Hey all
Sorry, i wasnt sure where to put this.
Ok, anyone who has done any planetary Pictures will know that Planet Shader is great to get Land, Mountians and Oceans. But this is quickly done and has all been generated randomly, Which is All fine and good. But what i was wondering, is if anyone here is willing to get together to try and hand make a full planet (Yes i know Power Fractical Generates Terrain For the whole planet) but i think it would be quite interesting to see what we can come up with, by hand making the whole planet ourselfs.
What do you guys think?
I think this has been discussed before, I dont know how far they got. http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=754.0 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=754.0)
Richard
No, thats a Detailed Planet Maker...This is just a group of people hand Making a single Planet (all Features hand made)
interesting idea but currently we can't rotate heightfields and so doing it around a planet would be kind of rough, I tried it once and it didn't work out too well.
Regards,
will
Well...What if We..Started off with a Power Fractal To Generate the Planet, Then Scaled it down so it looked like flat land, then for mountians we could use Alphine Fractal?
how do you plan on making them separate?
regards,
Will
umm...through Scale?
hmm could work, that the only other problem I could for see was how water is handled currently, its doesn't wrap around the planet so it might take some work getting it right but otherwise looks like an interesting project.
Regards,
Will
Only the lake object doesn't "wrap". This is not the only way to get "water". For planetary scale simply use the Water or Reflective shader and flatten low-lying terrain. You can use various methods to achieve this.
- Oshyan
well.....If That shader would be a bit hard, maybe the twist and shear shader might do it?
Hmm interesting, I'd been on board if we wanted to start a community project.
Yeh :) i think we shoutld..it would be interesting to see how it would come out
Sweet idea there. I was thinking of trying to do that my self, but it seemed too overwhelming. Another point with multiple people is how to make the separate terrains seamless.
well...We can gradualy Change colours through terrains, and say for mountians, slowly Slope Them, and water + Coaslines will be easy
I attempted a similar project recently. The biggest problem I found is the water. I used the same method Rob did in his terracell project which was using a water shader on a sphere object. However, the problem was that mountains would always stick up through the ocean and destroy the realism of the coastlines (as can be seen in the attached image. the colors are the different altitudes). If there was a way to "flatten" the terrain to create an ocean this problem would go away -- although the water shader would shoot render times out the roof if you ever got close to the surface. Interesting idea though, a community effort might be able to overcome some of these issues
Well,For Sea couldnt we use a diffrent Hightfield Shader..to generate that part of the ocean
I don't think that's possible to do for the entire planet.
what I need is individual output option pur the planet shader so i can get its water.
Regards,
Will
Using a heightfield shader on a globe is simply not feasible at this point due to projection issues. Heightfields are meant to be a planar representation, they don't work well with spheres. Use procedurals for best results, possibly (partially) directed by image maps in spherical projection. You can use blend shaders to vary your terrain features and blend between different areas. For water you could use a merge shader controlled by a large scale Power Fractal with one input being your entire terrain network and the other being a constant or water wave shape power fractal.
- Oshyan
I've done the image map type thing, a While back and it worked pretty well.
regards,
Will
Quote from: Oshyan on June 04, 2007, 04:32:01 PM
Using a heightfield shader on a globe is simply not feasible at this point due to projection issues. Heightfields are meant to be a planar representation, they don't work well with spheres. Use procedurals for best results, possibly (partially) directed by image maps in spherical projection. You can use blend shaders to vary your terrain features and blend between different areas. For water you could use a merge shader controlled by a large scale Power Fractal with one input being your entire terrain network and the other being a constant or water wave shape power fractal.
- Oshyan
What i meant, was to try and use Sperate Heightsield Shaders for Sea Beds, Which could eliminate the Problem of mountian tops coming through the sea?
Or, Perhaps during this project (If it happens) A few of us who know how might be able to develop a plug-in to remove certain parts from the Fractal Shader
As I said using heightfields really wouldn't be ideal, unless by "heightfield" you are referring generically to any terrain shader, which is potentialy confusing.
There is also no need to develop a plugin to "remove certain parts from the fractal shader". Simply use a Blend Shader and you can already achieve this.
- Oshyan
Ah, Never thought of that, So what if we used the Blend Shader to Flatten out The Bumpy Parts we dont want, And Perhaps..Twist and Shear Shader to Help Make Large Scale Mountians ect?
Using the blend shader input in this way is exactly what I suggest, except it doesn't "flatten" something, it simply prevents *new* displacement from being in certain areas. Thus the terrain that previously existed would already have to be flat for this to work. The planet starts out flat so you would basically use a Blend Shader on the very first terrain shader using a Power Fractal at very large scale as your blender. A better way if you want to build up a whole terrain network first would be to create the basic terrain then use a Merge shader at the end of the chain between a constant and the terrain network you've build up and using a large scale Power Fractal as a mix controller.
Twist and Shear isn't really going to help you make good mountains. Have you worked with this shader before?
- Oshyan
Yeh, Well, Ive Made a Few Mountain Ranges From the shader before by pointing them Very High Up, and it starts to look Kind of like a mountian Range