New discovery for me :)
I just populated a displaced plane.
There's no active planet in this scene, although it is there so there's an atmosphere :)
I'm thinking Bryce style renders with infinite planes ...
or possibly a much fast er way of rendering scenes where the horizon is obscured by the landscape.
Richard
it looks like a TG 0.9 render within TG2......or with TG2 features.. ;D
I think dandelO is really into displaced planes, so he may have some insights to share?
Yup, I've done this before, aswell. I do like to use planes, for quite the reasons already stated. You can attach most displacement shaders to a plane and use its data as the 'terrain' data.
An alpine fractal doesn't work, however.
To really speed up an alpine scape, use the heightfield shader's 'shader' parameter to generate your terrain from an alpine fractal, then simply save the .ter and use that. You'll be surprised at how much this speeds things up. As long as you don't need a massively distant shot, of course. And you can re-use the same terrain over and over, too. :)
Great tip. I have been using extreme fractal settings instead of the alpine.