwards displaced underlying terrain.

[Volker Harun]

Indeed - this could be handled with the last function node before the displacement-node.

Just use this as blending shader for the displacement-function for your spires' surfaces top, or use an inverted version for the bottom part.

Just a bit of fine-tuning with a colour-adjust shader is needed.

[Volker Harun]

Attached is an image of the nodes I am using at the moment.

The ColourAdjust is controlling the redirect-displacements. They only appear off the base, so the spires blend nicely with the terrain.

Disabled are two SurfaceShaders, one is set to positive, the other to inverted Blendshader.
Before using the Redirect, I applied different displacements to the top and base of the spires.

[efflux]

Using that other colour adjust is a good idea. I'll post a shot of my results soon.

Where the power fractal plugs into that last shader for displacement, I am multiplying it with a altitude function. I'm taking altitude subtracting from it then multiplying = tree like structures. Bear in mind here that the altitude could in be controlling a lot from one fractal rather than blending two shaders. I like limiting to as few fractals as possible and modulating them. It looks cooler.