Terrain from "seamless" (grand canyon)
Clouds from user "Njeneb"
Well, the Grand Canyon is certainly one of the more familiar sites around here. You've done a decent job rendering it, but you should definitely keep playing round with camera angles, haze settings, and lighting. It looks good, but lacks any particularly standout qualities, if you know what I mean.
A little bit more work. Try upping the colour contrast, and putting a lot more colour variation into it. Rock is never one colour, it's dozens of different shades all jumbled together. We don't notice all the time because our brain just takes the general pattern and marks it 'light brown'. But if you actually look closer, you'll be able to count at least six very different colours straight off the bat.
Good luck.
here is som images to studdy.
http://www.edupic.net/Images/Science/red_rock06.jpg (http://www.edupic.net/Images/Science/red_rock06.jpg)
http://www.mrupp.info/Photos/2005-Australia/center_redrock.jpg (http://www.mrupp.info/Photos/2005-Australia/center_redrock.jpg)
http://arts-wallpapers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Red-Rock-HD-Wallpaper-Scenery-HD-Widescreen-Wallpapers-red-rock-1600x1200-wallpaper-5229.jpg (http://arts-wallpapers.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Red-Rock-HD-Wallpaper-Scenery-HD-Widescreen-Wallpapers-red-rock-1600x1200-wallpaper-5229.jpg)
Quote from: Draigr on July 11, 2011, 05:00:45 PM
Well, the Grand Canyon is certainly one of the more familiar sites around here. You've done a decent job rendering it, but you should definitely keep playing round with camera angles, haze settings, and lighting. It looks good, but lacks any particularly standout qualities, if you know what I mean.
A little bit more work. Try upping the colour contrast, and putting a lot more colour variation into it. Rock is never one colour, it's dozens of different shades all jumbled together. We don't notice all the time because our brain just takes the general pattern and marks it 'light brown'. But if you actually look closer, you'll be able to count at least six very different colours straight off the bat.
Good luck.
I agree with you, i find it quite boring my self tbh. And yeah i really need to work more on the color, i saw some pics of grand canyon on google, and now definitely see what you mean.
and thanks:)
Quote from: microwar on July 11, 2011, 05:07:59 PM
here is som images to studdy.
Thanks!
I am glad someone besides me like my clouds. :) I keep them simple so they don't have long render times. I try to get them to help propagate the light; fill in the corners a bit.
Quote from: njeneb on July 11, 2011, 06:03:10 PM
I am glad someone besides me like my clouds. :) I keep them simple so they don't have long render times. I try to get them to help propagate the light; fill in the corners a bit.
Yep its really nice, thanks for sharing btw.
Here is a new render, with minor tweaks, mainly color.
I would add some larger boulders in spots; into the water and along the shore and its slopes. Not too many. Looks good other than that.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/USA_09847_Grand_Canyon_Luca_Galuzzi_2007.jpg)
Still need to work a bit more on those colours there, and sheer the cliffs a bit. Not quite grand canyon awesome yet. But well on the way there!
The cliff shearing in the photograph is a lot of thermal erosion, something of which terragen can not do. This can be faked in something like geo control to a certain degree. I suppose the fractals could be ran though a height field erode 3 with a lot of disposition set high. Alpine fractal might work as well with high aging where the disposition is high and wide.
You can get a look like thermal erosion with two power fractals and a merge shader. Select blend by highest in the merge shader. Make a Surface layer for slope constraints. You want the minimum slope angle to be 50 degrees or more. The power fractals have the same scales, one using a negative displacement, the other a positive value. The scale depends on the scene too much, but should be small. The power fractals get plugged into the first two inputs of the merge shader.
The smoothing effect of the surface layer can tweak the look of the erosion if it appears too rough. The merge shader gets plugged into the surface layers displacement input. This will leave the child input for more shaders if they are needed.
The power fractals need to using the ridge variant of the noise flavor. The y axis should be stretched. I use 1.6 to 1.8. You can use a little bit of noise variation, but keep it near 1; the default.
Got me very curious. Are there any examples here of that effect?
I think Ryan did something like the method I described here http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11963.0
FrankB did this one, which from a discussion gave me my method http://nwda.deviantart.com/art/Rock-wall-22b-153286594
You can't really tell from my Fortress Rock images, the camera is too far away.
Nice work, keep on going! :)
For rocks/boulders you could try this:
Make 2 fake stone shaders of different size and don't connect anything to their input on the left.
Merge the 2 fake stone shaders and set merge mode to "highest" and keep mix level to 0.5 (default).
Connect the merged stones as child layer of a new surface layer at the bottom of your shader-chain.
Disable surface shader colour and enable/set smoothing to 1.
Now you can use the surface shader to control altitude/slope.
Also you can manually shade/texture the stones by connect fractals to the "shader input" port of each fake stone shader.
(be careful with the displacements!)
Looks complicated, but takes 20 sec. to set up.
Cheers,
Martin
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on July 14, 2011, 04:06:45 AM
Nice work, keep on going! :)
For rocks/boulders you could try this:
Make 2 fake stone shaders of different size and don't connect anything to their input on the left.
Merge the 2 fake stone shaders and set merge mode to "highest" and keep mix level to 0.5 (default).
Connect the merged stones as child layer of a new surface layer at the bottom of your shader-chain.
Disable surface shader colour and enable/set smoothing to 1.
Now you can use the surface shader to control altitude/slope.
Also you can manually shade/texture the stones by connect fractals to the "shader input" port of each fake stone shader.
(be careful with the displacements!)
Looks complicated, but takes 20 sec. to set up.
Cheers,
Martin
Cool thanks! i did like you said(i think)but the terrain get another form as well, when applying smoothing effect??
Hmmm...in a way that's possible, but most of the times it works well.
If you go to my profile by clicking on my username you can find my e-mail.
If you'd like you could send your tgd + terrainfile to that e-mail address, so I can have a look.
Cheers,
Martin
I just sent you a mail with .tgd
Thanks.
In your situation the smoothing has quite an effect because you have very steep features on your terrain.
I'll explain briefly why in many cases it is beneficial to use smoothing in the surface layer which acts as a base for fake stones:
Smoothing effect makes the surface layer follow the smoothed normals provided by the last compute terrain node which precedes your surface layer.
If you incorporate a fake stone the "normal" way, like the 5 or 6 you had in one column, they would automatically incorporate the displacements which happen before those shaders.
Having fake stones shaders as child layers of a smoothed surface layers allows the fake stones shaders to "start with a clean sheet". In other words, you can texture and displace them separately from the terrain.
The steep features change faster than the patch size (determined by compute terrain) of your terrain and thus the smoothing smooths out large chunks.
Luckily, in your case it doesn't matter too much since your stones are pretty simple.
In any case I'd always use the merge method I described you, with or without smoothing then.
If you don't merge this way then stones will exist on other stones.
Unless you like that effect of course :)
Cheers,
Martin
Thank you very much for the explanation! i was just about to ask you what the advantage is with doing it this way, because i thought you could archive the exact same result by doing it "the ordinary way", but now i understand what you mean.
thanks again.
Quote from: njeneb on July 13, 2011, 10:44:53 PM
I think Ryan did something like the method I described here http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11963.0
FrankB did this one, which from a discussion gave me my method http://nwda.deviantart.com/art/Rock-wall-22b-153286594
You can't really tell from my Fortress Rock images, the camera is too far away.
I looked at those images and i see little evidence of thermal erosion. However, i may be missing the obvious here, otherwise it may be best to try and fake it in something like geocontrol. The idea i gather is to smooth out segments of the slope but at the same time fan the sediment outward as it travels downward of the slope and as it builds up it creates talus piles.
Talus piles. I always thought of these as the result of hard rain. Back to the drawing board.
Quote from: njeneb on July 16, 2011, 02:54:03 AM
Talus piles. I always thought of these as the result of hard rain. Back to the drawing board.
It depends really. Erosion is a complex process. There is a lot involved with erosion which is why it is so bloody hard to create with anything close to being realistic. There are layers of reactions going on with the terrain. Third party height field applications are still best for these effects. Erosion is not simply fluvial channels but there is so much more happening there. I think if you did want to do it procedurally, at least in a faked manner the alpine fractal with heavy disposition would work but have a lot of fake stones build up along the base of the dispositions where the slope is smoother. I am sure the alpine fractal can be cut off at there peaks and strata/outcrops shaders can be added. It might look more convincing in this case even though the alpine shader is slower, however i think the results could look more real if done well.
In fact, the Dolimites are a good example of how much is going on with such a dynamic mountain range such as them.
IMHO GeoControl2 does quite excellent Erosions...
You might like to consider it.
Quote from: neon22 on July 17, 2011, 05:50:56 AM
IMHO GeoControl2 does quite excellent Erosions...
You might like to consider it.
I tend to agree, particularly if folks are after that certain aspect of geology. It does very well with sediment carry out although i heard that the software's developer was going to work on an actual thermal erosion filter, the real deal but who knows...
I've been playing with my idea for creating the erosion flows. Merging does not seem to work. So, the next trail will be some sort of masking.
Using merge does make some very strange looking landscapes. Selecting 'difference' in the color control and merge by highest makes some very 1960 looking lunar mountains. I used a ridged mix power fractal for the first input and billows for the second. Try scales about the same as a fractal terrain power fractal has. The minimum scale needs to be quite high. Otherwise everything turns too spikey looking.
Could use just use terragen's erosion operator? I wonder if that would be a slightly easier solution.
Found a thread with some examples of it's multi use.
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=8741.15
I am going to try it out with the Davidson's Butte scene. It needs some work... Populations are attempting to steal the camera's limelight. It will be a nice experiment while I am working.