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Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Thu Aug 22, 2019 2:48 pm
by CSE
I am a bit busy these days, so not tried much but I must say until now I am not very successful.
Large part of the problem is that I cannot have nice previews like Silver showed, my previews in the equation editor of Vue are about 5-10mm square only so it is impossible to see anything - the only way to have a "preview" is to apply and render, but then it is not only slow but also sometimes difficult to see because of lighting and so on... this is a bit frustrating, the more so because I am sure I am just missing a simple option.
So any hint would be helpful!

But thanks Silver for the ideas...

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Sat Aug 24, 2019 3:20 pm
by HowSerendipitous
CSE wrote:
Thu Aug 22, 2019 2:48 pm
I am a bit busy these days, so not tried much but I must say until now I am not very successful.
Large part of the problem is that I cannot have nice previews like Silver showed, my previews in the equation editor of Vue are about 5-10mm square only so it is impossible to see anything - the only way to have a "preview" is to apply and render, but then it is not only slow but also sometimes difficult to see because of lighting and so on... this is a bit frustrating, the more so because I am sure I am just missing a simple option.
So any hint would be helpful!

But thanks Silver for the ideas...
Here's a thing about the preview - In the material editor there's a little magnifying glass to the right and below of the preview within in the window. If you click on that beastie it gives you a larger preview which you can render :twisted: Just found it while I'm trying to find a way to change the seed on a texture!

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:25 pm
by HowSerendipitous
Aaaaand I cracked it! It was a bit of a fudge, but I'm not bothered.... It works! I still need to twiddle with the lights themselves as they're a bit 'not right', but that's fine. At least they're only showing on the nightside :twisted:

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Thu Sep 12, 2019 2:32 pm
by Talvieno
Lovely planet, HS! As to the lights, just pretend it's bioluminescent forests full of elf-people and you're good to go. :lol:

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Sat Sep 14, 2019 7:12 am
by HowSerendipitous
Talvieno wrote:
Thu Sep 12, 2019 2:32 pm
Lovely planet, HS! As to the lights, just pretend it's bioluminescent forests full of elf-people and you're good to go. :lol:
Har, thanks :twisted: A little more tweaking of the displacement mapping on the lights and it's a bit more sensible.

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Sat Sep 14, 2019 2:11 pm
by Talvieno
Much better, yes! :D Could maybe use some more lighting perhaps, but that's just to taste, and I guess it entirely depends on the intended population of the planet.


Another topic entirely:

I made this for REKT:
Image

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2019 1:49 pm
by CSE
HowSerendipitous wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 7:12 am

Har, thanks :twisted: A little more tweaking of the displacement mapping on the lights and it's a bit more sensible.
This is turning very good!
How do you choose the lighted regions? With a displacement similar to continents?
Talvieno wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 2:11 pm

Another topic entirely:

I made this for REKT:
That is really nice. One could just wonder why those aliens put so many lights to get so few lighting :)
Joke apart, the ambiance is excellent!

Did you make a model of Chtulu?

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2019 1:57 pm
by Talvieno
CSE wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 1:49 pm
That is really nice. One could just wonder why those aliens put so many lights to get so few lighting :)
Indeed. :lol: But I had a certain tone I was going for.
Did you make a model of Chtulu?
Nope. I actually got all the graffiti off a Google stock image search. I can't really draw at all. That one in particular came from this photo:
Spoiler:      SHOW
Image
I lopped off the ears because, in the REKT timeline, in 3152, elephants are extinct, and I doubt the aliens on the station would know about them anyway.

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2019 2:00 pm
by CSE
Talvieno wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 1:57 pm
CSE wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 1:49 pm
That is really nice. One could just wonder why those aliens put so many lights to get so few lighting :)
Indeed. :lol: But I had a certain tone I was going for.
Did you make a model of Chtulu?
Nope. I actually got all the graffiti off a Google stock image search. I can't really draw at all. That one in particular came from this photo:
...
I lopped off the ears because, in the REKT timeline, in 3152, elephants are extinct, and I doubt the aliens on the station would know about them anyway.
So it's a billboard. With the lighting, it sort of looked like a (3D) model of somebody standing there...
Do you have somewhere a collection of your renders for the interested viewer?

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2019 2:08 pm
by Talvieno
Yeah, here's basically what the billboard looks like:
Image
And... no, I don't really have a collection anywhere. I've been meaning to put one together for a while, but never actually got around to it. I have a badly outdated collection here that's missing a lot of my newer pieces - newer pieces that I'd consider better than a lot of those.

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2019 12:40 pm
by HowSerendipitous
Talvieno wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 2:11 pm
Much better, yes! :D Could maybe use some more lighting perhaps, but that's just to taste, and I guess it entirely depends on the intended population of the planet.


Another topic entirely:

I made this for REKT:
Image
Niiiiice, that makes me think of Quake 3 for some reason, or maybe Unreal Tournament. Very cool though.
CSE wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 1:49 pm
HowSerendipitous wrote:
Sat Sep 14, 2019 7:12 am

Har, thanks :twisted: A little more tweaking of the displacement mapping on the lights and it's a bit more sensible.
This is turning very good!
How do you choose the lighted regions? With a displacement similar to continents?
Yup, exactly right. It's very similar to the planet I uploaded, but with the cities sphere I changed the material to a mixed material, with the lights as material 2, and just some transparent nonsense for material 1. Then I bumped the influence of orientation to 100%, then put Material 2 appears near Azimuth to 62 degrees :twisted: I suspect there might be some mileage in adding multiple layers with different attributes to vary the lights a bit more, but I'll keep fiddling! I could always change material 1 so it's similar but grey, so there'd be cities visible from orbit.

You might have to tweak the angle on there depending on the lighting position, but it seems to work!

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2020 5:52 pm
by HowSerendipitous
Has it really been a year?

I'm planning to use one of my previous LTFC entries as a background to a Microsoft Teams call tomorrow and that's kinda' woken up my desire to do 3D things again. Just need to find some inspiration now :twisted:

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2020 2:25 pm
by CSE
Hi guys :wave:

I actually never really stopped - but I miss the deadlines and the topics as motivating factors.

Because I hate the business model where you pay monthly to use a software and my old workflow (with Vue) using a version I owned does not work now in the current version of the OS (so I am delaying the upgrade), I am now concentrating on porting my 3D modelling/posing/texturing to Blender. Mostly successfully, but I'm not fully there yet.
Of course that means rebuilding from scratch all the assets (mostly the procedural texturing and the procedural bumps I used for details or cityscapes). And I miss the cool landscape and atmosphere generators - even if they did not appear a lot in my LTFC work as it was mostly in deep space ;-).

Image
(fully made in Blender, from Model to texture. Just adjusted the levels separately, but I know I could do it within blender as post-processing)

Take Care!

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2020 3:00 pm
by HowSerendipitous
Eyyyyyyyy :wave:

Yah, I hate the pay monthly business model too, 'though I lucked out and picked up Vue before they brought that in (2016 :twisted:).

Must admit, I never really got on with Blender, but given what you've got there, it looks like it's worth another crack. 'Though I still rather like the texturing in Vue!

I spent time playing about with planets again, and I finally cracked the atmosphere ; it always looked a bit too solid, in that it never really faded into space correctly. But a few tweaks to the alpha production filter and I finally got it right! :squirrel:
Planet-test-Lights4.jpg
Eyyyyyyy
Planet-test-Lights4.jpg (79.88 KiB) Viewed 7279 times

Re: Limit Theory Fan Contest - Discussion

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2020 3:25 pm
by Silverware
Two negative critiques.

1) The ice in the north looks hella tall, because of how strong the normal is there.

2) The atmosphere bloom feels wrong, it looks like the first quarter of a sine curve, rather than an inverse square curve like it probably should be.

Can you look into addressing those two issues?
Other than that, holy fuck thats some awesome stuff!



A suggestion to try, use a noise map to pick the blending between other noisemaps.
Say you make three other noisemaps, one with large detail, massive oceans and landmasses, and two progressively smaller detailed ones.
Put then at 0.0, 0.5, and 1.0;
Then you take a lerp (or a curved slurp) using the value on the Blending noise map. Say a point is at 0.4;
This means it's lerp( nosemap[0], nosemap[1], 0.8 ); (0.4 is 80% between 0.0 and 0.5)

It could allow a lot more difference without simply merging two or more noise layers together.
Some areas might be all large detail that fall off into smaller detail nearby. Giving you a large landmass surrounded by small lakes. or a single large ocean patch ringed by islands.