Recent posts

#21
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by sboerner - March 25, 2024, 10:45:09 AM
I'm curious, too. In the meantime, last night's rendering came out fine. Running another one today while I work on other projects. If I can get 3-4 renderings in a row without the artifacts, I'll be satisfied that it's fixed.

I use EXR files a lot: For VDMs, displacements and sometimes even for masks, especially if they are paired with color adjustment shaders for choke/spread control. I just like the headroom, and displacements look way better. If you compress them the file sizes are manageable.
#22
Image Sharing / Re: Nice place for R&R
Last post by pclavett - March 25, 2024, 09:56:21 AM
You are right Ulco, those trees are in the way of the view...... was too eager to try these beautiful trees from 3D-Shaker ! Another render on  the way with the Path Tracer. Will try to lighten the cottage somewhat, although this kind of dark brown is very popular these days in Canada. I did lighten the the load of plants on the ground as they were suffocating each other. Also put in some randomness in the flower bed as it looked too even. The rocks were also changed on the base of the chalet as one of the rocks has a distinct area that appeared repetitive. Will post when ready and work some more on the project with those trees changed for something less obstructive. Thanks for the suggestions !
#23
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Tangled-Universe - March 25, 2024, 04:37:09 AM
Thanks guys!

Ulco, for the water I just used 2 fractals mixed, one perlin mix 2 and the other ridges, both with low octaves.
The lambert shader does not use translucency. Good that you mention, I adjusted my post to this.
Basically it's just the node I used, it could have been a surface layer with the same colour as well. Would have done the same.
It's not rendered with PT, actually. All the colour and hues are from the GI. I used very high cache detail, like 16 with sample quality 32 (hence filename).
#24
Image Sharing / Re: coastal cliffs
Last post by Upon Infinity - March 25, 2024, 04:37:04 AM
Interesting technique. Great results! I could never get cliffs to work right in TG.
#25
Image Sharing / Re: Nice place for R&R
Last post by Dune - March 25, 2024, 02:25:50 AM
Nice POV. If I may make some suggestions; if you have a property like that with a view like that, the gardener must be a bit loony to place a row of trees to obscure that view ???  I'd rather put some small shrub and perhaps one or two 'thin-leaved' trees in the corners, like birches or so.
About the chalet, it's very dark and not too welcoming; I'd lighten up the wood and roof, give the roof (shingles?) a 0.3 of reflection, in fact perhaps the wood too, so it reflects a bit more light in dark areas.
If you do this in PT, don't forget to change the specular roughness in the glass shader. The default 0.01 will blur the reflections a bit (unless you want it to). But what do you mean by 'a bit transparent'?
#26
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by Dune - March 25, 2024, 02:16:30 AM
That is very weird indeed, something you'd never think of (not me anyway, never use EXR). I'm curious what staff will say about the rendering itself, if they know.

Especially good that you found the culprit by yourself!
#27
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Dune - March 25, 2024, 02:10:30 AM
Extremely cool, especially the last POV, with the great variation in hues and darks. Very subtle. Did you use (a.o) the water shader for sand displacement? I actually never thought of using a lambert shader for surfaces like this. I guess the translucency and the PT light reflections give it such a subtle 'gloom'.
#28
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Doug - March 24, 2024, 07:59:31 PM
really good pics

i could put some petroglyphs all over those walls
#29
Image Sharing / Canyon series 1
Last post by Tangled-Universe - March 24, 2024, 07:15:05 PM
A series of canyon's I've been working on...

Little fun fact; there's only one lambert shader as surface shader (w/o translucency and w/o masks).
The sand has the same colour, though ever slightly lighter with fake stones (which uses built-in RGB colour variation) as sand grains.
#30
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by sboerner - March 24, 2024, 03:19:52 PM
OK, I think I've found the problem and it's strange.  ::)

But first, it's important to know that these invaders (which is what I'm calling them -- they remind me of old Space Invaders sprites) didn't appear until the foliage was added to the scene. Then they showed up in every render, but in different locations each time. Sometimes over foliage, sometimes over water or elsewhere. (I even rendered the same file on both machines last night and yep, they showed up in both.)

While loading the file I finally noticed this error. It was getting thrown each time TG attempted to load a displacement file associated with one of the trees:

FreeImage error: Warning: loading color model R as Y color model

So I looked at the file, which came with a Megascans bark shader. It was an EXR file and had a single channel (which appears in Photoshop's layers panel) named "[R]". All other EXR files in the scene have a single channel named "RGB".

FreeImage must be the library module that TG uses for EXR support. This page explains the problem: https://sourceforge.net/p/freeimage/bugs/283/. More detail here: https://github.com/imageio/imageio/issues/356.

Anyway. I just changed the channel name in Photoshop from "[R]" to "RGB" and resaved it. The error went away and (fingers crossed) the render currently running looks fine so far. Why this would have anything to do with the renderer is beyond me. But the problem seems to be fixed: No more invaders. I'll be doing nightly renderings so if it hasn't been fixed, it will show up again soon enough.