Pretty lame name, but this really was more of a test. Of lava, and a few other things.
It didn't quite turn out the way I wanted it, but I did get that chunky lava look to it which I was going for, not the flowing lava, which is my next lava test.
And I am very excited b/c I was able to render it at 1600x1200 and at quality of 1.0 in just under 10 hours! The secret...well you guessed it: image maps. I also used an earlier version of the distance shader stack mentioned in this post:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3765.0I am a bit disappointed in the laval displacement in a way, as I had used a mud cracks displacement, which looked great at first, but something in the terrain seems to have spilled over into it, ruining the appearance to a degree.
As stated, the surfaces are all image maps pushed through a distance shader stack. The main displacements are simple power fractals with some tweaks.
To build the scene, I created all the displacements first, then masked out the "river" area with a custom map. Then I applied the mud cracks displacement masked to the river only. Then I worked on the shaders, the first of which was the lava itself (with luminosity set to 2) and covering the entire terrain. On top of that, I placed a burnt ground ash shader masked for the river (so it appeared on the river only). But I put some slope constraints, so that the lava itself was shown on the steeper slopes (ie the cracks). The rest of the terrain was inverse masked by the river, so it was applied everywhere except the river.
The sky is a custom Photoshop paint job (done in about 45 minutes), applied as the background with some luminosity (I think the value was 2).
The clouds are a standard TG2 cirrus plane with tweaks.
Post work: Minor color correction, contrast, levels.
I am not particularly satisfied at this point, so I am going back to the drawing board. Little steps eventually equal one big one!
