Mesa now in higher resolution (Updated)

[Tangled-Universe]

Very sweet work again! I like your style
Nice colors and composition. The strata are cool, though a bit sharp and less breakup.
The scales of the objects do work, but for me they don't speak for themselves. At first glance I thought it looked odd.
In overall very good work again, missed your work lately and I hope you get back soon with something new.

Thanks for your reply, Frank, but it's a bit confusing. I want the displacement to be ignored and I want the color information to be interpreted as a mask. Maybe I didn't get you right, but anyway I'll see what I can do.

I think you didn't get Frank right. If you use a powerfractal as blendshader for coverage then the shader ignores the displacement information, so the problem is in the colors of the mask.

You can do 2 things. First, like Frank said, try to decrease roughness and contrast to get a smoother fractal so you won't get spiky artefacts.
Second, like I often do, do the opposite: make a very contrasty fractal with low roughness. Say contrast 5-10 and roughness around 0.5-1.
This way you will get sharp breakup patterns which are very well visible and probably will not give displacement artefacts.

[Hannes]

Ah, that sounds good! Thank you. I'll try that.

[ndeewolfwood]

in the case of blend shader...i don't know if terragen do a extra computing to calculate something if the displacement box of the powerfractal is checked even it's not used. Did terragen ignore completly this during the render or is it a good idea to uncheck it ?

[Hannes]

Bad news:
My computer is too weak to render a 6000px image. Even a small crop (a 16th of the whole image) failed to render.
Unfortunately I still have XP 32bit and only 3GB RAM.
For now it doesn't work in that high resolution, but I'll improve some things and render it again in 3600px (or maybe 4000 if it works).

[Henry Blewer]

I have been having difficulties with large renders on my machine with 2.1. With 3 GB there is not really anything you can do. But stay tuned, I have been working on a solution.

[Hannes]

I'm curious!
Next year I'm going to tune my computer and move to 64bit!!!!

[Henry Blewer]

I am thinking of making this computer 64 bit. It can do it, but 4 GB does not seem to be enough memory. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? I will start a new thread in the Open Discussion area.

[rcallicotte]

Incredible, Hannes.  Love the lighting and the strata looks believably real.

[Hannes]

Right now I am rendering an improved version with a width of 3600px again. As I wrote my computer isn't able to render higher resolutions at the moment. It is not possible to render the lower half of the image at once (my friend the "an error occured in a render thread"-message appeared). I know it is a not-enough-RAM issue.
BUT:
if I open two instances of TG2 and render a quarter each, it works.
This is strange. It's the same amount of "work", and more RAM is used for the two instances of TG2, but there are no errors and it works like a charm. It's even a little bit faster.

If someone mentioned this before, I'm terribly sorry for the confusion! 

[Malcolm79]

Strange, but this artwork reminds me game "MYST 2. Riven". Fantastic work!

[Hannes]

Here's a new version. I took all your advices and hope that it's an improvement (sorry Freelancah, the medusa is gone!).
Unfortunately I'm not able to upload the high res version to Ashundar. For uploading it as an image the resolution is too high, and when I try to upload it as a zip file, it fails and tells me something about some quota. Any suggestions? The high res image has less than 2MB.

[Tangled-Universe]

That looks sweet, can't wait to see it full-res
If I want to upload huge images I do it on my deviant-art account.

Martin

[Oshyan]

Here's a new version. I took all your advices and hope that it's an improvement (sorry Freelancah, the medusa is gone!).
Unfortunately I'm not able to upload the high res version to Ashundar. For uploading it as an image the resolution is too high, and when I try to upload it as a zip file, it fails and tells me something about some quota. Any suggestions? The high res image has less than 2MB.

I've increased the upload size and allowed image size, although images larger than 4000 pixels wide will be downsampled. The quota issue has to do with the number of posts you have made on the site. To encourage participation in the forum community, we tie the amount of space you are given in the galleries to the number of posts you've made. We've just moved to a new server so I've gone ahead and increased the quotas for most member types. So you should be able to upload. If you run out of space, you can delete old files, or post in the forums.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

It did not think this could be improved much. I was wrong. Great work.

[Hannes]

Thanks Oshyan, it worked!!
Here is the high res version. I will revisit this one as soon as I have more RAM and a 64bit OS. I had a lot of fun creating this image. I replaced the medusa with another (smaller) dead tree and added some more fake stones shaders and some other things. I broke up the strata on the tower (thanks TU and Frank!) which gave me some strange but interesting formations. Hope you like it.
http://www.terragen.org/gallery/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=0