Laazy

[Volker Harun]

Being lazy, I went back to my start of TG2 and used image overlays. The more definition I got to my fractal solutions the more fake they looked.
It was a hazard to get a population work with the the surfaces - I switched thatswhy to the fog.

Regards,
Volker Harun

[FrankB]

I know what you mean - I've tried messing around with image maps for a while, and I too figured that they rarely add to realism if used across a large part of a scene, especially when you have a wide open view. It's ok to use them as a color function, though.

Frank

[rcallicotte]

Brilliant.  I like it.  Good colors and excellent lighting.  The terrain is pretty nice.

[moodflow]

Volker, great to see you back in action!

As for image maps, there is a way to make them work and avoid the tiling look.  I haven't had a chance to test this particular method yet in an "official" image, but I just rendered a test image featuring the technique and it seems to work!

Here's what you can do:

-Have 2 image map shaders, one above the other, with the same image map loaded, but make them slightly different sizes.  This way, they would be "out of sync" with each other over distance. 

-Then have a power fractal where the smallest scale is roughly the size of the average image map shader size, and use this as the blending shader for both of them.  However, select "invert blendshader" in the second image map shader so its the exact "inverse" of the first. 

This should get rid of most of the tiling.  Duplicating this process again with different sizes, then blending it with the first should really make a difference.

[Volker Harun]

Very good workaround ... did not even thought about it ...  thanks dude! :-)

[moodflow]

I am playing with this technique now.  Takes some tweaking to get just right, but the tiling effect is reduced significantly.