sphere...?...!

[child@play]

inspired by volker's and efflux's impressive work with functions i tried following them at least a bit and gave it a go. usually i tend to render realistic scenes, but i'm heavily experimenting right now, and this shot qualified for a higher resolution render.
the scene setup is stolen from volker's mojo.tgd ( hope you won't mind  ), slightly modified clouds and the spires and added a sphere, which is a pain when it comes to render-times. this crop render took 1 hour 5 minutes at 0.175 quality, 3AA, GI 1/1, 500*375. so maybe i'll remove the sphere and mess around with the terrain some more, i'm afraid of the final render time, hehe, and it looks very much like it's broken anyways.


well...

[rcallicotte]

This is still pretty cool.  I wonder if a bigger version would be fine.

[efflux]

I like the way you seem to be high up and see the towers below in the distance but I think you should make the sphere smaller in the scene and try to get it's surface a bit better but I know you're experimenting with these techniques. 1 hour 5 minutes is not really long but I would never go above 1 as my detail quality and in fact my max is 0.8 for final renders. My max AA is usually 6. Sometimes I use 5 but often I render big size and they are downsized anyway. I'm into renders now that are creeping into 30 - 40 hours. 3000 x 1240 going at the moment. However if you think about it, considering the size, quality settings, the GI and volumetric clouds then that's not bad. The renderer wastes a lot of time rendering things that aren't in the final picture. This will eventually be optimized then we'll see a big difference. Your render could have been much quicker though. Test out the settings a lot. You'll get to know how high it needs to be. When you start rendering big, only a slight change can add or remove hours to the render time. The problem with these landscape apps is that they have to render colossal amounts of information and we work blind a bit. When you get used to this and the app then you will know what certain things do before you even see them rendered.

[child@play]

thanks for your input. the size of the sphere is a bit of a problem and needs to be tweaked. in fact it has been a lot smaller before i used a combination of merge shaders. so i'll try reducing its size and cut down the displacement a bit.
i guess 'surface a bit better' refers to the sphere's towers reaching towards the ground, i noticed that too. seems to be caused by cropping the render, because parts in the middle of the sphere looked the same until the above layers where rendered.

maybe render times will be shorter after cutting down the displacement, i still think 1 hour is pretty long, had comparable times with other wips where i used more than 2 cloud layers.

i'll try other quality settings too before i change the scene, maybe that'll help against the cut off parts

cheerio...

[efflux]

The displacements on the sphere are very broken. You need to try to fine tune it to be smooth. At present I can't see how you've done them but I know the techniques being discussed e.g. about the voronoi are difficult not so much as to how to plug nodes in but to know what scales, sizes etc to give everything to keep things smooth. Every node controlling every other node in exactly the way you want. Your displacements are broken for what could be many reasons. Too big a displacement amplitude or could be colour roughness or feature scales wrong etc etc. If you're in pure blue function nodes then it gets pretty difficult. It's quite complex, how to get all that flowing together smoothly. For example if you want a large smooth displacement and it has a high displacement roughness setting then it will be very rough, obviously. Or maybe you are using colour to drive the displacement. In which case your colour roughness would need to be set low. If your feature scale is too small and you have big displacements it will be all broken. I suspect this is what is happening in your picture. Planetside have not yet fully explained how the data all flows in nodes. For most users this has been a long haul of trial and error and it's not even easily described unless you have experience in other apps. Colours, scalars, vectors etc. It takes time to get around all this. There are no quick fixes or easy answers. The discussions like the voronoi thread are a work in progress. Discovering what can be done. It will take some time before these things get refined. Sometimes the work may go backwards before going forwards (something I expect to see) but it will progress to great heights I am sure of it.

[child@play]

render took 1 hour 5 minutes at 1.75 quality, 3AA, GI 1/1, 500*375.

narf, hehe, i should triple check before i post. quality was 0.175 of course, just using the free version.

efflux, while lying in bed ( still have the best ideas there  ) i thought about that problem a bit, i think i simply forgot to scale down a displacement that goes into one of the merge shaders, i'm mixing terrain displacement and cloud displacement for the sphere's surface.

i'll give it a try


edit: on a side note: amazing how detailed the sphere's displacement looks at 0.175 quality, imho
edit: render is a LOT faster now, the sphere shrunk again and it's still looking like it is on the pic. i'll try using a transform shader to  get more control of the displacement

[child@play]

a little update. the sphere is back to 'normal', and so are render times. this is another low quality shot which took 25 minutes to render (lower resolution, 0.2 quality, 2AA), so i guess i'll do a render @ 800X600 tonight.

[rcallicotte]

Yeah...another render with more light to see the details on that blowfish.  Good job!

[child@play]

moved from efflux thread, too many images 

not working on the sphere right now, just experimenting a bit with the technique described in efflux 'planet pig' thread.
guess i won't have the time to do any high quality render soon, too much stuff to learn 

[sjefen]

That is fantastic.
Can it be used as fur maybe?

[child@play]

definetly, just make it black and yellow 

got a nice stone surface comming up next

[moodflow]

Wow, can't wait to see this nice rock surface.  Keep up the great work.

[dhavalmistry]

did you use image map?? or functions??

[efflux]

Wow, looks liked you've susses this child@play. Yes, this is one mother to explore. Keep going. This is beginning to show exactly the results we are going to be able to achieve.

[efflux]

You're image called masons is the one that will lead to great effects. I'm going to play with the distorting fractal to understand how to set it more finely. Results will be over on the Pig thread (should be separate thread really but It'll need to stay there for the time being). What we want is colour following those twisted strata.

My setup is slightly different because I'm concentrating on lateral displacements so I have a compute normal after the displacement shader.