Thanks.
I was happy with the textures but not on the stones. I fed ground textures to the stones and they were not ideal for the displacement but I'm trying to work on various things at once to keep moving ahead in terms of planetary scale. I'm trying to avoid getting precious about certain details at the expense of other things. This is not easy and very time consuming especially with the speed of my computer.
I also have a work flow that I'm now consistently using now and it is very important to the look I'm getting. Firstly I adjust exposure in Cinepaint to make sure the sky isn't blown out. This is crucial to the look of the sky in my more recent renders. This also makes the ground too dark but I export a 16 bit tif from Cinepaint into Lightzone and use it's relight algorithm. In Lightone I do all the other general level tweaking, colours etc. These two apps enable me to adjust the overall exposure without tricky post editing in a normal 2D app i.e. blending two differently exposed exrs. Then I take into Gimp and I've been using a plugin called Redux which sharpens and refocuses. It creates a blending layer for this operation which is quite cool. It's good because it doesn't sharpen all over. However I find sharpening difficult with TG2, at least on this planet because it is a bit noisy in places.
What detail levels and ant-aliasing do people here generally use? I've been using around 0.8 for detail and 6 for anti-aliasing. Less detail can create issues, especially with shadows and I don't really want to bump setting up much more. I had thought of increasing anti-aliasing to smooth things. I don't know if this will be effective. I still can not achieve as good a look as if I render big then downsize.
