New Planet

[CCC]

Here is what i think is the same area but from an orthographic perpective.

The greens should not be there but the browns and reddish browns along with the lighter browns are fairly accurate although there should be very light brown sandy parts along the washed out flat terrains.

[efflux]

The alpine fractal is cool but with my system I think I'll give that a miss. Once I get a new faster system then yes. There are various ways to blend different terrains which I've been working on. You can also use a duplicated version of the terrain fractal slightly tweaked to drive colours or blends. Not that I've tried this much but it's a theory that should work quite well. If you can make every aspect of the planet bear some relationship to every other aspect but distorted in natural ways then you get realistic results. For example when do you see strata that are perfectly horizontal? Some environments do have this but when they do bend it is usually in relationship to the terrain in some way.

[CCC]

Your theory should work quite well actually. What you could do is keep the same seeds for each terrains layer but just alter the sizes only as one example of blended flow. I think one way you could perhaps fake terrain erosive-like flow as well is use a strata/outcrops shader for example but have them cut into the perlin flavors in a warped vertical slant but then have warped and bended strata cut horizontally with less prominence. Stone shaders can then be clump blended in here and there using that warped voronoi idea just posted recently.

[efflux]

Yes, same seed but you need to keep the scale the same as well otherwise it goes out of sync. You can of course totally mess around with detail, spike limit etc. Even warp slightly, probably. Other slight variations such as clumping might be OK.

I've been investigating a kind of altitude blended terrain. You can't get altitude until after terrain is calculated but you do have the terrains value output to use as blend. My tests are still half baked though. I don't like posting things like this because half baked graphs end up causing confusion. Best to sort it out first.

[CCC]

What about using the surface layer features as well. Using the features in the effects tab. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with after more tests.

[efflux]

One issue is getting position. If you use the terrain fractal or a duplicate to also drive colour then the colour will be the shape of the fractal at the terrain's surface and not the planet's surface (which is where the terrain gets it's position from). This is useful in that there is some nice rough relationship seen but not absolute because terrain and colour are working from different position. I don't know if that can be changed. I don't see any way of doing that.

[efflux]

Never mind. I have that sorted. There are numerous interesting effects possible here It needs to be a new thread.

[efflux]

I had meant to do another render from this planet but got side tracked with this idea of relating fractals by using the same fractal for several purposes. In this render there is a general scale relationship between the various power fractals doing different jobs. You can kind of create cascading blends of various different octave level displacements in duplicated power fractals in a way that could not be achieved from one power fractals own controls. This is why it has a more lyrical flow.

This stuff will have to be another thread. I have so many ideas I can't possibly complete them all. I just had a bit of time this week and I can't carry on with this much longer.

[efflux]

This was another experiment. I might try bringing back my colour gradient hack.

[CCC]

Interesting results though. I can see adding a micro-scale series if rigid fractals and stones to eliminate the smooth fractal parts. This can go places. The color gradient hack sounds nifty.