Peterson sessions

Working on Geo assignments of late, running Terragen renders in the background. The latest renders are taking upwards of 5 hours to coalesce as they invariably become more complex and include more and more variables. I have a system where I generate a low resolution render that takes 4-5mins, and if I'm happy with it I go on to generate a high resolution version.

I actually haven't done any Terragen research or reading for a while, I'm just trying to reach the limits of my current knowledge. This approach may soon have run its course and I am thinking its nearly time to add to my knowledge base. I'm a little hesitant about incorporating objects into my gens as I know they are going to be very processor intensive and significantly blow out render times, which are expanding anyway. At any rate, its the landscape and geological side of Terragening that most interests me. I find generating landscape analogies in this way insightful when thinking about real world geological and geographical systems. And some of the renders look cool too!

Some of the renders below use a green surface shader to imply "grass", I think that tends to work well for the most part anyway.

(Top 3) Mature sedimentary landscape with lake. Getting the strata and outcrop shader to look good has been a challenge. I've found that stacking a few of them adds some much needed randomness to the layering of sediments. As any landscape photographer will tell you, the best time of day to take photos is at sunrise or sunset. The contrast of light and shadow highlights the three dimensional qualities of any land form.
(Bottom 3) Glitching the settings to generate unusual landscapes, purely for aesthetic reasons.

Sulfur or lichen?

 Some highlights from a recent terragen. Experimenting with hostile atmospheres and sheared/distorted terrain. Pushing parameters to glitching point in order to explore the fuzzy edges of possible landscapes.

Dust and aerosol filled atmosphere with approaching solar terminator.

 

 Sulfur aerosols and sheared beds.

 

Highland terrain above cloud bank with either sulfur dusting or prolific growth of yellow lichen.

 

Animation of saved progress images. 

As the terragen evolved with tweaks to various parameters, a copy was saved and later compiled to create this GIF.

Back into the Terragen activity, here are some of the latest renders.

 Snow dusted uplifted sandstone blocks. Foggy valleys.

 Messing around with creating glitched landscapes by tweaking variables beyond intended limits. This warrants further investigation.

More sandstone blocks, uplifted and tilted.

A nice little interactive tool that illustrates sea level variability of the Australian and SE Asian coastlines over the past 100000 years. These variations were of course a result of the growth and decay of the vast northern hemisphere ice sheet. I would love to see climate and vegetation categories as well!

Water worlds

Article about a recently investigated planetary system with two potential water planets, both a little larger than Earth. Would be fascinating to find out the composition of the atmospheres and the thickness of the water layers for each body. How deep are the silicate portions of the planets and how massive are they? How has their distance from the parent star influenced the composition of these planets?

Silicate planets

An interesting article on planet formation, specifically the various permutations on the silicate planet formation process. A few favourite lines but "Differentiation is an orderly and predictable process thanks to our knowledge of chemistry and mineral properties under pressure" is particularly pertinent. Given a known set of initial conditions (protoplanetary dust cloud composition, energy output from star/s, distance from star etc) accurate simulations of all the silicate planet permutations are possible.

Habitable zone

Interesting ideas regarding earths habitable zone and implications of anthropogenic warming.

Sandstone desert

Here are a few renders of a sandstone desert. Thinly bedded sandstones deposited in a rhythmic process. Some beds horizontal, some dipping at various angles. A band of carbon rich material visible in one render. Low flat areas partly covered in a salty crust indicating onetime presence of a lake or seaway.

 

 Carbon band.

Arenites

Sandstone. Arenites. Quartz, felspathic and lithic. Some links to interesting examples...

1  2  3  4  5  Uluru Flinders Ranges Jamison Valley


Some more sandstone country renders. Tinkering...

The light in this render makes it look a little alien I'm thinking. Love how the dip correlates with the bedding planes. Thinly bedded sandstones like this may indicate a rhythmic depositional environment, perhaps lacustrine or marine in nature, the dip may indicate uplift due to compressional tectonic forces. Fun to speculate on the origins of a purely simulated landscape!
 

I like the light in this render although the bedding planes do not stand out as much. Low level clouds seem more appropriate in this render, indicating cool and humid air accumulating in valleys during the morning.

Terragening Part 2

A selection of scenes rendered on the desktop. Same view, different time of day and variations in snow/cloud cover. Reminds me of a high latitude environment much like the dry valleys of Antarctica.

Terragening

Doing some Terragen terrains these past few days. Downloaded a free version of the software on the weekend and found a fairly good YouTube tutorial series on the basics. Once you get past the guys constant sniffling (blow ya fucking nose!) he goes through a fairly good step by step process on creating a basic scene. With the basics down, you can start to tweak and explore. At the moment I'm trying to master the terrain "strata and outcrops" shader and so far the results are pleasing. My geological interests primarily center around sedimentary rock systems so generating realistic looking sedimentary rock outcrops pleases me immensely!

I am interested in applying Terragen terrains to GIS (one of my current study units) or the other way around, applying rasters used in GIS generated from real world maps and sensing to Terragen. This would be a fantastic way of generating 3D renders of real world data, eg: radar terrain height maps. This is being done by people, a quick search through the Planetside forums reveal that people have been rendering GIS data in Terragen already. Ultimately, I would like to generate a GIS of a virtual world consisting of a wide range of data types in a meaningful layered way. This is something I have been wanting to do for a VERY long time, I just didn't have the tools or know-how to do it!

Here are some of the terrains I have generated this week. Keep in mind I have just begun exploring this software, and scenes so far are a little half baked in some ways.

Simple fractal landscape with little modification, only 3 surface layer shaders and basic water and atmospheric features. Desolate yet nice.

Simple fractal landscape (some artifacts quite visible) with snow. The white layer above the water surface is reminiscent of precipitation left by evaporation.

 High latitude islands shrouded in low cloud.

Playing with object placement. In this case pine trees. Very processor intensive. Realism in this pic is not the best but it was a useful experiment.

Rather pleased with this mornings effort, the cliffs and ridgetops in particular. I would like to superimpose some sort of erosional softening over the layers in the lower half of the image, not sure how to do this yet.