[Herra Tohtori]

Question for the planet artists here: has anyone seen this before, and more importantly, do you know how to fix it? (Effect slightly exaggerated.) Gaussian blur does nothing. I think it's caused by playing with the colour/brightness , but I can't work it away. Even when I down-scale the planet to 2048x2048, it's still visible.

Well there's two things that can cause it...

-Color banding of your display (this happens quite often with LCD's, for more information look here. This causes even the smoothest of gradients to show some amount of banding (or rather they seem to use slightly different RGB balance to achieve different brightness values, and thus the image doesn't appear as uniform gray). If you see banding on the images on that site, bad luck; get a CRT or better display. Mine shows some banding on the darker tones as well, so you need to just learn to see what is caused by the display and ignore it, and what is caused by image editing.

Wide gradients (large areas) of low contrast and brightness usually suffer from this the most of all.

-Image editing. Because the images we use currently have usually only 8 bits per channel and 24/32 bits per pixel, it means that when you edit something like smooth gradient with contrast/brightness/hue changes, rounding errors start to appear - you can check this out by taking a photograph that shows something like sky with a gradient, then start editing it (colour levels, back and forth, contrast/brightness with small changes)... With multiple edits, rounding errors start to accumulate and bands like that can start appearing in the sky. Same with calculating the final colour of a pixel with multiple layers with transparency.

If you can use 64-bit image mode while editing, you can decrease this problem as far as rounding errors go, but unfortunately your display will still only be able to use 32-bit colour mode, and in the end you need to convert the image to 32-bit (or if you don't need alpha, 24-bit) colour mode.

-...and yeah, image compression can do bad things to gradients as well. DXT compression uses less than 8 bits per pixel for some channels. It is not good for anything with significant amount of gradients in it. Use u888 instead (or u8888 if you need alpha).

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I see... Well, I'll blame my screen then. This was without compression, BTW. Thanks for your time

[Topgun]

does gimp have a 64bit mode?

[Rodo]

new inspiration waves coming this way... thanks to a quite interesting tut on how to make a planet... it gave me a couple of good ideas and also learned why my planets kept sucking that much XD


anyways.. here's a new pic, a frozen moon (well that's what It was intended to be at least jeje):

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Okay, so that's a really good surface. Looks perfectly icy I suggest you up brightness and contrast a bit though, the ice is still a bit "dirty" now.

[eliex]

I suggest you up brightness and contrast a bit though, the ice is still a bit "dirty" now.

Hmm, I quite like the ice being "dirty" myself. 

[Retsof]

Looks a bit pixelated too.  But still better than I could do.

[Flipside]

Mucking around with Displacement mapped materials in Vue, not really intended as a finished product, but having fun :



[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Snail]

Wow, that looks very cool.

[Herra Tohtori]

Saturn.

Blender is frustrating but when it starts to work, the results are awsum.

EDIT: Strange - it looks like the planet fails at shadowing itself under the rings... but it works fine in this render:

[Rodo]

that's from another planet!

it looks really good... and again, wtf is bloom 

[haloboy100]

that's from another planet!

it looks really good... and again, wtf is bloom 

It makes light bleed out of it's source; I.E. the effect you get when you look at the light at the end of the tunnel.

[Rodo]

ohh I see why I could not find that article in wikipedia, tnks halo

[Flipside]

@Herra, I think it's something to do with the Shader Tree, I have a similar problem on Vue if I try to put a volumetric object inside a refractive one, such as putting a cloud inside a glass-sphere, the renderer simply cannot handle the kind of maths involved. It's fine as long as the volumetric object doesn't touch the sphere, but as soon as they intersect, graphics hell breaks loose.

[haloboy100]

ohh I see why I could not find that article in wikipedia, tnks halo

At least say thanks for providing the convieniance of not having to search it yourself

[Rodo]

I did search for it but I forgot to search it on the English Wiki... the spanish one has no entry for "Bloom", nothing like that IIRC. anyway tnks again.

[Herra Tohtori]

@Herra, I think it's something to do with the Shader Tree, I have a similar problem on Vue if I try to put a volumetric object inside a refractive one, such as putting a cloud inside a glass-sphere, the renderer simply cannot handle the kind of maths involved. It's fine as long as the volumetric object doesn't touch the sphere, but as soon as they intersect, graphics hell breaks loose.

It seems it has more to do with alpha channel or something. In the render, the thing looks fine, but when I slap it on a black background, the part of planet behind the ring is lit up - or maybe it lights up the ring.

Oh well, I can cheat by rendering the ring and the planet separately and joining the images together later. Just takes two renders instead of one...

[Herra Tohtori]

Doublepost for relevant imagery. With help of blowfish (he did pretty much all the work in building the model and mapping it properly, I made the skybox renders), Saturn is now in-game.










Apologies for the partial windows bar on the wide angle images.

[Zacam]

I just felt a great disturbance in the Force. It was as though a billion nerds suddenly creamed their pants, and wept for joy.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Hell. Nice one!