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General => Image Sharing => Topic started by: Simius Strabus on July 03, 2012, 06:56:25 AM

Title: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Simius Strabus on July 03, 2012, 06:56:25 AM
Work in progress, C&C please
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: cyphyr on July 03, 2012, 07:15:36 AM
Good and interesting, no real comments, intrigued where your going to take this.
Richard
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Dune on July 03, 2012, 10:33:47 AM
Very nice concept. I recognize some procedural technology  ;) I like the colors and subtlety very much, although I would shift the trap slightly off center to the right.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Simius Strabus on July 03, 2012, 11:52:15 AM
I need to apply the golden rule: place your object of interest at about 1/3 off center.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: TheBadger on July 04, 2012, 02:31:19 AM
OK! How did you go about making the obelisk glow? I cant see from this distance, is the glow shedding light on the surface?

Very nice effect! Cool image/idea.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Dune on July 04, 2012, 03:20:41 AM
Luminosity is the key word, Badger. I expect it to be in this case, anyway. Either from default shader or surface shader.

See here: something to play with...
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Simius Strabus on July 04, 2012, 10:24:01 AM
Its actually a translucent surface. I want to add 4 smaller thin/narrow columns to the pyramid, but the extra columns don't render well. They are clipped halfway.
This hapend to me before, when using a very rough terrain, with huge displacements. Trying to solve this...
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: RArcher on July 04, 2012, 11:09:56 AM
You should be able to fix the cut off spires by changing the "Displacement Tolerance" value in the Planet 01 node (or whatever your planet node is).  Use very small value increments until the cropping is fixed.

The image itself is really interesting, nice to see something out of place in the forest.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Dune on July 04, 2012, 11:10:16 AM
Ah, translucent.

Try increasing the displacement tolerance in the planet node for your clipped of displacements.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Dune on July 04, 2012, 11:10:49 AM
You beat me by the second, Ryan  :P
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Simius Strabus on July 04, 2012, 03:20:53 PM
Thanks for the advice :D
Increasing the displacement tolerance did the trick. Making a cropped render right now. I'll post it when its done.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Saurav on July 04, 2012, 10:53:29 PM
Looking forward to where this heads.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: TheBadger on July 05, 2012, 02:40:01 AM
Oh wait, wait! Those are procedural structures, and not objects?!? That does make a difference.

@dune
thank you for the file! Im in a long render now, but I will look this over very carefully when the renders are finished. This all goes to the stuff I posted about illuminated objects and I want to get back to that soon. So i'm glad to get a better understanding here.

Thanks guys.

looking forward to more, Simius
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Simius Strabus on July 05, 2012, 07:01:32 AM
The whole thing is a stack of simple shape shaders. BTW, increasing the displacement tolerance is having a tremendous effect on render times....
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Simius Strabus on July 05, 2012, 11:13:25 AM
Update: I removed the troublesome panels/reflector sss and used 4 objects instead.
Added a reflective layer to the panels, some trees in the foreground. Still something missing.

Thinking of creating an animation. The reflectors are closed at first, slowly opening, moving away from each other as the obelisk slowly emerges from the pyramid.
As the obelisk reaches it final position, it starts to glow, reflectors tilt outward to their final position. Hmm....
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Oshyan on July 05, 2012, 12:23:47 PM
Quote from: Simius Strabus on July 05, 2012, 07:01:32 AM
BTW, increasing the displacement tolerance is having a tremendous effect on render times....

What did you increase it to?

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Simius Strabus on July 05, 2012, 12:41:35 PM
At first I tried 2, but I had to go to 3 to get rid of the clipping. Anyways, I solved the problem by using 4 separate object to act as the obelisk reflectors.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Oshyan on July 05, 2012, 01:16:22 PM
Generally we don't recommend values above 2, but if it's required in this case to fully fix the issue, obviously that's what you'd need to use. Generally it's the exception rather than the rule to need values that high. But indeed it will increase render time, especially at higher values above 2.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: cyphyr on July 05, 2012, 02:48:05 PM
This is a situation where a localised tolerance value could be useful, possibly also a localised compute terrain.
(if such things exist)
Richard
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Oshyan on July 05, 2012, 02:53:43 PM
Interesting idea, but I really don't know if that's possible...

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Dune on July 06, 2012, 02:30:32 AM
I used a localized compute terrain when making walls, by feeding the walls' area  + compute terrain (smooth and low patch size) as child through a blended surface shader into the normally computed terrain.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Simius Strabus on July 06, 2012, 07:17:55 AM
Thanks for the info Dune, I'll give it a go.
Title: Re: Ancient Technology: The Light Trap
Post by: Jo Kariboo on July 06, 2012, 09:36:47 AM
I like the mood of the first one!!!