This is actually quite a high view. We are above a canyon here. The foreground is near the edge of a cliff. The stones you see are not fake stones but my own graph as posted in the forum. Detail goes down to gravel sized level but also canyons so I'll try to capture these things in other renders. It is so difficult to get a planet to work at a few metres from the ground up to thousands in altitude. Something that looks good at ten metres might look rubbish at a hundred never mind thousands of metres and vice versa. This is probably what I spend most of my time working on.
I have learned that macro-scapes are much harder than a landscape 'photo'. This looks quite promising. Great choice for color.
Near the edge. New shot:
Hi
Both images are beautiful, but I love #2.
Excelent rocks.
Maybe more rocks shoud be deeper in the ground.
ciao
Naoo
I like both, I can not decide which is better. The rocks are fine. There are similar rocks near Binghamton NY. The water could not move them, or they were left from the last glacial period.
Wow. I love your stuff, efflux.
Very nice, I really like your textures.
Very nice, detailed textures and scenes. The stones are cool.
No 2 is my favourite - imaginative stuff as usual. I always find your work inspirational it has a poetic quality to which I aspire in my own work.
Mick
This looks good! I like the rocks and details very much. The strata are very nice as well.
The next thing you have in mind is probably some more color-variation in surfacing?
Looking forward to see more of this!
Martin
Thanks.
I was happy with the textures but not on the stones. I fed ground textures to the stones and they were not ideal for the displacement but I'm trying to work on various things at once to keep moving ahead in terms of planetary scale. I'm trying to avoid getting precious about certain details at the expense of other things. This is not easy and very time consuming especially with the speed of my computer.
I also have a work flow that I'm now consistently using now and it is very important to the look I'm getting. Firstly I adjust exposure in Cinepaint to make sure the sky isn't blown out. This is crucial to the look of the sky in my more recent renders. This also makes the ground too dark but I export a 16 bit tif from Cinepaint into Lightzone and use it's relight algorithm. In Lightone I do all the other general level tweaking, colours etc. These two apps enable me to adjust the overall exposure without tricky post editing in a normal 2D app i.e. blending two differently exposed exrs. Then I take into Gimp and I've been using a plugin called Redux which sharpens and refocuses. It creates a blending layer for this operation which is quite cool. It's good because it doesn't sharpen all over. However I find sharpening difficult with TG2, at least on this planet because it is a bit noisy in places.
What detail levels and ant-aliasing do people here generally use? I've been using around 0.8 for detail and 6 for anti-aliasing. Less detail can create issues, especially with shadows and I don't really want to bump setting up much more. I had thought of increasing anti-aliasing to smooth things. I don't know if this will be effective. I still can not achieve as good a look as if I render big then downsize.
Also, I have a colouring issue. This has always been an issue between various apps. For example, colours in Lightzone are much more vibrant than the exported tif or jpg (I've tried the jpg - it's the same). So these two images are not as vibrant as they should be, at least that's what it looks like from my computer. It is of course easy enough to go back into Lightzone and compensate for this since Lightzone is non destructive real time editing. I didn't do this with these renders. Will do so next time. Lightzone also has a non destructive cloner. This is great for taking out any dodgy areas - render issues etc. The last image had a couple of minor pixel sized problems after I changed the exposure.
I always render at slightly higher settings, but that's mainly because I often have populations. With "terrain only" renders I often use about the same settings.
Sometimes a relatively low AA setting can give surprising results. I once or twice rendered something with detail 0.85 and AA3 and the grains and rough details came out very nicely compared to AA7-8 which smoothed it out too much.
I'm going to experiment further with that. Slight blurriness is OK, better than noisiness.
One thing I am very happy with is distant terrain look. Spike limit is your friend here - to create sweeping horizontal shapes rather than fractal looking spikes. This never looks good. Terrain is seldom spiky and that always look bad in the distance. Also, I have redirected part of the terrain here by it's own fractal or rather a duplicate of it's general shape. The more outcropped areas are another fractal that has not succumbed to the redirect due to being in areas where the lower redirected terrain has low value. The redirect goes in X,Y and Z. Going in one or two directions is cool except when you start moving around the planet.
Just another point. The redirection is actually everything (surfaces as well). I have lots of surface altitude and slope constraints and the redirect screws this regularity up very nicely.
Naoo,
Interesting point about the rocks. I had thought of that but didn't work it in. I have a surface texture with clumps of voronoi poking through. If I worked this in correctly it would look exactly like more rocks but in the ground rather than lying over the surface.
Very interesting Eflux. Any chance of a screen grab on how you connect up your redirect shader on surface layers?
Got to say I like both renders, and understand the difficulty in getting variation across a planet. Not sure I understand spike limit either. Is it like a bias on a sort of clamp function within the PF? ie rounds off the cuttoff?
The attached image just shows, to me anyway, the amount of variation of colour you get in just a small area....
Yes, it does exactly what is says. If the fractal is spiky it smoothes it out but you will have to increase displacement to compensate.
As for redirect. That is easy. No graph even needs to be shown. Plug the redirect in after the surface shaders.
Another no brainer to get plateaus, mesas, canyons or whatever is by using strata and outcrops. Just give it a very large hard layer depth and hard layer spacing. Another technique I love is to use smooth surface in compute terrain to calm down and screw up the strata regularity. Note - there is a bug here. Smooth surface kills your altitude constraints. You will have to add another compute terrain with no smooth surface enabled.
All these techniques to screw things around is what you want. It instantly creates a more natural unregulated look.
Hetzen,
Yes this a very difficult. In many environments you get all that huge complexity of colour yet it also has a flow through the terrain shapes. It is very difficult to achieve in TG2 or any app.
Thank you for explaining that. I'll have to give those techniques a go. Here's an even more impressive variation of colour a few clicks west of the above image. Got to love Bing.
That is a beautiful example.
I'm thinking of working with intersect underlying. I haven't used it yet but it should provide huge scope for more surface distributions.
What I want is a very regulated way of setting things up, then methods to screw that around but still follow a kind of relationship.
This planet is finished. After having explored a bit, I have decided that if I mess with it I will lose it's character. I'll move to a new planet.
Due to not concentrating on specific dedicated stone surfaces I have found quite a lot of exploded stones. I like them though. It seems to fit OK.
I suspect that photo is actually color enhanced but it doesn't matter. Colours are often distributed like this even if subtle.
I can't specify enough about the exr. TG2 is like photography. I always have a polarizing filter when I take landscape photos which helps but if you take a picture into even partially glowing atmosphere you will get a lot of white glow and won't see what is behind this unless you exposure compensate for it but then you lose ground detail. The exr is fantastic because in a render where you see a haze of white, the exposure correction of the exr will allow you to reduce that white glow so you can see the features behind it like distant hills etc. You start to get a look like carefully exposed and post edited photos but much much easier. The exr will contain all the detail without over exposed white outs.
Save all your renders as exr because even if you don't use it, one day you may go back and find a cool render that would be great to exposure correct. You'll kick yourself for not having the exr.
Another suggestion. Don't try to make your scene in TG2 correct exposure by adjusting colours, glow etc. This isn't how the real world is. You can make those corrections after with the exr.
Showing you this visually is the best way to explain.
The first image here is a standard output from TG2 (tif). Terrible but I don't care because I know how it is going to look. This is exactly how many landscape photos will come out, especially if you have no filter, unless you are in some extremely clear atmosphere environment but you will still get exposure problems even if less glowing haze. There is not a good way to properly adjust exposure on that file. The info is simply not there but I did not want to make the planet do this part i.e. adjust it in a false way. Atmospheres glow like this. Mist obscures detail etc. Photos will blow out or go too dark in areas if you try to compensate. You'd be amazed if you saw how poor some photos are that become awesome after correct adjustments. Multiple exposures are one way.
Now look at the second one. It is an exr exposure adjusted to get the sky back. OK, so I am going to real extremes here (eradicating totally any white blow out) but this was my intention for the look of this planet. I always do this - take everything to extreme then usually draw back a bit. You'll obviously see we now have very dark ground. This is exactly how a photo would come out if you exposure adjust for the sky. However, unlike a photo, the info is there in the exr. Now you could post edit all this in exr but I find that the best method is to then take this into Lightzone because Lightzone's relight algorithm is exactly designed to deal with this problem in a real photo but not even as successfully as it can deal with a TG2 output. After lightzone I get the finished result without tricky messing around in standard 2D bitmap editing software. Messing around with masks etc. There may be photoshop plugins to deal with this. I don't know. Dealing with the whole thing in exr would be best but what apps can do this? Do they have a specific effect for sorting it out non destructively like Lightzone?
I definitely think more people should explore what I am explaining here.
What we are trying to do in TG2 and in photography is get a picture of what our eyes see and go even further for nice effect like in these renders I have done. Our eyes can mask a lot of this problematic extreme differences in light. A camera can not and tif or bitmap outputs from TG2 can not either if we want something that looks like a photo or rather a photo that has been tweaked around exposure wise.
If you tweak things in TG2 to compensate you will lose realism because you will have to reduce these natural types of effect. By reducing mist and very specifically things like glow you will lose the sense of space and atmosphere.
TG2 renders often lack a sense of scale in my opinion. This is because TG2 lights the atmosphere in a very natural way but people do not utilize this fully. Mojoworld on the other hand does not, so although the output has aspects that are not as real looking there is a sense of vast scale without this tweaking necessary in exrs from TG2. However, the TG2 atmosphere is much better for this very reason.
You can of course adjust exposure inside TG2. I never do this because it involves messing around too much in TG2, except maybe a few tests to check sky. I want to render out where I can see things, especially ground which is where most of the work gets done. Also, even when you set the final render off you often want the exposure set to something where you can see things clearly - generally the ground in case something is not too good then you stop the render instead of seeing the problem when you later adjust exposure.
The northwest of vegas reminds me of many parts of the california desert. I was just out there taking a road trip to the colorado river and took many photographs of the high sedimentation from the shale and sandstone where the thermal erosion cuts into the strata rock layers and intense rain water that cuts into the rock as well during flood season creating the smoother washed out flat parts of the terrains. I think what is need is if you were to remain doing all of this in terragen then choose to highly erode using the alpine shader and use a rigid perlin for the high elevations of the terrain with some twisted strata as the cuts of the alpine shader should still be visible if it is done well. So basically you have rigid rock strata at the higher elevations that sometimes twists at certain angles but note that the strata blends more into the terrain more then other parts and the deep cut erosion is quite visible then it flattens out into the basins where there is river wash channels and high sediments. The colors are more acurate in some parts then other. You get dark browns and in the cuts there are medium light browns. Note that these browns are warmer dark browns with iron deposits present but most are well blended with the shale colors. The darker browns are present in the high terrains and the lighter more sandy browns are present in the sedimentary parts of the terrains. Stones are mostly medium grey with splashes of reds and the rest appear to be medium and light browns. Much of the time stones are clumped into groups in the higher terrains where they appear to be in small rows and more rounded groups. In some cases the terrains can be reddish in color in this area but there is more brown harmonies then anything else.
Here is what i think is the same area but from an orthographic perpective.
The greens should not be there but the browns and reddish browns along with the lighter browns are fairly accurate although there should be very light brown sandy parts along the washed out flat terrains.
The alpine fractal is cool but with my system I think I'll give that a miss. Once I get a new faster system then yes. There are various ways to blend different terrains which I've been working on. You can also use a duplicated version of the terrain fractal slightly tweaked to drive colours or blends. Not that I've tried this much but it's a theory that should work quite well. If you can make every aspect of the planet bear some relationship to every other aspect but distorted in natural ways then you get realistic results. For example when do you see strata that are perfectly horizontal? Some environments do have this but when they do bend it is usually in relationship to the terrain in some way.
Your theory should work quite well actually. What you could do is keep the same seeds for each terrains layer but just alter the sizes only as one example of blended flow. I think one way you could perhaps fake terrain erosive-like flow as well is use a strata/outcrops shader for example but have them cut into the perlin flavors in a warped vertical slant but then have warped and bended strata cut horizontally with less prominence. Stone shaders can then be clump blended in here and there using that warped voronoi idea just posted recently.
Yes, same seed but you need to keep the scale the same as well otherwise it goes out of sync. You can of course totally mess around with detail, spike limit etc. Even warp slightly, probably. Other slight variations such as clumping might be OK.
I've been investigating a kind of altitude blended terrain. You can't get altitude until after terrain is calculated but you do have the terrains value output to use as blend. My tests are still half baked though. I don't like posting things like this because half baked graphs end up causing confusion. Best to sort it out first.
What about using the surface layer features as well. Using the features in the effects tab. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with after more tests.
One issue is getting position. If you use the terrain fractal or a duplicate to also drive colour then the colour will be the shape of the fractal at the terrain's surface and not the planet's surface (which is where the terrain gets it's position from). This is useful in that there is some nice rough relationship seen but not absolute because terrain and colour are working from different position. I don't know if that can be changed. I don't see any way of doing that.
Never mind. I have that sorted. There are numerous interesting effects possible here It needs to be a new thread.
I had meant to do another render from this planet but got side tracked with this idea of relating fractals by using the same fractal for several purposes. In this render there is a general scale relationship between the various power fractals doing different jobs. You can kind of create cascading blends of various different octave level displacements in duplicated power fractals in a way that could not be achieved from one power fractals own controls. This is why it has a more lyrical flow.
This stuff will have to be another thread. I have so many ideas I can't possibly complete them all. I just had a bit of time this week and I can't carry on with this much longer.
This was another experiment. I might try bringing back my colour gradient hack.
Interesting results though. I can see adding a micro-scale series if rigid fractals and stones to eliminate the smooth fractal parts. This can go places. The color gradient hack sounds nifty.