Planet within a planet, Swirling clouds.Need help!! Sequence render=white

[Themodman101]

Hello guys, here's the thing.. I have about 6 months to create a semi-photo realistic scene for my Demo Reel for school, and I want to use Terragen 2 to get the scenes done and composite in things with Nuke.

The scene is Alpine mountains similar to Alps, there is a large semi circular crater type depression in-between the sets of mountains. In this crater type hole I want to add another planet with an Atmosphere and clouds ect. And I want to have clouds swirling around the planet.

My T2 Package is Deep edition, so I have animation tools i think...

What I want to know is if the swirling clouds are possible, and whether or not I will need an animated texture mask, or if there is some way to do it proceduraly

Okay one last request. I have this shot here:



What I would like to know is how I can get just this area too lose those jagged things caused by the Rockface displacements I have setup.


Thanks for any answers or links in advance, I used the search function but all i did was come up with making cumulous clouds tutorials and stuff.

PS: also, is Blending using shaders with the Strata and outcroppings shader not supported anymore? no matter what I do I cant get a visual result.

[dandelO]

In your compute terrain node, you'll find a setting for smooth surface, with a setting for 'patch size'.
If you raise the patch size according to the size of the areas you'd like to smooth out(larger than the smallest scale of your terrain, more than likely by the looks of things), then your snow surface 'smoothing' parameter should be a bit more useful to you...

Alternatively, and much easier to deal with, just raise the 'smallest scale' of your terrain fractal so you don't have those little bumps to deal with at all. I can't see much need for the smallest scale to be so small from the image you posted.
If you still require small scale features on sloped areas where snow doesn't appear, try adding them afterwards with the invert of the snow shader slope constraints as their blender.

As for the strata shader blending question, are you sure the blend shaders are applying colour? That's where the blend shader takes its blending information from. Maybe you're using a fractal that isn't applying colour(I don't know, this seems a bit obvious but it's all I can think of without seeing a file).

[dandelO]

Sorry, missed out the main question.

You can make a planet any size. Right click where you want it to be and then copy those coord's to the position fields. Inside your new planet node you'll find a massively scaled fractal which will displace the planet surface ridiculously high if you've shrunk the planet radius. Just replace it or edit it to fit the new planet's size.

Adding cloud layers to planets is easy because the layer takes its height from that planet's normal. If I make a 1m radius planet node, adding a cloud layer with a height of(say) 5m will make a cloud with the centre of the layer 5m above the surface spherically. Setting the altitude of the cloud to '0' will always make the cloud layer's centre be at the surface of the planet, this extends outwards from that point in both directions.
So, a 1m radius planet, with a cloud set at '0m' altitude/1m depth, will make a cloud that starts at the surface, extending 0.5m beneath and above it.

To make a swirling effect, probably easiest to just animate the 'warp amount' in the density fractal. Don't overdo the warp, for 30 seconds of animation, you'll only want(likely) '0.1' to '0.25' difference in the warp amount from start to finish, otherwise you'll probably stretch the density fractal out of all proportion.

[Themodman101]

Your a fricken genius mate! thanks a million times a Trillion times Infinity! Plus a shader Array...

As far as the Blend shader, yes its color.. I tried using the color shader with both High and Low colors setup... its a no go :/
 

[dandelO]

All you should need is high colour checked in a power fractal to use it as a blend shader, unless you *don't need there to be areas with zero coverage of the shader your blending.
Generally in TG, black=no coverage/white=full coverage, so adding any colour, low or high, that isn't black will mean *some coverage in that area, coverage according to the brightness of the colour. Blend shaders should generally be b+w. Adding colour hues to blend shaders just confuses things(I don't think you're talking about that type of adding colour, though).

I have never actually used the strata and outcrops shader for anything, other than twiddling knobs here and there experimenting to see what they do, maybe I should.
Hopefully some of the strata-masters can help you with that part.

[Themodman101]

Okay, I got it too work... Turns out that I just needed to restart T2..

One question, will warping the Clouds work for 360 around the planet? like a eye of a hurricane? thats what I'm going for..

You know whats awesome about this? The university I go to has a 1000Ghz Render farm that's free for students.. That's why I figure I can achieve a good result. Even if the render time on my PC's is 3 hours per frame.

I wanna try to get a semi photo realistic look to it, Is there any alternate lighting setups that you would suggest for a more realistic lighting control?


Thanks again for all the help mate! your a life saver! You get a name in the credits my friend

EDIT:

Okay, ive hit a bit of a snag... Is it possible to import another tgd into a scene? Cause i have a planet that was done by someone else that I want to try and import into the scene... Im a little scared cause I dont know if I will have time to make one from scratch since they take so much work to get looking right.. :/

Oh shoot! will i have to change all of the scales? or will I be able to auto scale everything together so that it doesnt freak out when I downsize the planet to something small



Okay this is what I have so far:



Okay now I still couldn't get the clouds to swirl around the planet :/ and the atmosphere wont show up on the planet 2.. However I dont see anywhere to define the Atmoshpere's center. Otherwise I would give the same center as the planet2. is there any way to fix the atmosphere?

[dandelO]

Unplug the atmosphere/cloud node connection from the internal network of the small planet manually, then replug it again. I think that should reset the atmosphere position to match your planet again. You'll then want to check the 'height control' tab of the atmosphere to limit its extent around the planet.

You could probably insert a transform shader into the planet to rescale all the shaders attached to its input and use the transform shader as the planet's new surface shader. i.e. If you make the size of your planet ten times smaller, just type 0.1 in all 'scale' fields of the transform shader to match it.
Only use the 'shader' input of the transform node, leave its 'input' empty.

[Themodman101]

Awesome!! okay I cant get the atmosphere to work still, though the small planet in the centers scale is 400 Meters across.. Not really big. hehe I'll keep messing with it... I think im gonna upload the scene if I cant get it to work right :/

Thanks for the info on the transform shader, its like the one in Nuke.

EDIT: Haha, never mind.. I had to jack up the Haze and bluesky density up to like 100 each to be able to see it. :?

EDIT AGAIN:

Okay so the only issue I still have now is the Swirling clouds :/

[dandelO]

I didn't include the BG heightfield. The fractal warps and the transform shaders are animated. A bit extreme but...

[attachimg=#]

[Mandrake]

Well, you passed the course d. No you didn't get a d, d. I'll give you an A!!

[Themodman101]

Awesome!! Okay, What about the clouds around the small planet though? that's what I was asking about ultimately.. Although that answers another question of mine. hehe..



Thats what I wanna try to achieve, I just don't know exactly how to go about it. Maybe a redirect?

[dandelO]

The clouds are also spinning, moving and warping in the .tgd. Just delete the transform node from the surface shader input to see it better. I made it a bit more confusing than I needed to by rotating the planet shaders too.

[Themodman101]

OOoooh duuuuh... lol I feel stupid! my bad mate.... thanks

EDIT:

Oh man, All my renders are coming out plain white :-0  It says that access is denied but I have full access, and Im using an Admin account.
Also I have UAC disabled.

My system

Windows 7 Ultimate

I7-930 OC to 4GHz
6GB of DDR3 1600Mhz OCed to 1700
GPU= 2X 580GTX

[TheBlackHole]

You could also use an image map shader and rotate it around the Y axis. The clip file I've attached might help. You'll need to animate it yourself since I'm using the free version. The animation was made by rendering the scene, rotating the shader 45 degrees, rendering it again, rotating it another 45 degrees, render, rinse, repeat.

[Themodman101]

Yeah that's what I want for the most part, my renders from sequence are still coming out pure white! I have to render when I have access to the Render farm tonight!! please help!!

The only thing that it says is that access may be denied or something, but thats not possible because I have all security features turned off and am an Admin with UAC off.

Any idea's?


EDIT:

Now I'm having an issue with the Image shader... shoot nothings working lol..

heres what it looks like when I render the test:



The image I'm using is a 2046x2046 Jpeg at Max quality