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

[efflux]

That makes sense because you clearly have an understanding of it. I always hated maths or rather arithmetic. It's figures my mind doesn't like but the minute they become geometry it all makes sense because I can see all the formulas as shapes in a space. It's the pure arithmetic figures that my brain doesn't handle. For example in your way of getting back to 0 to 1 in that graph. I think it's my lefthandedness (right brain dominant). Good at spacials but not abstracted figures.

[rcallicotte]

I've been following from a distance now for about two days and just tried what you guys have put up as well as just creating it from scratch and following what you're talking about (or some of it).  What I wonder is what you might think is causing the Preview window to do fine while the actual render is cutting off the tops.  Would you mind giving your opinions about why you think this might have happened?

Anyone feel free to answer.  I've tried, but I obviously don't understand something.

[efflux]

It's a cool use of the technique. Looks like artichokes. The cut off is the big problem for this technique if you go crazy. The realtime preview must be analyzing the whole scene whereas the renderer sections off the final render into blocks and misses large displacements. This becomes a big problem when you are rendering large size with high quality because the renderer bypasses displacements. Maybe Matt can improve this but TG2 is not alone in this problem. It is not really designed for these extremes. Mojoworld does exactly the same thing and in fact in some cases a lot worse. There is an improvement if you add my graph that uses the altitude because my spires in that are much fatter. The altitude subtracts from itself and pulls some of the displacement inwards to be inside the original spire. This helps. What you could do is try some negative displacements with much fatter spires. Just make the displacement amplitude -. You will get different results, not like those plant like things (which is maybe what you want) but maybe you can get some things that I or Volker have not shown here.

[RArcher]

There was a thread awhile back about the cut off displacements and the hope that Planetside can get rid of them in "most" cases.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2107.msg20642#msg20642

But I just have to say that the effects you are creating here are phenomenal.  I wish I had more to contribute on the function side of things, but it is way over my head so far.  Thanks for sharing your results!

[efflux]

Thanks. I haven't seen that thread. I will read it.

[efflux]

Calico. I have a bigger render going at the moment. It's 3000 x 1500. It's a test to see how far realistically we can go. I don't think I can improve on it further. This render will need a few patched in crops but that's OK. If you can crop the missed displacement in such a way to get a correct render then you're sorted because you can repair the full render. I'll post this image in image sharing when it's finished. It will be a good demonstration of this technique and how far you can go if you want a big high quality render.

[efflux]

The best demonstration is with pictures. This is an Armands Auseklis render. The Mojo master. These spires have a lot of inwards displacement. I haven't checked Armands Planet file so I can't confirm it's 100 inward displacement on those spires but you can see the shapes are pushing into the spires rather than out or as well as out. Mojoworld's displacement orientates the opposite way for some mad reason. + pushes inwards. It doesn't do that throughout Mojo though. Just one of the many inconsistant annoyances. In Mojo, to render big displacements you can not tile render. It will almost certainly cut off displacements but you have an option to not tile render if you've got the RAM and the render isn't gigantic.

http://armands.pandromeda.com/MojoWorlds07/WorldofBondstonesPop.jpg

[rcallicotte]

Thanks for all your help, efflux.  I'll try the idea you suggested above as well as this.  Can't wait to see your render when finished.  This is helping me to learn, as well.  Thanks to you and Volker.

Calico. I have a bigger render going at the moment. It's 3000 x 1500. It's a test to see how far realistically we can go. I don't think I can improve on it further. This render will need a few patched in crops but that's OK. If you can crop the missed displacement in such a way to get a correct render then you're sorted because you can repair the full render. I'll post this image in image sharing when it's finished. It will be a good demonstration of this technique and how far you can go if you want a big high quality render.

[efflux]

The ultimate answer is a volumetric renderer that can render the landscape the same as the clouds. In full 3D. Mojo has a volumetric plugin but there are problems with that. Floating rocks for example, unless you want those. The Mojo plugin is not properly integrated either. No decent realtime preview, no water transparency and probably other issues. It's a pain to work with. I never used it except for clouds. It's a future thing. Maybe even some future version of TG2 wil have full volumetrics.

[efflux]

That Armands image shows another capability that would be fantastic to recreate in TG2. You'll notice the shadow areas have a slightly greenish colour. That's a dot product graph. Armands later developed this planet to also have a dot product atmosphere colour. I'm not sure if that is possible in TG2. I think you'd have to get the effect in real atmospheric ways like adjusting clouds rather than the more faked gradient across the sky. In Mojo it's really an attempt to try to create what looks like areas of dark cloud coverage.

Actually, I correct myself. The dot product gradient can be seen in the sky of that Armands image. He just later changed the cloud colours.

That Armands image will likely have had post processing as well. Don't be fooled into thinking everything you see is direct from the render. The post processing is a vital ingredient. Skill with this can work wonders. The cool thing in TG2 is that the atmospherics and GI mean we do not have to fake those parts in post.

[Volker Harun]

The point using a program like TG2 is that both sides of the brain are needed.

About the clouds ... why not taking Joe's idea and use clouds - they are a bit impossible to shade, yet. But what is life without a task?

[efflux]

I'm leaving the clouds idea for the moment. Maybe I'll try it later or maybe someone else can try it. It will be a task to experiment with because of render times.

[moodflow]

This is clearly a really cool thread! 

[Volker Harun]

The clouds are delicate.
It no problem to have them volumetric very close to perlin spires, but even a very dense cloud of 1000m depth above those spires shows the clouds only near the terrain.
Need time to investigate this.

[Volker Harun]

I have refined the function a bit.

Between the Perlin and the Clamp I set a multiply-scalar node for modifying the spires' shape (using a powerfractal or values from 0.8 to 1.5 are reasonable).

At the end of the function is a multiply-scalar for blending with a power fractal (large scaled).