stone bed and hero rock - *Final*

[FrankB]

Is this the type of thing you mean, snow, over and between stones?

Yes, but I can't tell from this camera distance if the stones are disorted.
Also, you have used an older version for that, I don't know if the newer version were introducing new issues with that....
If you can reproduce that, especially with smaller stones, with the now current version, I'd like to see how... because then I would have apparently made a mistake.

Frank

[Volker Harun]

Very good start on the sphere. The rock seems to hover above the ground due to the lighting.
Keep on going!

[dandelO]

I'm re-rendering the sky in my last image at the moment, I'll hunt out the .tgd for that file(I think it's still there somewhere) and try and reproduce it in this beta. If I remember correctly, though, it was just a simple surface layer after the last stone shader with power fractal displacement, 0.25 smoothing, and intersect underlying. I'll play with the same settings used over the top of my ascending 0.1-1m scale stone shader, it if I can find the original file...

[Marcos Silveira]

I love so much these desolated landscapes!!!!
Brazil is a country ssoooo full of life.
Even what should be dry is living...

[dandelO]

Nope. I'm running into increasingly frustrating problems when I try and replicate snow through rocks(even just lying on rocks correctly, as in this problem... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5368.msg55988#msg55988) in this beta.

I've said before, when intersect underlying was 'essentially broken'(in TP2), I could get far better results with it.
I've had a number of scenes I'd have liked to re-do but because of this I can't get them to work.

I'm on it, though. I'll keep at this because it's been bugging me for quite some time.
For now, when I lay a snow layer over any rocks, the actual stones are displaced instead of just the snow layer. Maybe a merge shader with 'highest=raise' would disregard any stones underlying snow?

I used to be able to just: check intersect underlying, set my displacement multiplier to the depth of the snow layer pile-up and, here's what I thought was the coolest part, use the displacement offset of the snow layer to raise the whole plane of snow(beneath the piles I wanted visible in the shot, like in that image above). You didn't even need a displacement function node/shader plugged in to the snow layer. Frustrating.

[Volker Harun]

Well, you might want to use a distribution for the snow and an inverted for the stones (pure blending, do not use it as density shader).

You may want to add a displacement shader to the snow to fake the intersect underlying (I guess that displacement offset should be another easy way).

Another approach is to activate smoothing for the snow layer and to forget any inverted distribution.

Hope this helps
Volker

[Matt]

When the Intersect Underlying feature was "broken", I probably (or should have) suggested that you shouldn't use it because the results would change in future. That's what has happened. Different settings would be needed to get anything like what you had before. I completely understand the point of view that "it looked good, I don't care if it was broken, I just want to know how to do that again", but unfortunately I can't support every old behaviour that we had already stated wasn't working correctly.

I think you may be able to get similar results by using "Favour depressions" and then adding some displacement offset to the layer. If I recall correctly, that's similar to how Intersect Underlying worked when it was "broken".

It looks like there may still be some bugs (Saurav's weird shadows, Frank's stone problems, and maybe something with the fade-in of the colour), so I will go back and try to find out what's happening. Please let me see any project files if you think there are problems with this feature, because they may only occur with particular setups that I have not tried already.

Matt

[dandelO]

Thanks, Matt, for the official reply.
I understand that it was broken, I just wish I understood the fixed version better, the parameters to me are confusing.


Moved this portion to here... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5572.msg57520#msg57520
I think the 'intersection zone' is the point connecting the underlying layer and the surface layer itself, the zone is measured outwards in both directions from this point? If there's an intersection zone of, say 2, does this mean the zone is 1m into each layer from the mid-point?

Is 'intersection shift' the displacement amount of the intersecting parts of the layers, with 'minimum intersection shift' being the lowest it's allowed to displace?
These settings, when used in conjunction with the displacement/offset options just get me lost in a mindriot.

I apologize for turning your image thread into a support topic, Frank. I'll post a general topic about this elsewhere.

[FrankB]

@Matt: thanks for the explanation, I will certainly try favour depressions with a little displacement offset next.

Everyone else: here's an update for you. This time everything is just right, except maybe that I got a little overexcited with the roughness on the "hero" ;-)
But apart from that, I would consider this final. Also, now that I figured out the displacements for the hero rock, (I was so dumb ;-) ), the version you see now has become a very handy little tool for placing hero rocks. You know, I have been making stone beds for a long time now with various sized mixed in, but was tired of hitting random seed a hundred times, before *just the right* hero rock would appear at *just the right place* :-)
It was just a time killer in scene composition.
The hero rock is very practical, as it can be moved around and placed anywhere you want them in your scene. The hero rock, along with the stone beds, will be available through my site, soon.
Thanks for the interest in this thread thus far :-)

Cheers,
Frank

PS: sorry for the big file size and the compression artifacts... the jpeg compression doesn't seem to be overly excited about these myriads of little stones, so I had to reduce the jpeg quality a lot.

[Seth]

oh my !!!
very very good !

[old_blaggard]

Great improvements! Very nice job.

[Volker Harun]

Very good :-)

[efflux]

Nice variations with the stones. The artifacts spoil it a bit but otherwise very realistic.

[Tangled-Universe]

That's a cool stone and rockbed. Perhaps you could try a little less warpy fractals and some more speckled texturing.
Also, to my taste the image is a bit too contrasted, can't see much/any detail in the shadows.
I know you prefer/like this so probably useless to mention lol

[Seth]

Also, to my taste the image is a bit too contrasted, can't see much/any detail in the shadows.

great details on my monitor ^^