first world

[EdgeFx1]

a  week of learning and this is what i have come up with from what i have learned, its only after the high quality renders do i see there were little issues  that i never noticed, i included the project file in case anyone wants to dissect and give advice. that being said, i wasn't aiming for photo realistic here, what i WAS trying to go for was the look and feel of some of those voltron planets, if anyone has seen the netflix series they should know what im talking about, thats the reason you can see mountains high above the cloud line, how ever the atmosphere covered a large chunk of the surface,and i think the atmosphere too... anyway, please lemme know what you guy think and any additional advice you have, i am open to any and all inputs.

this was rendered in about 11.5 hours with a mac pro 3,1 i found in the garbage lol, the cpu is xeon x5460 and theres 12 gigs of ram, would upgrading the cpu to xeon x5492 or the x5482 make much of a difference?

[N-drju]

This is, pretty much, just what I have uploaded to the forums at the very beginning of my "adventure" back in 2014.  See here:

https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,17748.msg171946.html#msg171946

While I don't have time to look into the project file, I would agree with your own and make a bit more of the surface visible. Otherwise it's a nice-looking world.

[EdgeFx1]

This is, pretty much, just what I have uploaded to the forums at the very beginning of my "adventure" back in 2014.  See here:

https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,17748.msg171946.html#msg171946

While I don't have time to look into the project file, I would agree with your own and make a bit more of the surface visible. Otherwise it's a nice-looking world.

I was skimming through the forums and i stumbled upon a post where it was like ice in rocks, it was a Martian ice cap, anyway, i was trying to figure it how it was done and i don't even know where to begin, leaves me feeling  excited and exhausted lol at the thought of how far i still need to go to be able to flex sumtin more creative, i made some modifications to this project and it's currently rendering, I'll post it once it's done

[Dune]

I had a 10 minute go at your setup and changed some things.

[N-drju]

Ice caps are easy to make. All you need is either a simple shape shader or even a painted shader to create a mask. Then, proceed by adding details as necessary.

icecap_base.tgd

[Dune]

Yeah, forgot that. Adjusted with N-drju's additional icecap.

[EdgeFx1]

so this i what i ended up redoing it to, this was closer in line with what i was thinking of. with a better understanding of compute normal im going to try and make the ridges using a painted shader instead, but i do have a question pertaining to the "stretched" look of the terrain afterwards, in this fashion the side of the mountains look smooth, but when i tried a painted shader and displaced it to these magnitudes, the sides have a stretched look to it, can anyone explain how i go about avoiding that stretched look or ho wi can "subdivide" it or sumtin?

[EdgeFx1]

Ice caps are easy to make. All you need is either a simple shape shader or even a painted shader to create a mask. Then, proceed by adding details as necessary.

icecap_base.tgd

ah i see, i was able to dissect and understand, but i came about a different issue, i tried to give the ice cap some height but the walls of it turned out to be stretched and chiseled, and i ave no idea how to go about  fixing that issue? can you describe what to do to add texture to the wall of it?

[Dune]

First the stretching. See it as paint being smudged in one direction; you get stripes. That happens when you displace a terrain heavily. In order to get smaller unstretched displacement onto those stretched sides, you need to recompute that terrain, which can be done by an additional compute terrain, after the first big displacement. If you then add smaller displacements (or fake stones), you'll see much nicer mountain sides.


The icecap; you used offset in a power fractal to displace it up, which takes the whole of the masked area and lifts it up. And apparently its sides are not soft, so you might have to take a look at the masks used.

The chiseled look comes form the roughness of the fractal warp. If you decrease that it's warps will be softer.


Maybe this simple file will give you a better idea how things work.

[N-drju]

i tried to give the ice cap some height but the walls of it turned out to be stretched and chiseled, and i ave no idea how to go about  fixing that issue?

When you have a terrain, or a shader, masked by a SSS (simple shape shader) it is prudent to apply a smooth edge profile in SSS's settings. This lets you add some smooth, natural falloff for the colour generated by an SSS.

What Ulco says is also true - if you warp with a fractal shader, roughness can easily become a problem if you fail to control it. My example was really basic and good enough to view from orbit. You need to remeber that it might be a good solution to drop some details (like I did) when they are viewed from a very large distance (orbit especially) and add details only when close by. Think of it as LODs.

Adding displacement to a vertical or near-vertical surface is a loooong topic with lots of variables to take into account. Don't get me wrong - it's not that I don't want to help. I'm just getting ready for travel and don't have too much time.

[EdgeFx1]

i tried to give the ice cap some height but the walls of it turned out to be stretched and chiseled, and i ave no idea how to go about  fixing that issue?

When you have a terrain, or a shader, masked by a SSS (simple shape shader) it is prudent to apply a smooth edge profile in SSS's settings. This lets you add some smooth, natural falloff for the colour generated by an SSS.

What Ulco says is also true - if you warp with a fractal shader, roughness can easily become a problem if you fail to control it. My example was really basic and good enough to view from orbit. You need to remeber that it might be a good solution to drop some details (like I did) when they are viewed from a very large distance (orbit especially) and add details only when close by. Think of it as LODs.

Adding displacement to a vertical or near-vertical surface is a loooong topic with lots of variables to take into account. Don't get me wrong - it's not that I don't want to help. I'm just getting ready for travel and don't have too much time.

First the stretching. See it as paint being smudged in one direction; you get stripes. That happens when you displace a terrain heavily. In order to get smaller unstretched displacement onto those stretched sides, you need to recompute that terrain, which can be done by an additional compute terrain, after the first big displacement. If you then add smaller displacements (or fake stones), you'll see much nicer mountain sides.


The icecap; you used offset in a power fractal to displace it up, which takes the whole of the masked area and lifts it up. And apparently its sides are not soft, so you might have to take a look at the masks used.

The chiseled look comes form the roughness of the fractal warp. If you decrease that it's warps will be softer.


Maybe this simple file will give you a better idea how things work.

ah dont worry about it literally everything you said is more than enuff to help guide me, this past week an a half trying to teach myself has felt like trying to find up from down  while floating in space with no sense of direction, any thing you guys can tell me, how ever great or small has been enuff to settle me and guide me in any type of direction, and now, back to trial an error with new knowledge, thank you guys  so far

[EdgeFx1]

so i really took the time to go over the file that @Dune  posted up, i turned off all the layers and turned them on 1 by one until i saw sumtin happen to the 3d preview, from there i click node son an doff and made changes to each node and screen shot the render and flipped back and forth to see the difference, and i made notes to help me remember what each thing did. this was immeasurably helpful and is probably really beneficial to alot of beginners who are just starting out, and so i want to say thanks for this, maybe i can post this in the correct forums so beginners like me can find this some how? anyway, this is very helpful but then another question is raised, if i wanted to add another mountain or even a valley, how do i "connect" them together into one scene? another way of putting it is, i have the planet, i put the mountain in, how do arrange/group/layer everything if i wanted to add another mountain into the scene? i added a visual representation of what i mean, if i wanted to make two mountains that have nothing to do with each other, how do i add them together...

[Dune]

You can add stuff in several ways, but I added a few so you can dissect again. Little 'problem' in the basic was that I added the fractal warp in the left line down, so a line like the color adjust to the stream would not be affected, or you'd have to copy the same fractal warp and insert it in the same line. Another disturbance in the parallel lines is the compute terrain, which also creates different results in the left and right line down. Maybe it's getting too complicated already  So, for the additions I took at least the fractal warp out. If you insert it again, you'll see what happens.
The colored lines will tell you what each section does. I hope it's clear enough.

[N-drju]

ah dont worry about it literally everything you said is more than enuff to help guide me, this past week an a half trying to teach myself has felt like trying to find up from down  while floating in space with no sense of direction, any thing you guys can tell me, how ever great or small has been enuff to settle me and guide me in any type of direction, and now, back to trial an error with new knowledge, thank you guys  so far

Had no time to answer you as I should, but thank you for some nice words. TG is a spacious book to read indeed. Little by little, you can read through it.

One piece of advice that I was meant to give you... I noticed that you do have a tendency towards huge values. I've seen this in your fake stones as well as, more recently, in one of the planet shots here. My advice would be to always start with moderate, small values. Be it displacement, warp amount, cloud size, whatever. Only then, increase the values if you think the effects are not sufficiently pronounced.

In TG it is easier to make less into more than the other way round.

[EdgeFx1]

@Dune this was a doozy to dissect but i feel like i definitely learned alot about how to add additional elements, i got a project coming up that i really want to attempt, and im building the battle ground in terragen. its just a personal art project that i have been wanting to do for the longest, the idea is pretty straight forward, good me vs not so good me. the battle ground takes place in a sink hole type of location, and the clouds above are suppose to look like y our in the eye of the hurricane, i only now feel like i have enuff puzzle pieces to try and create a scene for this story board (that im still working on) and @N-drju your absolutely right, most of the times i seem to be working on these titanic planetary scales lol, i think my problem is, i dont realize that im dealing with a 3d space, and so i dont have a sense of scale, only sight, for this project coming up im going to import an obj of a person and set it to 6 ft tall so i have some reference of what im doing lol

https://www.deviantart.com/edgefx1/art/Rival-Universe-Rage-Against-the-Light-841450810?ga_submit_new=10%3A1589244316 <--- thats the photoshop i did that is the idea this story board is based on.


 if anyone has any recommended reads on height fields would you care to share? i know at some point i need to learn that too