I decided to have another try at hurricanes again. This hurricane mask is MUCH better than the one I used a few months ago; and the color adjust shader works wonders ;). This is the first decent test of this setup. There are three cloud layers. Two for the hurricane itself and one for some small clouds to compliment the storm. It is not quite where I think it should be but it's geting pretty close (at least from this angle anyway ;D). Sorry for the size but this is just a test.
I know you say this is only a test but the detail is lost in the brightness towards the right of the image, which is a shame as it looks impressive. Roll on the finished article :) :)
If this is just a test, I really look forward to the finished product. It really is starting to look pretty good.
Very nice :). This is indeed quite a nice mask. I still think that it would be cool to generate it all internally, though.
Quote from: old_blaggard on January 08, 2008, 08:20:51 PM
Very nice :). This is indeed quite a nice mask. I still think that it would be cool to generate it all internally, though.
As do I. Any ideas? ;D
That is very convincing. Good job. Lower the exposure a bit and walla.
About doing it internally, well... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3001.0
I guess some one will figure it out. :-\
This is nice.
Yeah, unfortunately building things with function nodes seems a bit awkward at the moment. If I ever get the chance, I might just see if I can't build a basic model of something like this.
I certainly hope so. Sadly, I just don't have the math skills needed, yet. I would love to see what you can come up with if you ever give it a try.
how big is your mask??...it looks great!
very nice, I like this image
nice, looks realistic I agree to bright though.
Here is a full render from another angle. I'll render the full version of the first image later (probably over night). The mask is 5600 X 4200 pixels. I lowered the exposure a little for this one but I don't think I really did enough so sorry about that (although I don't think you'll missing much detail anyway).
Oo amazing stuff !
Cooool. 8)
nice if its not too late I would say add a little texture to the right side of the hurricane its look to sold and flat. over all great job though.
Building something like this procedurally would be a huge project, but I'd love to see it. I think it would require multiple stacks of fractals, done "just right" for the variation needed. Thats why image maps can be very useful, especially if their resolution is beyond the image's native resolution.
As I stated on renderosity, this is the best orbital render I've seen yet. There have been others that were good too. And they were yours.
The only improvement I could really see would be to add more detail in the cumulus near the bottom left. But its not a big change.
WOW!!! The second image is fantastic (Do we expect anything less?). ;)
I can't see my ever getting the time to try but I imagine that a procedural version could be created by defining a central point, manipulating a get position via a localised spiral transformation, feeding the result to a power fractal and controlling the density with a radial distance blend coincident with the centre point. THAT IS A LOT OF NODES ;D ;D ;D
At the moment I am working on converting a specific case to a general solution that would give the radial density function and that is bad enough :o
Yeah, I threw together a little thing last night that used a redirect shader and an ungodly organization of function nodes (there aren't that many, but I barely understand what I did) to spin a power fractal into a circular shape - unfortunately there's a seam and the transformation is circular, not spiral. This would a matter of a few minutes if there was a way to get a specific value from, say, a power fractal and then use some kind of "Set" function to assign that value to another point in the plane.
I'm afraid I just don't have the math skills yet to try to make something like this one my own. Here is the second angle; I think I liked the first better. As you can see, there are still some issues with mask that need to be worked out.
Nonetheless, it still looks good :). The detail of the clouds from the high altitude is impressive.
Highly impressive and realistic image, image map shader or no. Great work!
- Oshyan
congrats for the IOTW !
Quote from: Oshyan on January 11, 2008, 02:33:14 AM
Highly impressive and realistic image, image map shader or no. Great work!
- Oshyan
Indeed, logical choice for awarding it IOTW.
Using image maps this way is just great and serves the purpose very well.
Congratulations again Stephen, well deserved!
Martin
Woah! Man, this latest render is amazing....
Great stuff as usual. One thing I was experimenting with the last time I tried something like this was splitting the mask image up based on the area of the cloud. I used NIH Image to generate a few binary masks based on different particle size ranges, which I then used to carve up the original tonal mask image.
The main reason behind this was to match the cloud height to the relative width. A narrow cloud looks a bit silly when it's 20km thick.
But other than that the only real problem I can see is that the broadest areas of cloud appear to flat across the top. If this is partly due to your mask image you could use the above method to add a "cap" to these flat areas to put some variation back in.