Creating "Spires" and Heavy Displacement (Mojo-esque)

[Xynedia]

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[Xynedia]

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[efflux]

Xynedia.

Very artistic work with this technique.

I'm going to do all this again at some stage because better files need to be made as a base for this idea. For example, without a sparse convolution basis or a curve graph, we can't easily create a nice blend with the ground or have very smooth spires. There are ways though. I think maybe Volker used a function for smooth blend somewhere here. However, a file needs to be simply presented as a base for creating a spires planet rather than the various node techniques spread across lots of experimental files.

[efflux]

I'm actually currently working on another thing that relates to how you do something in TG2 that you can do in Mojo. It's not so easy to tell Mojo users how to do stuff due to TG2's completely different flow of data. Most functions in Mojoworld do not have different data types. Also, in Mojo position coordinates are not built into any component. You plug in a planet surface, displaced surface, undisplaced surface, altitude etc. This is a major problem in moving to TG2 because in Mojo you can effect the positions by treating the coordinates before they get to anything. It's not that TG2's system is much worse, there are some advantages. However, It makes TG2 harder to understand what you are doing but possibly easier from a basic level of just hooking up surface shaders.

Mojoworld also has VAST fractal power. More so than any other app out there multifold times over. It is hundreds of times better than TG2 in this respect. In fact I see no app coming close any time in the near future in terms of sheer fractal power. On the downside. Mojo's UI is an absolute nightmare. TG2's is massively better. Of course Mojo has fallen behind so now render times are impossibly long (no multi core). It's really dead as far as I'm concerned. TG2's renderer is superior.

Of course certain direction decisions in TG2s development are understandable. Ken Musgrave was more in a fantasy land about how Mojo was to be used and by who.

[Xynedia]

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[efflux]

I am actually more into creating alien type worlds but not always. What I am into is realistic effects and open ended easy to use nodes aid this because you find all sorts of interesting ways to do things. My latest TG2 planets are in fact much more realistic than anything I've done before but there is always some element which is not a typical earth like scenario. Due to technical headaches I've not even posted any images yet from what I've done recently.

This thread here demonstrates some of the problems of TG2. It is very straightforward to create what amounts to a basic mask to create towers in Mojoworld and control their distribution. This extends to all uses of this technique. It's not just for towers. This is not because Mojoworld is completely different from TG2 in underlying capability to do this but the apps are completely different in their node networks. Mojoworld is the absolute benchmark of how this should be in my opinion even if the actual UI around how you view nodes is terrible. It's very easy to decide where your textures are getting their positions from in Mojoworld. This amounts to ANY positioning including altitude and slope.

If you look at the work of the best Mojoworld artists, many of them veered towards much more realistic scenes later on because the craziness of huge displacements and mad pshychedelic colours wears off in novelty after a while. Even if you still do things like this, it always works better when there are some more realistic contrasts. Sadly Mojoworld fell short in the area of better tech to get more realistic renders so it doesn't look as real as TG2 but also sadly TG2 actually limits you in getting what are in effect more realistic results in Mojoworld in terms of shapes so there is no app that does the basics of what we need. We don't even need all the massive fractal power of Mojo if we have some more basic power of tweaking things in nodes.

[Xynedia]

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[efflux]

Xynedia,

Yes, Sine Warriors by Armands is the ultimate psychedelic type planet. In fact I think Armands has produced the best landscape work period out of any procedural landscape app. However, we don't have a sine basis in a fractal in TG2 to achieve the beautiful forms of Sine Warriors. You have to simply use a sine maths function. I'm not saying we particularly need a fractal for that above other features but it would be cool. What if the fractal in TG2 could just accept any input basis? There are other things you can do with sine fractal that does yield things that are "realistic".

However, imagine Sine Warriors but with TG2's renderer. It would look much more realistic. It's also cool to mix some totally out of this world tower into a photorealistic landscape.

Some of the renders you have posted here have a realistic lighting but don't have the beautiful fractal forms that are achievable in Mojoworld. This is the frustration as well as some technical limitations in TG2 like choosing position type wherever you want to get the extreme blends to be accurate.

I have a final solution in the works for this "Mojo-esque Spires" thing that I'll eventually post in a new thread.

[mogn]

Xynedia,

Yes, Sine Warriors by Armands is the ultimate psychedelic type planet. In fact I think Armands has produced the best landscape work period out of any procedural landscape app. However, we don't have a sine basis in a fractal in TG2 to achieve the beautiful forms of Sine Warriors. You have to simply use a sine maths function. I'm not saying we particularly need a fractal for that above other features but it would be cool. What if the fractal in TG2 could just accept any input basis? There are other things you can do with sine fractal that does yield things that are "realistic".

However, imagine Sine Warriors but with TG2's renderer. It would look much more realistic. It's also cool to mix some totally out of this world tower into a photorealistic landscape.

Some of the renders you have posted here have a realistic lighting but don't have the beautiful fractal forms that are achievable in Mojoworld. This is the frustration as well as some technical limitations in TG2 like choosing position type wherever you want to get the extreme blends to be accurate.

I have a final solution in the works for this "Mojo-esque Spires" thing that I'll eventually post in a new thread.

I don't know if your are aware of Chebyshev Polynomials, They are a set of polynomials, that divides that divides an angle range 0..2PI into n subranges of
sinus like subcurves (i.e changing between -1 and 1) with n zeroes.
The polynomials can be defined with a recursive formular:

T(0,x) = 1
T(1,x) = x
T(2,x) = 2*x^2-1
T(n+1, x) = 2*x*T(n,x) -T(n-1,x)

This sounds complicated, but there are also a trignomial equation for the polynomials:

T(n,x) = cos(n*arccos(x))

E.g. a perlin 3d scalar delivers a range of numbers between -1 and 1
If you compliment this you get a number between 0 and 2.
You multiplies this with PI so you get a number between 0 and 2*PI.
This what you get from applying an Arccos to an angle.
So multiply this by n and apply a cos function you get a sinelike subdivision of the areas of the perlin.
Since cos(0) = 1 n should be odd to get a soft subdivision.

[Dune]

Would you mind putting this into blues? I tried to fit it together, but just got fakestonelike bulges....

[mhaze]

It works, give me a moment and I'll post a tgc.  Ok attached, just add a compute terrain and play. Also added a tgd with 3 iterations.  Mick

[efflux]

May look into that but I need to keep the maths simple to understand. The only time I heard of the word was from Dmytry Lavrov's program:

http://dmytry.com/games/

Dmytry was the person who made the Volumetrics plugin for Mojoworld. Sadly not very easy to use due to UI integration. Open GL doesn't display a decent preview. Water has no transparency either. However, the plugin was simply awesome. Mojo's rendering speed isn't though hence pretty much defunct. Mojo is full is amazing stuff that is now more or less unusable. Terrible waste of in the end.

I'll have a planet set up for spires type scenario eventually. The main problem was providing blends so that the spires can exist without any problems in any environment with altitude/slope distribution. This requires blue node blends due to TG2's positioning limitations.

I'm not sure if I got a blue nodes slope distribution correct. It works but kind of before I even expected - I was expecting to have to do more than I did. That's the one part that will need checking but that may appear in other files I'm playing with before the spires one.

[efflux]

mogn.

You will understand this. I figured that I could get slope info by using a dot product between get normal and get normal in geometry. Then after that I tried using an arccos scalar. What we want is degrees - easy for most to edit. I'm not certain what outputs what exactly. Arccos into radian to degrees appears to actually work but I just threw this together. I need to go back to study it. You will likely know what the score is here.

[Dune]

Thanks, mhaze. Actually that's what I got (1 iteration, that is), but I thought it would yield some vertical sinelike bulges in 'spikes'. I was experimenting lately with an alternative for fake stones, hoping to find something without the hard edges that would bulge out of a flat area.

[mhaze]

Hi Dune I don't know if this is what you want want but it makes an interesting play. I've basically subtracted two iterations, added an extra perlin noise and a power fractal.