Planetoid Crater Shader testing

[WAS]

Another iteration. Downscaled form 3k. Speaking of that, does anyone else try supersampling their renders manually? IE rendering at a higher resolution and downscaling to desired resolution? I wonder if you could save any resources doing that by lowering quality for scaling to compensate. 

Anyways. I am almost happy with the surface shader, but I"m having issues. While warping the shaders by the terrain gives the shaders nice flow and interesting shapes, it causes the weird distort by normal like patches where it just flips colours and looks weird. I wish there was a way to blend this better like noise and such. I tried extra colour adjustments like smaller patches of multiplied colours and hue adjustments but it still kinda shows throw pretty well.

I find that the small scale impacts are far too exaggerated. Their divider constant should be higher.

[Hannes]

I find that the small scale impacts are far too exaggerated. Their divider constant should be higher.

Maybe, but all in all it looks fantastic!

[raymoh]

Great work!
I know this forum is more about "how" to attain a certain result, but the result itself is also very impressive and realistic. I'm anyway fond of Space Art!

[Dune]

Looking good. I agree that some of the smaller displacement areas are too rough. And there's a glossyness (very visible near the top) that is a bit too much IMO. I would have thought planetoid surfaces would be pretty dusty and the macro/micro displacements of rocks, sand and crevices absorbing light and reflections. But maybe I'm wrong, and some have pretty reflective surfaces.

[WAS]

Looking good. I agree that some of the smaller displacement areas are too rough. And there's a glossyness (very visible near the top) that is a bit too much IMO. I would have thought planetoid surfaces would be pretty dusty and the macro/micro displacements of rocks, sand and crevices absorbing light and reflections. But maybe I'm wrong, and some have pretty reflective surfaces.

No reflections at all. That's the warping effect that happens in TG that I can't overcome I was tlaking about. Wish there was a noise shader almost. It's sorta why I don't like Distort by Normal in terrain shaders, makes it very weird looking where peaks cause colour inversions. One side is one tone, other side another tone.

Take a look at the craters. One side of the peak is one colour, the other another colour. Warping is just weird in TG. Need better methods.

I use warping to achieve all the interesting shapes, otherwise it's very flat, and uninteresting, and not very planet like.

[Dune]

I guessed it would have been the distort by normal. I sometimes do a minus distort, which flips the colors.  But you have to be careful with the amount, as René also said a while ago.

[WAS]

I guessed it would have been the distort by normal. I sometimes do a minus distort, which flips the colors.  But you have to be careful with the amount, as René also said a while ago.

Unfortunately being careful just for the sake of the inversion doesn't help you achieve the desired effects though.

I do wonder if a noisy breakup between negative and positive warps or distorted PFs would look better. Gives me ideas.

[archonforest]

Wow!!! This is great!

[Stormlord]

Much better !!!
The imporvement is maybe not realistic, but as Hannes said, overall it's convincing...

STORMLORD

[René]

That moon looks very good. The glossiness of 'distort by normal' is indeed strange, it even seems as if it reacts to the incidence of light. You can partly prevent that by applying distort by normal to a mask and use that to mask a power fractal that has no warping. A breakup between negative and positive warps is also a good idea, maybe even better. I think I'll try that myself.

[WAS]

Little upset I spent all night rendering this and messed up the whole reason I was rendering it.

Here I was testing my noise shader, but I accidentally fed it to the breakup and not child of the surface shader so it did little to nothing. There was some coverage so it applied a slight effect but not like I wanted. The point was to help vary/mask distort by normal effects.

No craters here, sorry. They were disabled for testing speed.