Ice Cream - Shader progression 1/1/10 - page 2...

[dandelO]

Thanks, Martin. Yes, I decided to keep the snow in fractal form. This'll make it easier all round for people of all skill levels to edit it, if required.
I have other attempts at functional perlin snow, too, but really, my fractal lines issue was the main hurdle I was facing. That is now fixed. The only functional part of the shader set now is the sparkle effect.

Frank has pointed out a small issue involving slope/intersection. It is just a small thing, however, and I've fixed it, for the most part, by slightly adjusting one of 2 separate 'effects' tab parameters(which one is the best fix yet, I'm not sure). It involves a dark outline, resembling a shadow at the intersection zone when close-up and when slope constraints are in place.

This issue can be easily fixed by lowering 'intersection shift'(a parameter that will not need adjusting when the shader is released, you won't have to worry about that) or, by reducing 'fuzzy zone softness'(in these images FZS is set to default = 1) in the same tab.
I mentioned this briefly a page or two ago here but I didn't think it was a very big problem.

I have got around this by reducing FZS by no more than half or, by reducing intersection shift by a factor of 10, from '0.1'(the setting for these previews) to '0.01'.

Both methods fix the problem, I think I'll go the FZS way to finalize it, though.

Cheers!

[dandelO]

I take some of the last post back. I realise now that the smoothing effect is also having issues with this(just like Frank said to me. )

There are what appear to be some render artifacts when smoothing is set to '1'. Really, though, they aren't artifacts, they're shadows but they're from overhanging snow displacements, unwanted ones on a close up scale.

My fix now is to reduce FZS by a quarter(to about 0.75 probably) and to reduce smoothing effect to '0.85' from '1'. (I can't disable smoothing, Frank, it messes up what I'm going for but thank you for that little nudge, it has helped a lot. ).

[Tangled-Universe]

Ghehe, I really like reading this, because this is exactly what I had to figure out all when making my snowshader

Try reducing the smoothing effect further and compare it to a render without the snow, it will then be very clear what it does
In contrary to you I won't deal too much with FZS. I didn't find any noticeable effect using it. 90% of the deal is in the first 3 settings and 10% the rest.
The actual control of the volume is by the min and max shift and the zone controls the edges, simply put.

Martin

[dandelO]

The fuzzy zone softness doesn't directly affect intersect underlying. Reducing this helps to give a more defined border between snow and ground, according to slope and height constraints fuzzy zones.

The way I see it(usually wrongly), default fuzzy zone softness of '1' makes a 'gradient' of the amount defined in the constraint's fuzzy zone. Lowering it makes it a tighter border between one surface to the next.

I'm having more and more little problems appear as this goes on, for instance, this piece looks beautiful but just turn my camera 20 degrees and then there's a big torn part of snow, ha! Give me until approximately December and I might be nearly finished with it.

[Tangled-Universe]

The fuzzy zone softness doesn't directly affect intersect underlying. Reducing this helps to give a more defined border between snow and ground, according to slope and height constraints fuzzy zones.

The way I see it(usually wrongly), default fuzzy zone softness of '1' makes a 'gradient' of the amount defined in the constraint's fuzzy zone. Lowering it makes it a tighter border between one surface to the next.

I'm having more and more little problems appear as this goes on, for instance, this piece looks beautiful but just turn my camera 20 degrees and then there's a big torn part of snow, ha! Give me until approximately December and I might be nearly finished with it.

Ghehe,  I know, getting planet-wide same quality result is very difficult
You're definitely on the right track though.

[tempaccount]

If you don't mind me asking, what are your intersect underlying settings for the snow cover? Your snow packs up quite nicely.

[dandelO]

The intersection rules are, for most of these images; Intersection zone - '1', shift = '0.1', min' shift '0.1'.

This project is now on a hiatus. I will resume this and hopefully make it much nicer(I've now scrapped the luminosity completely, it ruins areas that it shouldn't appear on at all, even areas with no snow, I'm finding there are still sparklies on the ground).

I'll work on this snow some more when I can, for now I'm back at my own PC and there really isn't any point in carrying on with this at the moment. The image in the previous page that says... 'Fixed the translucency' is now taking me 40+ minutes to render on my own pc, 40 odd minutes at 640x480! I think not.(I hijacked my children's new computer recently(one we bought them for Christmas, it's about 1000 times better than this) and I really cannot justify the time I'll need to spend to simply tune the creases and tears out of this shader on this old beast, that I hope to share, once it's done.

On the bright side, Christmas is over and I only have one birthday in February to occupy my meagre wages in the meantime. I hope to get all computered-up in the weeks(probably months) to come and this will be the first thing I go back to once I am sorted.

[dandelO]

When you're banging your head against the TG brick wall, just take a step or two back from it for a while.
No idea why I didn't take my own advice when I said I was thinking to make this thread's previous images (luminosity)sparkles from of a perlin function. Christ may know why I didn't apply this brainwave to the failed fractal specular attempts from the other thread. I don't.

[attachimg=#]

I need to tone down the plasticy effect again and I'd like less sparkle bloom...

It's all only one shader node again, too.

[FrankB]

looking very good
congrats!

[Tangled-Universe]

looking very good
congrats!

Indeed! Keep m coming

Martin

[Henry Blewer]

WOW. It looks like the refrozen snow after a partial thaw. 

[domdib]

Please keep the sparkle bloom! - I was looking at some sparkly snow tonight and it is BRIGHT.

[dandelO]

I have, dombib. I just think the bloom is a bit too bright here. I've since raised specular roughness a bit to tighten up and pinpoint the sparkles a little more.

Henry. Yes, it is like ice. The translucency is tricky to manage and kind of makes it plasticy. Once it's done(if it's ever) I'll detail how to flip from icy settings to snowy settings. How to go about doing it is another matter, powdery snow that still sparkles and has any translucency applied is quite hard to balance. My current attempt(not here yet) is an experiment with different translucency colour, the hue of the sky, clearly not of the same saturation, though, ha! That'd be real plasticy.

[Henry Blewer]

I hate to throw sand, but you may find the setting will have to be tweaked eachtime different light conditions are used. Sorry...

[dandelO]

Aye. Indeed.