Quote from: Draigr on November 09, 2011, 08:02:48 AM
I'm making the skydome image by projecting a cube with the rendered images mapped to it onto a reflective sphere.
Ok. Thanks for all that Martin. I do have a few questions though. You refer to things I know very little about:
1. What do you mean by "blend them less out in the distance."? In terms of terragen, I have no idea what that means or how to implement it.
2. If I like how clouds are turning out, changing something like the cloud depth/cloud density will completely change the strata. Unlike you, I still don't know a lot about hand building my own clouds in Terragen. I simply having had the time or years to learn all of that. Which means I'm stuck with procedural techniques which take days before I achieve something I'm after. Even if I am quite good at manipulating them in the direction I'm after.
3. You talk about settings outside the norm. What exactly is the norm?
I'm testing your suggestions out now. We'll see what happens. I've scaled everything right back, which means I don't like the clouds as much anymore, but it looks promising.
Hi, I will try to answer/explain:
1) The cumulus layer you have is blended with a distance shader. What I meant to say is to make less thicker and smaller clouds and make them appear closer to the camera. To do this you must tweak that distance shader.
Currently it is set to first 3000m from camera no clouds (nearest colour = black, distance = 3000m) nothing, then from 3000 to 10000m they slowly fade in.
So if you change 3000 to 600 and 10000 to 2000 you'll have a similar falloff, but much closer to the camera.
Thick clouds would obscure the camera, but with thinner clouds at a bit higher altitude will create the same look and a lot cheaper to render.
2) I realize that. It's the difficulty with TG2. You need to start off in the right direction, because if you need to change something quite drastically (like changes cloud depth in this case) the result itself will drastically change as well.
To circumvent these kind of troubles you actually need to think ahead a little and know what problems you might run into and keep that in mind while creating the scene. This is mostly an experience thing, but also a forum-lurking thing. I barely create skyboxes myself, but have read so much (troubles) about it here that I know what to do and especially what NOT to do whenever I would need to make them.
Believe me, I'm not good at hand building clouds at all. I know which strings to pull a bit to get certain clouds, but most of the work is planning and knowledge/experience of the settings and/or the renderer. All to make it as easy as possible and without having to render for too long.
Not an answer which will really help you, but just to show that there really isn't much magic that I'm or others are doing.
3) What I meant to say is that it takes quite some big adjustments to get from the default atmosphere/clouds to the actual result we're seeing now.
By default the atmosphere and clouds don't contain so much contrast because of dense colours (atmo) or thick/dense clouds.
Naturally there isn't so much dynamics anyway, which isn't a real argument, but definitely is a reason why it is so difficult for TG2 to render these skyboxes.
I just saw Kevin posted a link to the render settings recommendations thread which definitely is a must-read.
Also this thread is obligatory for everyone touching TG2:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=8300.0I'd like to encourage you to continue, but perhaps take a step back with something simpler in terms of lighting and atmosphere dynamics.
Get that to work with the aforementioned tips/tricks everybody suggested and develop further from there. We're to help if necessary.
Cheers,
Martin
