New planet.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/full.php?image_id=1818225
Experimenting with exr. I rendered out the atmosphere and surface separately. Then was able to adjust exposure better, especially for the sky. I used Cinepaint then some extra post work in Lightzone.
I'm not too happy with a few things. It turns out this render doesn't look so cool unless the monitor is quite high contrast and brightness. I could have got better composition and lighting as well. So I'll try to rectify this a bit with further renders.
However using exr is superb. I'm going to carry on with trying various methods for exr post work. In fact I doubt I'll use anything else now.
Very good and inspiring work.
The ground's detail is amazing, so is the choice of colours.
I really like the part where the ground meets the spire!
damn ! great ! Oo
Thanks for comments.
Just some info about things I did here.
I set up a different approach with this planet. Many of the displacements are actually in a separate chain in the node graph but hook back through into a kind of base layer as child layer. These separate functions all chain through displacement and distribution nodes. These are all blue function nodes utilizing perlin and voronoi basis. Then after that there are standard layers mostly dealing with colour and some larger fractal displacements. I found that separating most of the displacements in this way makes the graph easier to follow and edit. You can then pull data from this separate chain for use elsewhere to control colour for example.
There are fake stones but only the bigger ones. The other smaller texture (at least what can be seen here - it gets even smaller) is the same technique used for the stuff on the Mojo spires thread except I used a conditional node to get the values to two for masking purposes.
There is also subtle slightly distorted altitude driven Perlin basis which gives very slight displacement and colour. You can see this on the lower ground with the slight changes in tones at altitude.
There is more detail on the ground which will be visible with lower shots.
I wasn't too happy at more extreme towers elsewhere. That wasn't really intentional. Like the huge overhanging things in the distance but I'm leaving it like this. The towers are standard tweaked power fractal, nothing fancy.
Just another point which kind of disappeared a bit as the planet developed but some textures have slight luminosity. Not just the red glow but originally I had a kind of glowing ash on the ground. Some remnants of it remain.
Love the details in this espically the surfacing and the atmosphere.
efflux, you rock. Uh, well, you know what I mean...GREAT.
I would love to see this. Could you post a non-rendo link?
OK. I see that linking to Renderosity is not a great idea. I was sure at some you could link direct to an image without having to sign in.
Wow, this looks great. I'd love to see some more smaller rocks on the ground, if you keep this POV. I like the clouds too.
This is very inspiring! The spires and lava formations are great, as well as the surfacing. The clouds could use some work (look too extended to me).
The clouds are too large I think. I brought down their altitude but didn't change the size.
I'm finding it quite problematic to find more render POVs that I like. I may rework the terrain. I'm happy with surface mats though.
Quote from: efflux on January 21, 2009, 12:01:30 PM
The clouds are too large I think. I brought down their altitude but didn't change the size.
I'm finding it quite problematic to find more render POVs that I like. I may rework the terrain. I'm happy with surface mats though.
I like the clouds as they are at they moment as they add a sense of mystery to the image but they also do much more then this, at there current scale they help scale and proportion the land forms relative to each other that they may not other wise have; they also give the scene a depth that may other wise not have been there. At there current scale they cover some of the tops of some of the higher land forms, this can be seen under certain weather conditions in the real world, in the image here it has the visual Que that those land forms are further away then those closer to the viewer, helping to sell the 3D quality of the image that is on a 2D plane.
Regards to you.
Cyber-Angel ;D
This is just awesome! And YES .exr is the ONLY way to save! I switched a year ago and never looked back.
Very nice work :). Thanks for posting the image here - it sure was worth it to me. I see what you mean about the clouds, but the surface both for the ground and for the spires looks great.
Cyber-Angel is right about the clouds. I tried changing them but it spoilt the sense of scale. This planet is stuck with these clouds. If I change them it changes the whole character. However, I have changed the terrain which is better now. I'm after an other world look but those big bulbous hills in the distance were too much. The reason those appeared is that I used altitude to displace the whole hillside. I could show you the graph for that but if you think it through it's quite simple. You have a value coming from altitude node which obviously increases with altitude so you can use that to change various functions. The benefit with this basic displacement is that it pushes the whole hillside smoothly before any rougher displacements over the top. I've used this a few times. This was clamped to not displace any further beyond a certain altitude but it still displaced too much on the higher hills. This is sorted because the terrain now rarely climbs higher than was intended. New render coming.
Thanks for comments.
New render.
EXR again. No separate treatment of atmosphere and surface this time. The scene was not so much in shadow so it wasn't such an issue. Maybe I am overcorrecting exposure? The trouble with EXR is that the tweaking becomes even more dependent on monitor. Cinepaint has exposure and gamma warning but is not set up for my monitor. I need to look into these issues more deeply. Last image was tweaked on the Linux system where the Quadro driver was defaulted to turn the monitor to high brightness then when I switched to the Mac (also plugged through the Eizo - dual DVI) it was not set to full brightness and the image didn't look too cool.
One problem with this planet is that I did a lot of detail on the lower ground but I have found that POVs from these low areas don't seem to work too well. I'll have another search with this new terrain arrangement.
I agree with everyone else, totally awesome...
I really like the composition of the second one. The surfacing is fantastic on both and the clouds are in a better position now as well.
Quite lovely. Bravo. Great work.
The second one is a great image, but you lost the best feature: the light from within the rock. I liked that the best, and it doesn't show much on this one.
Oh I love this rim ... did you use 'smoothing' for cutting into the spires?
Yeah. I know I lost the glow. It only really shows up where the rock is in shadow but then I get the exposure problems in the shade. I'm thinking of setting up a planet where I have control of all the surface lightness as a kind of exposure hack.
Volker. I used elements of smoothing just about everywhere so yes if I understand what you mean then smoothing was used as you describe.
The terrain that the rocks are on is actually simply a perlin billows powerfractal. There is another perlin fractal for terrain which supplies some lower undulations but I've found that you can tweak all the parameters of the power fractal to get kind of spires but not lots of nasty sharp spikes because you can use the spike control and also the smooth control in compute terrain. You don't really want spikes but more smooth bulges. Ironically I did use the other spire technique for some very small rocks which you can faintly see in the first render. Discussed here:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2530.0
Except in files on that thread a colour adjust shader was used to get something to mask with. I replaced this with a conditional scalar.
The reason for using this technique was more to do with the fact that I needed to clamp and mask what looks like small stones so they had different materials (can't really be seen clearly in these first two renders). Fake stones are cool but they are voronoi and always look so. Clamping and masking perlin gives you some other options.
The ideal set up (or really compromise) for this kind of extreme displacement is to set up terrain that is peaky and steep as possible while keeping it smooth with low detail then the smaller overlying displacement provide that detail without having lots of underlying terrain detail clashing with it. Smoothing in the surface layers is also effective. This is one of the great things about TG2's displacements. There are lots of various ways to smooth them out. Other apps tend to get masses of artifacts with nasty clashing angles.
You also find a problem at the hill peaks. This is where big displacements tend to get seriously messed up. The altitude drive I use blows the terrain up like a balloon and so smoothes out this top area = smoother overlying displacements.
Funny. I just read that old thread. The problems were so easy and obvious. Cut to the chase and go to the end of that thread where some files are provided if you are interested.
The main issues were caused by lack of documentation on exactly how TG2 works! Had to be done the hard way.
Here is a shot of the entire graph for this planet. You won't be able to work out details from this. Node names are shortened and it's a mass of connections but it shows a general data flow that I am going to continue with. The blue groups are handling much of the displacements in a kind of separate branch which hooks back into the first layer which is a sort of base layer.
Oo'
woah ! now I understand your profile's pic !
He he. I should go back to an old profile pic that I used to use but I didn't like the idea that people think I'm smoking drugs.
The graph isn't as complex as you might think. Since I build stuff on planetary scale then I guess this means lots of procedural tweaking.
Quote from: seth93 on January 24, 2009, 08:17:41 PM
Oo'
woah ! now I understand your profile's pic !
An uncanny resemblance indeed! 8)