Hey everyone, I've been working with my moon .obj lately trying to see how effective it would be to use in Terragen 2 scenes. I'm still working on the texture as well as maybe upping the poly count a bit but I thought that I would share some of the renders I've been doing with it. Here are the first two mildly presentable ones. Tell me if it looks moonish.
The first one looks more moonish to me than the second. In both cases, though, I think you need a whole bunch of craters.
Yeah, the first one is definitely the more moonish of the two. I wouldn't worry about the poly count though, it's nearly unnoticeable. I'd focus more on what Will said, and crater the bejesus out of it.
Better than what I have the patience to do! :P
o_b got it right. The first one has more definition. It might be your lighting, too. From hearing nvseal, many things affect the outcome. Nice one to start with, Will.
If you manage to get "a lot" of craters on the first one....then I would love to buy a house on the dark side of that moon....
My vote is for the first one and at the risk of being repetative, make lots and lots of craters!
OK I get it more craters, I just to make more alphas that means. interestingly I found that terragen can't handle my higher poly count version which has 6 million or so polygons. which is kinda sad because I wanted to do moon walk renders.
Quote from: Will on September 13, 2007, 05:50:21 AM
OK I get it more craters, I just to make more alphas that means. interestingly I found that terragen can't handle my higher poly count version which has 6 million or so polygons. which is kinda sad because I wanted to do moon walk renders.
someday my friend......someday
This is looking very good but I think it would benefit with some large darker areas if your aiming to produce something similar (but not the same) as our moon.
Keep it commin'
Richard
It's a lot more efficient to do something like this as a displacement map rather than geometry. 6 million polys is pretty serious. What are you using to model?
- Oshyan
As cyphyr stated... more darker areas are required. You could add a power fractal shader (scaled to the moon's size) as a color function.
Yea I'm still working on getting the material right, getting the right about of "glow" light reflection as well as dark areas is next on my list as soon as I get the model done. Oshyan I was originally planning on just making a displacement map but the weird think about Zbrushs slandered poly sphere is that they are really a really rounded square and that made it have two UV groups and Zmapper requires that it all is one UV per Normal or cavity map (which I was just going to make into a displacement map). If I can re do the topologies though I might be able to transfer the details ti sphere with one UV and get it to work. That and all my maps are coming up weird (in Zmapper) but I'm trying to figure that out as well. till then I'm using an imported .obj.
Never mind that babble I found that Zbrush 3.1 has a nice little displacement exporter and I have my maps all ready to go I test it out.
Edit: Does Terragen 2 take TIFFs? because its not letting me use it.
Quote from: Will on September 13, 2007, 08:07:28 PM
Edit: Does Terragen 2 take TIFFs? because its not letting me use it.
yes TG2 does take TIFFS...some of the plants I have use TIFF images for opacity and leaves and barks...
Its telling me that I need to convert it to SGI for non standard bit-depths.
Yeah, the first one is definitely a moon. The second one is a bit too smooth. Some craters would touch it up, I would say too. Good work, I am curious to see the results of your experiments.
hmm Photoshop won't let me turn the TIFF into any other format which is weird, any idea on what to do guys?
you can email me the tiffs and I can try something from my end....
How big of an attachment can you get?
20 MB
I can probably get it that small, might have to use a ZIP though. Thanks man :)
hey Will....what format you want them converted to???
**EDIT**
I have converted the tiff tile to BMP and ended up with 16MB file which when zipped, bumps down to 6MB
by the way the file is a 32-BIT TIFF, that is probably the main reason TG2 wasnt taking it. In order to convert it into different file format, you have to bring it down to 8-BIT
To do that all you have to do is in photoshop,
Image -> Mode -> 8-BIT
you can try this on your computer and see if it works, if not then I will email you the converted file.
I would suggest you to leave the file in TIFF format, that way you wont lose as much detail as you would do by converting it to BMP or JPG format.
Hmm so it was the that fact that it was 32 bit huh. Anyway thanks for that, I converted it and I'm playing with it now, still trying to get the size right though.
Anyidea on how to get the texture to wrap properly? it seems like spherical projection isn't working out that well any ideas?
I'm guessing that's because it's 16-bit? AFAIK TG2 only supports 8 bit RGB or greyscale TIFFs (I use LZW compression with no problems)
nope I changed it to 8-bit via dhavalmistry's instructions. my problem now is that the maps resembles a unfolded box (if you were going to make a box out of paper) and thats not fitting the planet properly, I've tried a bunch of things but I'm still having trouble. I've worked with square images to displace planets before but not this irregular shape.
It may be that specific support for Zbrush displacement maps will be necessary, at least for projection. It doesn't sound like they're made for standard spherical projection. If I recall correctly Zbrush has a unique way of making a "sphere", so perhaps this is why. If you can find out the actual method of texture projection that should be used that would help.
- Oshyan
Hi,
if i got it right Will is using a polysphere and these are nothing
but a subdivided and spherized cube (unfolded it would be a
cross of 6 squares),so maybe a cube map would work,but i´m
not shure ´cause i didn´t tested it yet.
Yes, I was thinking cube possibly. Nonetheless we don't have cubic mapping at the moment, so no help there. ;) Perhaps there's a way in Zbrush to convert to other projections/mappings?
- Oshyan
Here is a link to info on zbrush displacement maps, Will, in case you haven't seen it yet
http://www.zbrush.info/site/index.php/Tool:Displacement_Subpalette
and one for displacement exporter, though I don't know if you are using 3.1 which it is in, so no need to download it.
http://www.zbrush.info/docs/index.php/Displacement_Exporter#Download
SeerBlue
You'd need to convert the image to an equirectangular projection.... there's plenty of free panoramic software that could help, although you may need to break up the image into 6 separate cube faces. HDRShopis the only app I know that converts a cross to equirectangular but it works with HDR images. Not sure if it would work with 8-bit.
Well I've spent the last week/week and a half doing studies in ZBrush 3.1 and I've yet to find a way to transfer the sculpt of the obj to another so I've taken a little break and tried starting from scratch and made this (look below) though I can't seem to get to sit right on the TG planet. Any suggestions I've tried my usual spherical project ticks but to no avail.
Note The actual image I'm using for these tests is 2048x2048
I'm not too sure what kind of effect your after but I was able to use spherical mapping with your image to achieve the result below.
The displacement here by the way is set 1,000,000. By the way normally spherical maps are set at a 1:2 proportion (ie: 1600px by 800px) rather than a 1:1 as yours is although this may be due to zbrush, I wouldn't know.
Richard
Well done, thats the effect I'm looking for. did you get any stretching around the pole though because thats what I've been getting.
You'll always get some distortion about the poles, its just a matter of limiting it as much as possible, or just not looking at it.
Richard