Planet Pig

[child@play]

OK, I will take a look at your file, dhavalmistry. If this all becomes too much of a problem I'll put a tgc on here but I'm not a big fan of that especially when I see them simply being used as is without any tweaking or development which shows some understanding. Not that you guy's will do this but some will with no advance in understanding which is the aim of discussing this stuff here. If even one person susses out these techniques properly then it's a success.

Calico, TG2 is actually quite difficult to learn. After all, we are creating entire virtual worlds here so it is not easy to learn but TG2 is very easy in comparison to other similar apps which are so poor in their UI, I don't want to use them again.

hi guys,
efflux, i agree with you, sometimes hints can do more for people to understand than a given tgd or tgc. but on the other hand, sometimes it's easier for people to learn when they can see the base structure (myself for example ). i think sharing network views/setups can be a great help when you're learning new, abstract things, especially when you're not an expert on e.g. maths.
hopefully we'll be able to do a tutorial of these things soon, containing both, information and maybe some very basic node setups.
enough hijacking for now, keep up your great work everyone

cheers...

[efflux]

Hi child@play,

You played with the ideas and got some results which is cool. By exploring the settings a bit you can work out how it works but I know it isn't easy. I'm going to put a file on here which is a tweak of dhavalmistry's and then it can be seen how to set this up but dhavalmistry put a graph together so that's cool. I'm happy to tweak it now and everyone can take a look. My colour manipulation on my last graph was a bit quirky and odd to be honest. Not too helpful. I'll have to explain the oddities of that but it's all a work in progress.

[child@play]

well, i think the main idea in the way i'm learning is to get an insight when your a total stranger to that subject. when you check the nodes closely, how the perling looks after doing this or that, you can easier see what can be done to get what you're looking for. you easier get the feeling of how the output will look when you multiply/divide/whatever that particular node by this or that value/scalar etc.  'ah, the noise looks this way, now i have to do that to get closer to what i want' (at least my brain keeps telling me ).
that's just the way i'm doing things, sorry for getting off-topic for that crap, lol

[efflux]

OK, dhavalmistry. Here is a quick change to your file so you can see a suitable use of this technique. Lets forget the multiplying scalar. My colour method in the last graph will just confuse things further and was not a helpful step at this stage so lets get back to simply changing the fractal's colour values. The clamping does not clamp from 0-1 but simply clamps the values you enter so don't worry about the clamping. Explanations I gave before may have been confused about that issue. Some changes I made:

I increased your distorting power fractal's scales so that the distortion is less but you can still see some distortions going on. I also increased the smallest scale because there is no need for small scale calculations in the fractal, we only want largish features. I also changed it from perlin ridges to perlin billows. Billows are a bit smoother but that change was not crucial. I reduced the colour roughness - play with this one - it has a lot of effect. You'll see. Also, be careful with noise settings and warping. I have reduced these. They will distort up your strata even more. I changed the displacement multiplier to 10 not -10. In this scene, 10 provides quite high displacement - bear in mind we are pushing displacements around a lot which distorts geometry and there is this shadows problem so lower might be better. The quick render settings in this file will demonstrate this - black patches. It is a ray traced shadow problem. Matt has mentioned something about that. It may be improved in future versions. Another help when distorting things like this is to increase the detail settings to higher than usual when rendering. You may notice the geometry around the strata ridges gets a bit rough. This strata technique is actually very useful for simply colour never mind displacing - you should try that. The file is not perfect and I'd suggest keeping subtle with the displacement multiplier but there are so many variables that effect the problems. If your strata are thicker then the geometry is not bent so much so you can have bigger displacements. This is what it boils down to. TG2 is building everything up with triangles. The more that its pushed and bent the more likely you'll see that geometry rather than a smooth shape.

I removed the surface layer fractal breakup. The simpler and clearer this is the better.

The other point is that you used colour from the distorting fractal. It's not really achieving much because of it's distorting type settings. I have set up a blend from two fractal to get colours that will follow the strata. A simple way to get colour and more in line with my earlier examples rather than my later more quirky colour set up that will simply confuse things.

I've turned the GI to 0. I never use that until final render. It's just so anyone looking at this file can simply render it quickly to see the result.

[efflux]

I edited the file again. I suddenly realized there was not lateral displacement with a compute normal. This is ideally what we want to do here - have strata appearing to displace more on steeper slopes. We just need lateral displacement and I've decreased the displacement amplitude.

[dhavalmistry]

thanx efflux....I will check it out!...and thanx for the detailed explanation...

[child@play]

hi,

looked up both ps and ps tweaked tgd, and i see what you're doing, but maybe i got wrong what you're looking after. maybe something like this? ?

[efflux]

What did you do to the files?

The difference is that the first one displaces outwards from the normal i.e. could be in any direction. The second file only displaces outwards horizontally and slightly less because I adjusted the displacement amplitude. It will displace this way even on flatter ground but will give the impression that most of the displacement is happening on the hillsides. For strata we really just want this horizontal or lateral displacement. You need to hook a compute normal after the displacement to do this.

[child@play]

ah, forget it, i'm just going bonkers over here again. i better shut up now

[dhavalmistry]

hey efluxx....how do I get the strata wave effect and not go in straight line??..

[efflux]

Reduce the first two settings in the scale section of the power fractal attached to the perlin node or increase that fractal's colour roughness which will also change this. Try that first. Change it to 2 and you'll see a slight difference. Keep the smallest feature size in the scale settings the same though. All these settings are interlinked in various ways.

[efflux]

I deleted my message just posted in this space. I'm confusing myself and you.

After setting the colour roughness to 2, try reducing just the feature scale setting by half. You'll see it becoming even more swirly.

The reason for more swirls with smaller feature scales is that the feature scale is moving the shapes about. Once it becomes smaller it moves those shapes in a smaller space but it has to be quite large or you'll get incredibly tight swirling effects. This is why it ideally needs to be several times the size of your terrain feature scale for more subtle natural results.

[dhavalmistry]

ah it works...thanx efflux

[efflux]

In one sense TG2 is a little more confusing than Mojo. Mojo does not have separate colour. All your control is in it's scale settings but in TG2 you have some separate colour control. This does actually make the concept a little more confusing but it's quite versatile.

[efflux]

I just edited a confusing post above so read what I've added there now.