Hi guys,
For many years I've been keeping a check on Terragen's development progress. Noticing Version 3's features made me give it a serious try for the first time. Must say thanks to the regular forum contributors that made available various useful bits & pieces I used to produce the image attached & Planetside Software for the trial version.
Regards, H4n$
This is cool!
Indeed, a very nice render, and welcome to this forum! We hope (I do, at least) to see more of your work. Great ships also.
If you're open to C&C, I'd have one comment; the wake. I think it is too straight and hard, and I would break it up, soften it further behind the ship. And perhaps give it some reflectivity, so sun-hit areas will be lighter, like at the bow of the ship.
Welcome. A vey good start and an unusual image. I agree with dune about the wake.
Thanks guys, much appreciated. In the end I'm just a 3D modeller... Only been at it (TG) for about a week so still exploring possibilities!. A really good wake is difficult to achieve in any 3D package & with TG I still have to figure out lots (-: The foam needs volume & gradients (fading) for both the pattern & colour. Also have to look at improving the wave pattern generated by the ships. Luckily there's guys like yourself that have shared their knowledge on this forum. Still some of that left to dissect before asking questions.
Regards, H4n$
A fractal warp (watch the sizes) and stretching of the voronoi foam is the easiest way for the wake, and/or a Photoshop) painted mask.
Thanks for those pointers. I will defo have a look at that (-: It was actually seeing your (& more specifically the beach) pictures & imagery that Hannes, DandelO & various other regular forum contributors achieved that made me feel that the time could be right to have a go with TG... Since progress has been well beyond my expectations I'm about to fork out but still have to decide on which TG version?! Obviously, I haven't come around to assessing animation capabilities for my 3Dships purposes yet. That sailing ship animation Hannes did was very impressive though... Guess, everything can be done with blood, sweat & bit of dedication...
Regards, H4n$
Excellent work - particularly the latest version - and especially for only having used TG for a week or so!
- Oshyan
Agree.
Yes, that does it, top notch!
Thanks guys (-:
It is mainly due to TG3's feature set & the members of this forum who made it pretty straight forward to research & put together things so far (-:
I'm not anywhere finished though as I only managed to find time to adjust the Painted mask for the foam a bit. I have to build a setup to visualise the rules of the road at sea. Ideally, I would end up with a default seascape where the weather / seastate can be adjusted easily & both the static (buoys & stuff) & moving objects (watercraft) can be popped in as complete modules including their interaction (foam/wake) with the water. This would allow for being able to move the various objects (including their interaction with the water) around to visualise the various scenarios to explain the rules at sea. Ideally, navigation lights & animation would be included as well. At the moment I still have to figure out a way to attach wake/foam to a ship...
Regards, H4nz
That sounds like an intriguing venture. The wake part isn't that hard; you can make one (or more, if wakes are very different) Photoshop greyscale mask, import it in an image map shader (leave at default, but set the size) and attach a transform shader to it, in which you click the location and angle of ship 1. For ship 2, add another transform shader with location and rotation (and perhaps size) and add through a merge shader. Etcetera.
Thanks a lot for those pointers Dune (-: I was already under the impression that a lot is now possible with Terragen. I also see loads of mathematical nodes available & was wondering if it could be possible to build a clip file which creates a 3D Kelvin Wake pattern on a lake or sphere surface?! I'm having a dig for the maths required to do this. I already got the code for a Houdini Kelvin Wake Mesh deformer & got in touch with a developer that coded a Kelvin Wake deformer plugin for Maya as well. Is there any maths wizards on this forum that could have any idea if this is at all possible?
For those like mtself who have no idea what a Kelvin Wake loos like mr google says this:
https://thatsmaths.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/kelvin-wake-duck.jpg
There are a few math wizards around, Mogn is one, Oysteroid... they might chime in one of these days.
Hi! I like your render :)
I did a wake in Blender with the water simulation and then baked a hightmap in Blender for the use in terragen as a mask.
Thanks for liking (-: I've tried many different applications for generating wakes but I always resort back to bitmaps as it is "quick & dirty". Always a bit confusing the wake thing... In my view it consists of 2 related but separate components. A wave pattern & a foam pattern. I'm using a bitmap (I guess it's called "mask" in TG) for both in the images I've done so far.
8)
Cool stuff H4nz!
Welcome too!
Looking forward to seeing you around :)
J
Looks to me like you got all the basics of TG down really fast and really well.
Since you seem to get lots of energy and pleasure from doing ships you may want to focus on developing surface shaders...
In the major 3D softs, you either get when you buy, or through a 3rd party after, a large collection of material shaders made to work perfect in whatever renderer. So woods, metals, plastics, stones, so on. For example: http://www.dryzen.com/shLibV002_preview.html
Sadly TG does not have this from anyone. So, if you are going to do lots of rendering with metallic objects....
Even with TG not displacing objects in a "normal way", something like a shader library could be very popular, you could even sell them on NWDA. As for me, I would really like to see stone and wood shaders, but I digress ;D
Anyway, just an idea for you if you need them anyway for your boats, why not think about making and selling them too, at a nice price ;)
In the meantime, J meyer made and gave away a car with some really good metal shaders for TG. You may want to track him down and ask him about it. Looking at his files could really give you a giant jump forward on your surface work for your ships. (your making such fast progress anyway, may as well go warp speed)
Lastly, again just because this seems to be a real pleasure for you, how about trying to get something like this : https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3354/3328157572_569ac6367e_z.jpg other than the modeling part, should be pretty easy to get the textures in TG.
:)
Lol, too much praise... Let me get things straight here (-: Fair enough I've been doing 3D for quite a few years & got nice renders out of TG pretty quick but that was really due to TG itself & the kind people on this forum that left plenty 3D snippets for me to pull apart so I didn't have to ask silly questions. On top of that Dune left me various tips that will keep me occupied for a while.
My main interest in 3D is making ship models from drawings but generally I find surfaces / materials / shaders just a major pain because every application does them differently. So far I've just used very low poly single texture / material models that convert quickly. My high poly models have many different materials & it's going to be quite a job to get them rendered decently /-: I'm having a play with one right now & fiddling with the reflectivity shader...
I will defo have to get in touch with J meyer when the time comes as his Land Rover is in deed the best surfaced external 3D Model I've seen on this forum.
I'm no great fan of rusty ships & wrecks really!