Hi all,

yet another landscape. I've spent the last couple of days re writing my code
to use isosurfaces instead of height fields.The attached image is the first
major test. It was rendered with the isosurface, atmospheric media and
clouds, media water, radisoity and aa. The render took 9.5 hours on my p4.

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Attachments:
Download 'land4.jpg' (147 KB)

Preview of image 'land4.jpg'

Hey Nathan!

> isosurfaces instead of height fields
Looks damn cool! Nice landscape, great skies, cool water...

But I think the texture of the rocks needs a bit of tweaking. Looks to 
plastic-like IMHO.

Nice idea for your project would also be to include automated 
placement of grass (Gilles' MakeGrass) and trees (Gilles' MakeTree or 
TomTree).

Keep up the great work!
Florian
-- 
//=================[web: http://www.torfbold.com]==================\\
#local a=-5;#while(a<5)sphere{<sin(a*pi)*5a*10pow(a,5)*.01>sin(a*a*a*
.1)+1pigment{rgb 9*z}}#local a=a+.01;#end camera{look_at-y*10location
<8,-3,-8>*10}// [www.povray.org]     [www.imp.org]     [www.irtc.org]

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Nathan O'Brien wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> yet another landscape. I've spent the last couple of days re writing my code
> to use isosurfaces instead of height fields.The attached image is the first
> major test. It was rendered with the isosurface, atmospheric media and
> clouds, media water, radisoity and aa. The render took 9.5 hours on my p4.
> 

The composition is very nice.  I can't see much effect of the radiosity 
though.

Once thing i have observed in all your recent landscape scenes is the 
very dim lighting - nearly like a full moon night scene.

Is it one isosurface or a combination of several objects?

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 2 Sep. 2003 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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news:3f6df974@news.povray.org...
> yet another landscape. I've spent the last couple of days re writing my
code
> to use isosurfaces instead of height fields.The attached image is the
first
> major test. It was rendered with the isosurface, atmospheric media and
> clouds, media water, radisoity and aa. The render took 9.5 hours on my p4.

Hi Nathan
This is quite promising, but you should try to find a way to increase the
tone range, as it's much too dark right now. The other pictures suffered
from that problem too.
See a tone-corrected version below (I just stretched the half and high tone
values).

G.


-- 
**********************
http://www.oyonale.com
**********************
- Graphic experiments
- POV-Ray and Poser computer images
- Posters

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Attachments:
Download 'land4.jpg' (46 KB)

Preview of image 'land4.jpg'

Texturing needs a little work, but I think the rock formations are 
great! The render time, however, is a little long..... How long would it 
take without atmospheric and water media?

I think you're making notable strides in the field of complex, detailed 
landscape creation. I tried to make a height_field patchwork like your 
last image, but was plagued with large gaps. I saw a good idea the other 
day.... somebody was making turbulent oceans with a radiating mesh, not 
entirely unlike a height_field, the main differences being it was disc 
shaped and most of the detail was near the middle. Since objects that 
are farther away are smaller and have less detail, the setup was ideal 
for water, and probably landscapes too. I plan on making one soon. It 
would be a perfect height_field2 if anybody were to ever make it into a 
pacth:)



-- 
Samuel Benge

stb### [at] aolcom

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Florian Brucker wrote:

>But I think the texture of the rocks needs a bit of tweaking. Looks to
>plastic-like IMHO.

I agree. At the moment they are flat pigments. I'm going to start working on
thata rea soon.

>
>Nice idea for your project would also be to include automated
>placement of grass (Gilles' MakeGrass) and trees (Gilles' MakeTree or
>TomTree).
>

I've already created some placement macros for rocks and should have a grass
version up soon. I was thinking of creating a Java interface to run the
whole thing, in an ideal world it could then be integrated with Gena's Java
tree interface to Tomtree.

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Christoph Hormann wrote:

>Once thing i have observed in all your recent landscape scenes is the
>very dim lighting - nearly like a full moon night scene.

I'm using a flat panel screen now. I've noticed a big difference when the
images are displayed on a crt screen. I'll have to play with my gamma
steeings for the next render.


>Is it one isosurface or a combination of several objects?

There are actually 316 individual isosurfaces that have been tiled. Each
isosurface has been optimised for its container (just big enough), its
max_gradient (exact) and its accuracy (based upon distance from the
camera).

I've written a series of pre parsing macros that do all the hard work. On
tests it looks like I've picked up about a 40-50% speed increase on a
single optimised isosurface when using the atmospheric media and radiosity.

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Gilles Tran wrote:

>This is quite promising, but you should try to find a way to increase the
>tone range, as it's much too dark right now. The other pictures suffered
>from that problem too.
>See a tone-corrected version below (I just stretched the half and high tone
>values).
>


I agree. Still coming to terms with the flat panel display (need some gamma
correction) and the radiosity settings I'm using need a lot more work. The
interaction with the media needs some finer control.

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no13 wrote:
> 
> I'm using a flat panel screen now. I've noticed a big difference when the
> images are displayed on a crt screen. I'll have to play with my gamma
> steeings for the next render.

It is not just a matter of gamma, the scene is also too dark as a whole 
and the brightness relations are wrong.  For example the lit parts of 
the terrain are too uniform in brightness - if you adjust the image it 
all looks washed out.

> 
> There are actually 316 individual isosurfaces that have been tiled. Each
> isosurface has been optimised for its container (just big enough), its
> max_gradient (exact) and its accuracy (based upon distance from the
> camera).
> 
> I've written a series of pre parsing macros that do all the hard work. On
> tests it looks like I've picked up about a 40-50% speed increase on a
> single optimised isosurface when using the atmospheric media and radiosity.
> 

Interesting.  Are there no problems at the borders between the tiles?

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 2 Sep. 2003 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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Christoph Hormann wrote:
>
>It is not just a matter of gamma, the scene is also too dark as a whole
>and the brightness relations are wrong.  For example the lit parts of
>the terrain are too uniform in brightness - if you adjust the image it
>all looks washed out.
>

The lcd flat screen seams to increase the image contrast. Probably because I
keep the ambient lighting low in my study. Will try and preview images in a
different environment before I settle on the lighting settings.


>>
>> There are actually 316 individual isosurfaces that have been tiled. Each
>> isosurface has been optimised for its container (just big enough), its
>> max_gradient (exact) and its accuracy (based upon distance from the
>> camera).
>>
>
>Interesting.  Are there no problems at the borders between the tiles?
>

I've had no problems at the tile borders. Sometimes small errors appear when
the maximum Y value of a container is set to low. When that happens I
either hand correct it if it's just one tile, or increase the sample rate
of the macro that calculates the Y values if there are lots of errors. It
also helps to have only a small step in the accuracy between each
isosurface. Most of this is handled with pre parse macros.

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