Planetside Software Forums

ok here is an odd topic for discussion - but lately as i either look at nature photos or even nature itself (back yard, park) i find myself wondering what shaders or how many surface layers I would need to achieve that effect. and while i find this preoccupation rather interesting.  I was wondering if others sometimes find themselves doing this.

david

Yes

And as a mountaineer I always look up at hills and plan routes up 'em or when I did a lot of canoeing look down into rivers when crossing bridges, and plan routes, still do infact.

Mick

I have been seeing fractals in nearly everything since IMandelbrot on the Amiga in 1989. My dad was a land surveyor. They are obsessed with accurate measuring. I took Civil Tech in college. There was a program for DOS called Cogo. I added a fractal algorithm to the calculation which compensated for the stretch of steel tape by temperature. He was quite skeptical and never used it.
Since then other people have done this and more to produce more accurate maps.

But back to the topic. Yes, I look at my surroundings and images and start thinking 'how'?

Every time I look up. To capture the near infinite level of detail of the real world you'd need to think pretty methodically. I'm a programmer by trade so I tend to split things into categories;
air, land and sea breaks down into
clouds, atmosphere, sun, celestial bodies
flats, hills and rocks and
oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds
then I'd break these down even further.

But that's only if you want to put a lot of effort into it, which if you want to recreate nature you'd have to. Planning ahead saves a lot of hair loss and constipation in the future :D

Oh yes.  ;D

And before TG I used to think in terms of POV-Ray.   Defining colours as RGB triplets amd the like.

What stopped me in my tracks is when I caught myself thinking that a real cloud didn't have enough samples.   ::)

Yeah, just snapped this, (I do this all the time for reference), think the nature gods went a bit ott on the warp shader
richard :)

---

I've done that to Calico!

Same.  Often while driving or walking and I notice something cool, I start to consider how to do it with terragen.

wish i had a better camera then my cell phone ;) then id prob take a lot more pictures of things that intrest me for later attempts with terragen :P

I stopped doing this - it was a promise to my lovely wife. There is work, there is terragen and there is family.

But yes ... I was heavily that way ;)

I love being single. If I find a girl who will put up with me, she better be as addicted to computers as I am. There are not many women who put up with me for long. ::)

my girlfriend thinks im insane when i start to stare off at various things and wonder how to do them in terragen, but she loves me all the same :P

I spent an afternoon watching ants swarm a cup that had a milkshake in it. My ex was thinking about calling the men in white coats. It was cool. One ant type found it first, then a different species came along. They had a battle. A beetle was attacked. She was too busy sunbathing, and got mad when I started talking about it on the way home.

watch it on animal planet and its fine, watch it in real life your crazy... such a horrible world we live in :P

whats wrong with a lil real life entertainment while out in the sun.

I don't need to travel on busy roads anymore; just create my own landscape to wander in. But seriously, this crazyness does let you really look at things in nature. Not just glance uninterestedly, as many people do (if they look at all). You see a thousand times more than 'ordinary' people.
I find myself thinking TG when outside, fractals, warps, colours, displacements, whatever. When heavy on photography, I used to look at everything through 'compositionary eyes', very tiring.

Real-life insects make fun studies.  Good, too. 

No question about it, what we know impacts very much what we see and how we see it.  I was shocked 30 years ago when I was learning programming and the instructor talked about inputs -> process -> output, and my brain flashed and said to myself "that is the way the world works".  Yet prior to that brain-flash, things seemed more random, rather than a collection of processes (broken though they may be) that interact.   The other day I was riding my motorcycle to work and I was approaching a curve on the road with dark shade and trees overhanging the spot.  It looked like a dark square lacking proper resolution and my brain screamed "bucket render error".   

Quote from: pfrancke on August 20, 2009, 06:07:01 PM
"bucket render error".   

LOLRMAO

"Normal" people are missing out on so much. If they don't like it when you see this stuff, well, too bad. You shouldn't try to stick to the boundaries of their world...

Which is better:

YourWorld U TheirWorld

or

YourWorld /\ TheirWorld

Matt

The man himself has spoken - thanks so much for the comments. In a strange way inspite of the fact that I am also an artist - i do look at things diferently and with a bit more interest. I ask why a lot more and try to find the answers. this program definitely keeps the mind muscle working

david

We prefer the U , but be careful to focus on /\ in conversations with normal people, otherwise they start to look at you funny ;D


Like: "Whoaa have you seen this bucket error in that bush over there?"

"Now during a solar eclipse, never look directly at the sun without first using your supersample prepass" :D

I always notice the antialiasing on the treelines along the sky!
I get my best TG ideas when I'm away from the computer. I could be anywhere, work, bus, toilet, bed, etc... and I've already got the thing built in my own internal node network! ;)

I work in a boarding school in the hills outside Perth in Scotland, I don't need to go far for inspiration. A land of pure green and nature. I do get some funny looks and comments from my colleagues when they say, 'What're ye daein snapping shots of clouds and water, mud and trees? Etc'. These people know, and care, nothing for real-life! :D :D

I'm near jealous, I am. 

Quote from: dandelO on August 22, 2009, 10:09:36 AM
...in the hills outside Perth in Scotland, I don't need to go far for inspiration. A land of pure green and nature.

A friend of mine was playing Ultima III on a Commodore 64. Beautiful hills and plains. Maybe Volker could make an 8 bit look render using functions. His work with them has been quite amazing.
I get a lot of inspiration looking at the NWDA gallery. Not so much copying what they have done, but trying to figure out how.

I agree I go to nwda and droll over the pictures. I also want to figure out how to do some of the things they have accomplished. for me the next challenge is working with dirt. I know this has been done by Mr Archer, but part of the challenge of this program and why it holds my interest over the years. is the fact that is is just so deep. the permutations are endless. the only drawback is waiting for a test render to finish

david

I just loved to play the Avatar ... but mostly Ultima VI.
How about a contest ... only using CGA colours ;)

love the contest idea - how  about we define a scene as having only a certain amount of layers, with each layer restricted as to power fractal and child layers. ie back yard

  surface ----dirt
                           child layer - dead grass
    grass layer ------live grass

etc

folder

Most of my stuff uses only simple layers. Rock, sand, grass, water, snow. I use power fractals for color, and often use the same power fractal for displacements. Could be fun to see how others do this.
SHould the tgd be required to be posted with the image?

Well i guess if we wanted to see everyone's approach from a common startline, but really just the use of the concept should be enough

david