Hi All
Here are a couple of test renders of my water masking and fake water surface. I've stuffed up my image map adjustments along the way and will have to go back a step to fix these up (banks are too sharp and the water distribution is a little off... up close)
The white surface below the river bed is mainly for me to preview the mask at the moment. There's a fake stone shader above it which provides texture for the banks. My new mask creation technique is making life easier although I had to choose an angle that picked out a flaw I missed ;)
Render times aren't too bad yet. The lake took 4 1/2 hours, a fair proportion of which was taken up populating and rendering the trees (2.5 million in each image over 20x20km, medium quality).
I like them very much but the bottom one wins the prize IMO. Your rocky shore will finish it off perfectly. Huzzzzzah! ;D
Yes I to like the bottom one well done
These are really nice, maybe too "nice and clean", sort of Truman Show like!
I'd really like to know more about masking techniques - and you appear to the man Ben ;D ;D
Kevin
Dirtying up the edges is the next stage. This test is mainly to check that the underlying "principles" are working properly first. You could of course 'dirty up' the imge map but that would require a higher res image map and this is already 8000x8000 (covers 160x160km, which is a big advantage from the point of view of adding a lot of rivers and lakes with a single image map)
These are really nice, Ben. You seem to be becoming a TG2 genius.
Trust me, there's a still a heap I don't know.
Here's another test image to demontsrate why I created a fake water shader. The original problem is posted here... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=516.0 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=516.0) For the repeat I used the same terrain but clipped the valleys to 0 to remove the subsurface terrain and applied my fake water shader with the displacements increased x10. To put the subsurface detail back in I could use an image of the elvation data to mask additional colours for the water surface. A colour adjust shader on the mask could then be used to control this effect to compensate for different camera altitudes in animations.
lol new zealand :P
looking good man