marsness

[billhd]

Working toward a few Mars-type formations.  First pic had render problems on the sharp displacements (working smaller buckets did not cure, so I reined the displacement in a bit).  Tamed on second but somehow lost my rock color.  Third is an approximation of the flat surface stones.  Hope to post some more integrated scenes with improvements.  

[billhd]

A sphinx formation appeared in the side of a test render.

[pixelpusher636]

Your sphinx formation looks great. Happy accident?

*Edit* you should definitely do a better quality final render.

[billhd]

Thanks...yes, a quirk of a texture for fake stones with extreme displacements, that I have a hard time getting a handle on but that can get some good layered results.  That texture, scaled up for some cliffs, leaked into some fake stones and made inflate and warp with unexpected results - is my theory.  

[billhd]

Some strangeness to these displacements, as the first pic is a single size fake stone shader set to 3cm.  The shader combo has a propensity to result in truncations along bucket lines, for a range of bucket sizes from 16 to 256.  The response seems to be sensitive to settings of a laterally redirected masked PF displacement.  For one image below I managed no artifacts but you can see the truncation in the second (which does not appear in all stones).   I also started using the path tracer and it seems to bring out more detail than the standard renderer though at the settings I'm trying it looks grainy, which is kind of emulsion-photographic.  This is lo res due to slow render times- detail about .5, AA2.

Final is a larger scale test scene with obvious problems that I am trying to address, but makes use of the same texture approach for the large stones (appx 1m).

[billhd]

Rock and dune test.  Detail on the rocks (extrusions, not fake stones) are slow to render, especially when close-up, and thus it's slow to iterate improvements.