New Planet

[efflux]

Naoo,

Interesting point about the rocks. I had thought of that but didn't work it in. I have a surface texture with clumps of voronoi poking through. If I worked this in correctly it would look exactly like more rocks but in the ground rather than lying over the surface.

[Hetzen]

Very interesting Eflux. Any chance of a screen grab on how you connect up your redirect shader on surface layers?

Got to say I like both renders, and understand the difficulty in getting variation across a planet. Not sure I understand spike limit either. Is it like a bias on a sort of clamp function within the PF? ie rounds off the cuttoff?

[Hetzen]

The attached image just shows, to me anyway, the amount of variation of colour you get in just a small area....

[efflux]

Yes, it does exactly what is says. If the fractal is spiky it smoothes it out but you will have to increase displacement to compensate.

As for redirect. That is easy. No graph even needs to be shown. Plug the redirect in after the surface shaders.

Another no brainer to get plateaus, mesas, canyons or whatever is by using strata and outcrops. Just give it a very large hard layer depth and hard layer spacing. Another technique I love is to use smooth surface in compute terrain to calm down and screw up the strata regularity. Note - there is a bug here. Smooth surface kills your altitude constraints. You will have to add another compute terrain with no smooth surface enabled.

All these techniques to screw things around is what you want. It instantly creates a more natural unregulated look.

[efflux]

Hetzen,

Yes this a very difficult. In many environments you get all that huge complexity of colour yet it also has a flow through the terrain shapes. It is very difficult to achieve in TG2 or any app.

[Hetzen]

Thank you for explaining that. I'll have to give those techniques a go. Here's an even more impressive variation of colour a few clicks west of the above image. Got to love Bing.

[efflux]

That is a beautiful example.

I'm thinking of working with intersect underlying. I haven't used it yet but it should provide huge scope for more surface distributions.

What I want is a very regulated way of setting things up, then methods to screw that around but still follow a kind of relationship.

This planet is finished. After having explored a bit, I have decided that if I mess with it I will lose it's character. I'll move to a new planet.

Due to not concentrating on specific dedicated stone surfaces I have found quite a lot of exploded stones. I like them though. It seems to fit OK.

[efflux]

I suspect that photo is actually color enhanced but it doesn't matter. Colours are often distributed like this even if subtle.

[efflux]

I can't specify enough about the exr. TG2 is like photography. I always have a polarizing filter when I take landscape photos which helps but if you take a picture into even partially glowing atmosphere you will get a lot of white glow and won't see what is behind this unless you exposure compensate for it but then  you lose ground detail. The exr is fantastic because in a render where you see a haze of white, the exposure correction of the exr will allow you to reduce that white glow so you can see the features behind it like distant hills etc. You start to get a look like carefully exposed and post edited photos but much much easier. The exr will contain all the detail without over exposed white outs.

[efflux]

Save all your renders as exr because even if you don't use it, one day you may go back and find a cool render that would be great to exposure correct. You'll kick yourself for not having the exr.

[efflux]

Another suggestion. Don't try to make your scene in TG2 correct exposure by adjusting colours, glow etc. This isn't how the real world is. You can make those corrections after with the exr.

[efflux]

Showing you this visually is the best way to explain.

The first image here is a standard output from TG2 (tif). Terrible but I don't care because I know how it is going to look. This is exactly how many landscape photos will come out, especially if you have no filter, unless you are in some extremely clear atmosphere environment but you will still get exposure problems even if less glowing haze. There is not a good way to properly adjust exposure on that file. The info is simply not there but I did not want to make the planet do this part i.e. adjust it in a false way. Atmospheres glow like this. Mist obscures detail etc. Photos will blow out or go too dark in areas if you try to compensate. You'd be amazed if you saw how poor some photos are that become awesome after correct adjustments. Multiple exposures are one way.

Now look at the second one. It is an exr exposure adjusted to get the sky back. OK, so I am going to real extremes here (eradicating totally any white blow out) but this was my intention for the look of this planet. I always do this - take everything to extreme then usually draw back a bit. You'll obviously see we now have very dark ground. This is exactly how a photo would come out if you exposure adjust for the sky. However, unlike a photo, the info is there in the exr. Now you could post edit all this in exr but I find that the best method is to then take this into Lightzone because Lightzone's relight algorithm is exactly designed to deal with this problem in a real photo but not even as successfully as it can deal with a TG2 output. After lightzone I get the finished result without tricky messing around in standard 2D bitmap editing software. Messing around with masks etc. There may be photoshop plugins to deal with this. I don't know. Dealing with the whole thing in exr would be best but what apps can do this? Do they have a specific effect for sorting it out non destructively like Lightzone?

[efflux]

I definitely think more people should explore what I am explaining here.

What we are trying to do in TG2 and in photography is get a picture of what our eyes see and go even further for nice effect like in these renders I have done. Our eyes can mask a lot of this problematic extreme differences in light. A camera can not and tif or bitmap outputs from TG2 can not either if we want something that looks like a photo or rather a photo that has been tweaked around exposure wise.

If you tweak things in TG2 to compensate you will lose realism because you will have to reduce these natural types of effect. By  reducing mist and very specifically things like glow you will lose the sense of space and atmosphere.

TG2 renders often lack a sense of scale in my opinion. This is because TG2 lights the atmosphere in a very natural way but people do not utilize this fully. Mojoworld on the other hand does not, so although the output has aspects that are not as real looking there is a sense of vast scale without this tweaking necessary in exrs from TG2. However, the TG2 atmosphere is much better for this very reason.

[efflux]

You can of course adjust exposure inside TG2. I never do this because it involves messing around too much in TG2, except maybe a few tests to check sky. I want to render out where I can see things, especially ground which is where most of the work gets done. Also, even when you set the final render off you often want the exposure set to something where you can see things clearly - generally the ground in case something is not too good then you stop the render instead of seeing the problem when you later adjust exposure.

[CCC]

The northwest of vegas reminds me of many parts of the california desert. I was just out there taking a road trip to the colorado river and took many photographs of the high sedimentation from the shale and sandstone where the thermal erosion cuts into the strata rock layers and intense rain water that cuts into the rock as well during flood season creating the smoother washed out flat parts of the terrains. I think what is need is if you were to remain doing all of this in terragen then choose to highly erode using the alpine shader and use a rigid perlin for the high elevations of the terrain with some twisted strata as the cuts of the alpine shader should still be visible if it is done well. So basically you have rigid rock strata at the higher elevations that sometimes twists at certain angles but note that the strata blends more into the terrain more then other parts and the deep cut erosion is quite visible then it flattens out into the basins where there is river wash channels and high sediments. The colors are more acurate in some parts then other. You get dark browns and in the cuts there are medium light browns. Note that these browns are warmer dark browns with iron deposits present but most are well blended with the shale colors. The darker browns are present in the high terrains and the lighter more sandy browns are present in the sedimentary parts of the terrains. Stones are mostly medium grey with splashes of reds and the rest appear to be medium and light browns. Much of the time stones are clumped into groups in the higher terrains where they appear to be in small rows and more rounded groups. In some cases the terrains can be reddish in color in this area but there is more brown harmonies then anything else.