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

[efflux]

That's really cool Volker. This is looking very much like a sparse convolution tower which is what we want.

[j meyer]

Very inspiring!(pun intended)

[Mr_Lamppost]

This thread has been very helpful.

I had been experimenting with spikes a couple of weeks ago, I arrived at them by a slightly different method but gave up because of the cut off tops. I was working with very tall slander spears so there are quite a few of these  I didn't know about the crop solution.

I was using powers and getting results similar to volker's double squared example. 

I have now worked through all the versions posted here and am now off to resurrect my version and see if I can adapt the masking technique to work with my spikes. 

If I can get it to work I will add an example here.  There may be some use in having a slightly different approach to the problem. 

I can see that that little group of nodes that returns a clamped value back to a 0-1 spread is going to become a must have clip.   

[efflux]

Going further and so are render times so not top quality but it's only a test:



The sky is a tweak from the thread by cyphyr about voronoi skies.

The trouble with this one is that huge detail levels are required for any overlying displacements on those grossly displaced shrooms but without any displacement and just colour, it would be fine. The smaller surfaces on the shrooms are now also clamped perlin but you can't see that very well.


These renders often fail in places but can be patched. I'm pushing this to limits that I will probably never use in a planet.

This next render is the next stage if we really want to see how mad this can be. It pays off in better techniques for less extreme effects as well. We need to use positive and negative displacement, specifically in this case pulled from the altitude driving function and with much fatter spires. Then absurd extremes are possible:

[efflux]

The more we can negatively displace the better in these circumstance because then the renderer won't miss bits and we won't have such large geometry details showing up in the render.

[efflux]

The reason I'm tweaking this to the best I can get is because when I come to do bigger renders the renderer is probably going to screw up more so the more extreme I can get it the better. l'm expecting to have to substantially tame it down.

[Volker Harun]

Stunning renders! I am getting jealous again 

First image attached is from the previous scene, showing the blending of a spire with a terrain node after the spires' function.

Second image is the one that I started yesterday, using the redirect shader. Base terrain is the Towerbuster-Terrain, that I shared some time ago.

Volker

[cyphyr]

Out of this world! I'm too much in the world of Constable atm but I'll really have to get into this abstract stuff you guys are creating here, very inspiring.
Richard

[Volker Harun]

Well, just for entertainment, the attached image shows the dreamland of frustrated women - women that dream of electric devices ,-) 

[rcallicotte]

efflux and volker, this is cool stuff.  Thanks for showing your experimentation.

[efflux]

I love those renders Volker. I can't wait to see how you will develop this further into bigger pictures. They are Volker style which is interesting because I'm rendering out a larger picture now with the same technique yet totally different style of landscape. Your work often reminds me of Slav's (A very cool Mojoworld artist). He used Mojoworld to get realistic looking landscapes that always had a surreal touch. Something TG2 will excell at. This is the part I love. You can use TG2's beautiful surfacing, atmo GI etc to get very realistic results which makes the more surreal parts look totally convincing rather than CG looking.

[efflux]

This picture is where I went too far but I wanted to hammer the TG2 renderer to extreme. It's reduced in size by 50%. I can't remember the exact quality settings but they were not extremely high and it still failed. The bigger the render with the higher the quality then the more likelyhood of failure which is why I tried to tweak this technique to maximum power:



You can see there was no way of fixing this one but I'm surprised it even went this far. The displacements are giant voronoi. I also used a colour gradient and sine functions. My currently running bigger render is an extremely tamed version of this world but with some cool atmospherics to give that "real" touch.

[Volker Harun]

Well, I like your style more - as it is beyond my capabilities ... yet ... so everybody has a goal ,-)

[efflux]

Your capabilities are perfectly advanced as far as I can see, Volker. You have a clear style. I'm into the mood of the thing more so I tend to chop and change styles. You have a bit more maths know how than I do. I'm only good when I can visualize the maths as geometry. The maths is a big benefit but both that and some artistic imagination are equally important. You can do stuff without the maths or function tweaking but I think it limits you.

The wierd pshyedelic things going on in that image are actually very simple. I'll go into it a bit when this other render finishes. I'd love to have sine as a basis function in a fractal along with voronoi then we could really get going. Voronoi fractals are capable of beautiful shapes.

The spires and big displacements are not a render killer but I have some atmo things going on in my latest render so it may be some time

[Volker Harun]

Well, I graduaded in maths, but this is 17 years ago and left is just luck ,-)
Like most things I do in TG2 - the start off is luck and then analyzing the results