Thank you very much everyone for the nice comments!
Yeah, in this case the simple setup worked out really well.
The cube thing... there are a few reasons why I chose the displaceable cube for the flat terrain:
- the area the cube inherits is the masked out main terrain.
Using the cube object one can simply disable the rest of the scene and work on this object alone.
Very fast turnaround to get it right.
Even for doing variations: just copy the cube, disable the first one and work on the next one and so on.
- speaking of masks, I very often have trouble not to influence shapes and displacements in other areas
when using networks of surface layer nodes with masking.
I loose track of what node to put where when the network gets complicated to get the desired result.
- in this case its only 2 simple Power Fractals (one for colour, one for displacement) on the cube.
Just enough to get the scale and the appearance of grass blobs and bushes scattered.
Much easier to get there than with different populations.
But close-ups would not be possible because the structures are actually spikes.
- the cube is tilted here towards the viewer so you get a better view on the far end.
This hides the hard line in front of the mountain range and the flickering is reduced with the small displacements.
And to get the really flat areas in the plain I only needed to reduce the y-position of the cube.
The terrain / planet is coming through. Merges nicely. Doing all this within a network would be not that easy (for me).
- The main reason I think is - this simply was the right thing to do for this project.
I guess, that`s about it. Thank`s again for commenting.
CHeers, Klaus
@amandas: I saved it as 32bit exr. Maybe I can do something with that. The Haze value is quite high so it greys the scene out a little.
To get the balance right with all the settings...dooh
