Ideas...

[rcallicotte]

Any ideas on what this might be?  Something is blocking the sun from going all the way to the surface and I think it's probably connected to this.

[rcallicotte]

More evidence of a problem, though I think I discovered part of the weird aberration (a Compute Terrain), which I removed.  There are no clouds and the sun is at 90.

At first, there is sunshine and then it all goes dark.

[Harvey Birdman]

1) It's an intra-dimensional gateway with a black hole on the other side that's sucking all the light away.

2) So that's what happened to my cloak of darkness!

3) sigh... that sucks.   

[dhavalmistry]

posting a tgd will help a lot here....

[rcallicotte]

It was a power fractal on the Fake Stones, which had a Blending Shader set to Terrain Normal.  When I took the Displacement of the power fractal, everything went back to normal.  Now...to understand exactly why this happened, I can only assume it was a displacement prior to the Terrain Normal taking effect (and not the intra-dimensional gateway Harvey had concluded LOL).  But, this is with my limited understanding.

By the way, I bought the book Texturing & Modeling, which recommends me to the RenderMan technology.  It's funny to me that there is some odd connection with DAZ|Studio here, wherein they use the 3Delight software renderer which is connected in some way to the RenderMan technology. 

Harvey, how hard is it to learn to program in the RenderMan shading system?

[Harvey Birdman]

I've never worked with Renderman, just GLSL and Cg. (My approach has been more from the CS/technical side than from the art side.) From what I understand Renderman is more powerful/flexible but more complicated, and it's use of a wide variety of shaders might be a closer parallel to TG. I don't know if I'd want to start off with it, though, particularly if it's a more general understanding of 3D graphics theory that you're after. IMHO, of course.

[rcallicotte]

Thanks Harvey.  I'm a programmer and am doing what I can to understand procedural graphics, 3D, texturing...a number of graphical subjects.  What is GLSL and CG?  Forgive apparent ignorance.  I think CG means color graphics...or not?

[Harvey Birdman]

Hey, guy.

GLSL is OpenGL Shading Language; Cg is C for Graphics. Cg is nVidia's version of a 'high-level shading language'; GLSL is the OpenGL-sanctioned 'hlsl', and then there's Microsoft's HLSL (iirc - who knows. it's alphabet soup.).

If you have a background in programming but are new to 3d graphics, I'd repeat my suggestion of Alan Watt's book '3D Computer Graphics'. Trying to dive in to a shading language raw would be very tough. I started with Watt's book (which you can cherry-pick and rip right through), then moved on to OpenGL. If you're working on Windows, at some point you'll end up choosing to concentrate (at least initially) on either OpenGL or DirectX. OpenGL is (iirc) a conceptually cleaner system and easier to learn.

These are the low-level (well, mid-level) systems a lot of 3D apps are built on. I think you'd be better off approaching the whole of the subject (3d graphics) by studying one of these (GL or DirectX). You'd pick up all the general stuff (texturing, lighting, etc) along the way as well as picking up an understanding of the mathematical underpinnings, something which ALWAYS serves one well, no matter what science is involved.

[DiscoBall]

for rendering you could later move on to nVidia's Gelato Heard that was REALLY good, dunno though.

Oh and just a thought, if your wanting to understand how to make procedural stuff, you might want to search around for .kkrieger. It's a 97 kb game that uses procedural modelling to the max

[rcallicotte]

http://sponeil.org/index.htm - I wonder if he's aware of TG2...and how many other people don't know about this incredible sofware. 

[dhavalmistry]

his Billboarded Grass is looking awesome!!

[RealUser]

Hmm, seems to be rather old stuff.