grainy coasts

Started by ProjectX, May 02, 2007, 03:32:49 AM

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ProjectX

You must be sick of my postings by now, lol.

This has probably been mentioned before, because it's quite obvious, but if you do a far off shot (mine was done 1k away) looking down at water and land intersection, the point of intersection goes all grainy. I haven't been able to make it go away by increasing detail, the render below was done at detail 1 (I usually can't even render at that level).

rcallicotte

Sure seems like this problem is associated with something we've seen before...have you tried without the cache acceleration in the renderer?
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Oshyan

Calico, the Acceleration Cache only affects clouds.

ProjectX, I presume you were using a Water object (Lake)? This problem seems to occur because of z(depth)-determination issues between the infinitely thin water plane and the terrain. It's an issue that should be resolved before the final product ships. For now a workaround is to use water as a surface shader on your actual terrain rather than as a separate object (Lake object). You would of course need to flatten the terrain at your water level height for the proper effect. You may find that working with the "Coastline" settings in the Power Fractal Displacement tab can help, or if you're working with an imported terrain you should be able to flatten below a certain altitude in a 3rd party terrain editor.

- Oshyan

ProjectX

Thanks oshyan, good idea.

I'm lucky in that when I was making my procedural canyons shader I needed a way of flattening the terrain at a certain altitude, so I won't have any problems there, then all I got to do is displace that altitude with some wave shapes. Cheers!