Planetside Software Forums

General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: balteus on September 14, 2018, 08:04:53 AM

Title: Creating a planet
Post by: balteus on September 14, 2018, 08:04:53 AM
Hi, I am a new user of Terragen and have been exploring it for sometime with good results. I have a project for which I need to create a realistic planet something along the lines of the attached image. What would be the best method to approach this?
I have a few initial ideas.
1) I need specific shape of continents, well more like one large land mass, which I am planning to achieve through an camera projected image mask.
2) I need to specify regions of mountains and deserts and so on. Maybe I can use camera projected masks again for this?
3) Fractals to create surface details within the masks but I am not able to achieve sharp details like the ones in the attached image.

I also need to make the continent move and split up at some point and maybe join back again. Can I just animate the camera I use to project the masks with or using a sequence of images would be better?

The final shot will be similar to the attached image so I need a lot of detail in the terrain which is the main focus.

Any help is welcome.
Title: Re: Creating a planet
Post by: Dune on September 14, 2018, 10:40:42 AM
Welcome balteus. Have you tried the search function yet? There are quite a few threads and working files available to study.
Title: Re: Creating a planet
Post by: WAS on September 14, 2018, 10:55:58 AM
Dune, and me have just recently posted continental setups in the file  sharing section. Plenty of others. I am also willing to help further down the road with said details. One thing you might look into is the warp shader with the redirect or vector displacement shaders.

https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,24734.0.html

https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,24529.0.html
Title: Re: Creating a planet
Post by: Oshyan on September 16, 2018, 05:31:39 PM
There are also some good planet project files for purchase at NWDA: http://www.store.nwdastore.com/planets

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Creating a planet
Post by: balteus on September 17, 2018, 07:40:04 AM
Thanks for the suggestions.
Title: Re: Creating a planet
Post by: balteus on September 19, 2018, 02:09:24 PM
This is my progress so far. I do not understand why I have those creases in the terrain, there is a long way to go.

I have a couple of questions.

1)How can I mask out certain areas in the terrain. Lets say I need to dedicate regions of mountains and some for deserts. I am using some fractals to create the terrain so far, but I need a particular region to add some details what method can I do that with?
2)Also how can I get more details in the clouds?

Thanks for the help.
Title: Re: Creating a planet
Post by: WAS on September 19, 2018, 03:24:37 PM
For 1) take a look at the Painted Shader. You can paint areas and use the shader as a mask. For 2) you'll want to play possibly play with the feature scale and smallest scale. Additionally you could use a global cloud map from NASA to create global coverage of all types of clouds. It works pretty well as a image map set to spherical or projection by camera.
, and applied as a v2 clouds noise.
Title: Re: Creating a planet
Post by: Dune on September 20, 2018, 02:02:34 AM
If you need specific areas, the painted shader, or a map drawn as spherical map is the answer. If it may be random, I'd say use another power fractal and 'submask' certain areas. May take trying some seeds to get the right distribution though.
The folds are likely caused by the high density variation in the fractal and its warp.