I've been playing around with small planets recently, and notice that if a planet's surface has a strong shadow then it appears darker than the atmosphere around it, no matter how thick. Is there a way of counteracting this?
M.
Can you provide an image for an example?
- Oshyan
Will do when I can close cubase and audition down to get my RAM back :D
Funnily enough, I find the biggest bottleneck for me is the CPU, not RAM. I might only use between 80mb - 180mb while doing a render while my CPU is maxing out.
Yeah, me too, but the trouble is, when I've got my audio programs running, there's not even that much left!
Now I've had a play around, I think I've isolated the problem to the cloud fractal shader. It just uses the whole greyscale, which means there's black in there. It is affected by the haze, but only noticably at high thickness.
It's a nice enough effect.
1: nothing
2: cloud set as colour function
3: cloud set as luminance function
4: cloud set as lumincnce function (same as before but it looks different, how random) with THICK atmosphere.
M.
I'm unclear on exactly what you've done when you say "Cloud set as luminance function", etc. Can you show an image of your network or post the .tgd? I'm not sure if there's a bug here or not. :D
- Oshyan
Here's a shot of the network. I don't imagine it's really a bug, just something I don't understand. Thanks O.
M.
In this case it would appear you're just plugging the density shader from a cloud layer into your surface map as a luminosity function. Since the density shader is really just a customized Power Fractal shader you're not getting any special effect by doing this and might as well not be using a "cloud fractal shader". What was the effect you were trying to achieve?
- Oshyan
. . . a cloudy shiny effect? 8)
Hehe, well what I mean is were you trying to achieve an actual cloud-like look? All this is doing is shading the "planet" surface with a black and white cloud-like texture - pretty boring. It's luminous so that affects things, but still it doesn't sound like what you're aiming for. Wouldn't an actual cloud layer be better?
- Oshyan
I wasn't going for any particular look at all really, just experimenting to see if I could find something useful to use in a real situation. I like the look of the cloud density shader on the surface of the planet. I imagine it could look pretty interesting warped, etc. Obviously real clouds could go on top of that.
Or it could be used to replace a cloud layer if the planet is in the distance and you don't want to have to render yet another cloud layer for not much gain.
Sounds pretty good to me. :)
- Oshyan