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General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: russe166 on April 22, 2014, 09:13:10 AM

Title: Bright stars?
Post by: russe166 on April 22, 2014, 09:13:10 AM
Hi!

How can I make bright little stars?

My stars are always greyish, and when I increase Luminosity they get bigger and bigger, but I want them to stay small.

Michael
Title: Re: Bright stars?
Post by: Dune on April 22, 2014, 11:49:27 AM
What a strange combination of nodes. At first I doubted if any dots would appear as both color adjust shaders are set to black-black, but it did show some pinpricks. Strange.
Here's a background file that's on the forum somewhere as well. I think Dandel0 made it (not sure). That works well as a base, and I don't think the stars are too big. The principle is quite simple actually, kind of the same the file you used.
Title: Re: Bright stars?
Post by: russe166 on April 22, 2014, 12:27:40 PM
Thank you for the quick reply and the example file.

Unfortunately, even here the stars are grey and not bright-white.

(800 % zoom)
[attachimg=1]
Title: Re: Bright stars?
Post by: bobbystahr on April 22, 2014, 01:57:23 PM
odd...that .tgc has always worked well for me....
Title: Re: Bright stars?
Post by: bigben on May 12, 2014, 06:22:45 PM
Had a look at the TGD. I think it's going pear-shaped with the merge and subsequent colour adjust.  To simplify it you could use an Add scalar (or Add colour, I just like to be minimalistic) to replace Merge Shader 02.  And don't forget that antialiasing might be smoothing your really small stars

Quote from: Dune on April 22, 2014, 11:49:27 AM
What a strange combination of nodes. At first I doubted if any dots would appear as both color adjust shaders are set to black-black, but it did show some pinpricks. Strange.
This is actually a really useful feature for creating binary masks at a specific value.
Title: Re: Bright stars?
Post by: Dune on May 13, 2014, 02:10:56 AM
Can you explain what you just wrote, Ben? How does that work... I mean black is kind of black, isn't it? Though I noticed that with clamping, reversing and such, black is not black at all.... confusing sometimes.
Title: Re: Bright stars?
Post by: russe166 on May 13, 2014, 02:38:34 AM
Thank you  :)

Now I got bright stars ...
Title: Re: Bright stars?
Post by: bigben on May 14, 2014, 05:00:52 AM
Quote from: Dune on May 13, 2014, 02:10:56 AM
Can you explain what you just wrote, Ben? How does that work... I mean black is kind of black, isn't it? Though I noticed that with clamping, reversing and such, black is not black at all.... confusing sometimes.

Short answer: Matt told me.

But it does make sense. Numbers between the black and white values are interpolated between 0 and 1, numbers beyond beyond the black and white values are extrapolated (or clamped). If they're both identical, it still holds true that larger values will be white and smaller values will be black.
Title: Re: Bright stars?
Post by: Dune on May 14, 2014, 07:38:08 AM
Still hard to comprehend, but I'll keep that in mind. Might be useful knowledge some day.