Terragen 2 Contest

[MeltingIce]

hey meltingice, I have a question...does the render HAS to be in 4:3 aspect ratio???....or it can be anything? and is the use of external 3d models allowed???

Nah the render can be any dimension you want, I guess 640x480 is more of a guideline.  Basically just make sure the render is big enough to see clearly.  External 3d models are allowed, I'm pretty sure I said that one in the rules 

[Will]

Man I need to finish mine before I go to russia so I don't miss the deadline!

Regards,

Will

[MeltingIce]

Man I need to finish mine before I go to russia so I don't miss the deadline!

Regards,

Will

In soviet Russia, terragen renders you!



Ok sorry i had to

[DiscoBall]

Hahahaha
That Family Guy episode was funny, VERY funny

[Will]

Haha, very nice. Да, в советской России Terragen отдает Вам! 

Man I really wish I could bring a russian to english translator with me I'm going to bucher their langauge.

Regards,

Will

[DeathTwister]

Hay guys,

  I am having a bit of a problem with my main planet.  I made mountains and put in a huge lake/ocean and then I am looking down on it and it looks like crap, as the water Ain't working at all from space, looks great in normal mode sucks out here in space.

I went down to the serface of the planet to see why it looked so bad and It looks fantastic and I am rendering a scene on the planet itself now, but I have not figured out how to get it to look like a KEWL Planet from space, that is a horse of another color.  Do we have to map it like we would in 3D Max? or do we create a world and have it seen the way it is? that would be my choice, but I haven't gotten even close yet I don't think.

  So my Questain is, any Tutorials on making Planets from space yet? I have not seen any, but that don't mean they have not been done???

Need Tut bad here for me guys I kinda ran into a brick wall.  Thanks for the help you guys I know someone has the answer /smiles....

DeathTwister

[Oshyan]

DT, if you can be more specific, or better yet post an example of the problem you're having, we'd be much better able to help you. It's hard to give much advice when the only description of the problem is "aint working" and "sucks".

- Oshyan

[Will]

If I ever finsih my tutorial on planets there will be one. but here s breif explination on two ways to do it.

1: Use a power fractle and make the size really really big then ajust and add other nodes till your content.
2: use the planet shader and edit those setting till your content.

Now on to the atmo, dpeending on what you want for a look you can play with the atmosphere settings which are pretty self discriptive the clouds on the other hand can be a bit tricky (espacshally if your far away from the planet or at a weird angle) for more realistic cloud systems go into the cloud's fractel and make the setting really large (just move the feature scale alll th way over and make the lead in scale somthing simular)


I can go into much more detial in any of the areas if you want.

Regards,

Will

[DeathTwister]

Hi again guys,

  Haha I was planning on posting some shots, but I wanted to finish some renders first, then do a couple of low polly renders, but this will do for a start I gues /winks.
OK, What I want in a planet should look more like what Rich2 did when he uploaded yesterday/today's image he did with the planet in the sky in his background that he posted on renderosity.com:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1420944

Only I want to have it a bit different of course.  But looks like he is on to what I am after I think. My problem is all I have been able to do is get the dang planet to look like:



As you can see my planet sucks big time and I tried to get the terrain to get bigger, but I have to go through it again and see what you were talking about Will.  I went down to planet serface with the camera and had a great scene already done hahaha, and am rendering that atm as a side trip since it came out nice, but it's not even close as to the actual Orbital render qas a planet in space right now.

Maybe we can get Rich2 to share his secret with his planet some?? /smiles, and I hope he is watching this post by the way haha. And no matter what I did to the water, I could not get it to show at all, not to mention have it go around the planet as a world body of water and have Island and landmasses showing like if we really were up in space.

Does that help some guys on what I am trying to achive?  The rest is secret until the voting /winks, all the goodies I will bring in after I get the fracking basics wired hahahaha. I would imagine that we are all in wanting this info as a rule of thumb?  This has only been the second time I kinda got stumped here with mapping so far, the rest is pretty simple in some ways, but this one got me good.

DeathTwister

[Will]

how are trying to get the water by the way? If its using the ocean thing on the planet shader you need to crank it way up to raise the water lvl. and did you use a alpine fractle for your terrien?

Regards,

Will

[child@play]

looks like a voronoi-terrain, since i'm by no means familiar with that (and funtions in general ), i can only guess that you'd need to adjust the scale constants. to get water to a certain level on planet-scale you could try feeding the water into a distribution shader, dunno if that works out tho. that's why i have no water in my image, hehehe

[Will]

you know more about the functins them me man I just assumed becuase I was playing around with one earlyer and it kinda looked like that.

Regards,

Will

[Oshyan]

I think that looks kind of cool actually DT.

I would avoid use of the Planetary Shader at this time. It's just not very flexible.

Changing the scale of your terrain depends heavily on what you're using to create it. Someone else mentioned voronoi, which looks like it might be right. It might also be an Alpine Shader. Either way you need to increase the Lead-in Scale and Feature Scale proportionally. Use really large values for both and you'll get much larger overall terrain features. However I recommend that rather than adjusting your base terrain function you instead add a Blend Shader (a Power Fractal will do) with those larger feature and lead-in scales and this will help break up your terrain a bit more with large-scale features while also preserving the smaller mountains and whatnot.

To create an ocean you should use a Water or Reflective shader, usually confined by altitude to lower areas. Don't try using the "lake" object - as its name implies it's not for global bodies of water, only for confined lakes. The best way to do this and achieve color as well is just to use a Surface Layer, restrict by altitude with its built-in settings, and set its color to a dark blue or black. Then add the Water or Reflective Shader as a child of this layer.

Of course this means you need large, low-lying areas across your entire planet to get proper water distribution using height restriction. You can use the "Adjust Coastline" settings in the Displacement tab of a Power Fractal to create these. Enable Adjust Coastline and then tinker with the Coastline Altitude and Smoothing to get the result you want. Then when you apply a reflective or water texture by height as above you'll be able to restrict it to these low areas you've created.

That should give you some good directions to go in...

- Oshyan

[Will]

just a word about the alpine shader on a plantary scale: it distorts, or at least for me it did.

Regards,

Will

[DeathTwister]

Hehe yup,

  that veronie was the alpine fractal /smiles.... Glad you liked it Oshyan I sure didn't  but dat OK, ya'll gave me a direction to go in now and I hadn't thought about the water/lake shader as was trying to get it to go around the dang planet as a very big lake hahaha /winks. (A light goes on in the madman artists head)

  So I have a direction to go now and think I can piece it toegther more.  I still want to talk with Rich2 as well on what he did, as I thought whathe did was awesome, and then get on with it.  KK guys thanks for the insght and lets see what I can come up with. Ya'll gave me the  ideas I needed.

DT