So? anyone jumped on the TerraDome bandwagon yet? It looks interesting, and the introductory price looks reasonable for what it is... though I never had any luck getting Infinity Cove working.

www.runtimedna.com/Runtime-DNA-s-TerraDome.html

Poking around with it, slowly. No opinion yet.

Whichway

Just bought it; haven't loaded it yet.

The first thing I've actually wanted in months ;o).

Laurie

Can some one comment about this in regards to Poser 8 and IDL?

lmk

Quote - Can some one comment about this in regards to Poser 8 and IDL?

lmk

Me too...

Haven't tried it with indirect lighting yet, but it's relatively easy to use & render quality is good.

definitely a worthwhile purchase.

Its a great product , i love it
tried it with the suppled lights using IDL and it looks/renders even nicer I think :)
IDL calculations for the terradome are quite fast :)

Whichway

Terradome: Two men enter, one man leaves!

(I just hadda say that.)

As far as IDL goes, I would imagine it would be best to use one's own lights or tone down the supplied one. That's been the case with everything else; I don't see why TD would be any different. But I haven't pulled the trigger yet.

And $$-wise, I just aggravated myself. Made a $25+ Marketplace purchase here and forgot to input the 20% coupon code. Gah.

Here's an extremely quick render I put together of TerraDome plus Dies Nefastus (which doesn't have Poser-optimized materials and I didn't bother to tweak them for this). 

This render uses IDL with smooth polygons turned off.  The lighting is a little off but I left it alone so you could see what it looks like "out of the box".  Dies Nefastus looks a little "blown out" from a lighting perspective but otherwise it's pretty good.  Dies Nefastus ould use some materials tinkering and the render needs some postwork and vegetation, but this took about 2-3 minutes to build with TerraDome (if that) and maybe 3-5 minutes of render time with IDL.  I have my render settings up pretty high. Cast shadows, displacement and raytracing were on.

BTW, I had to scale Terradome to 99% in order to get the ground to appear properly in the preview.

This render uses IDL with smooth polygons turned off.  The lighting is a little off but I left it alone so you could see what it looks like "out of the box".  Dies Nefastus looks a little "blown out" from a lighting perspective but otherwise it's pretty good.  Dies Nefastus could use some materials tinkering and the render needs some postwork and vegetation, but this took about 2-3 minutes to build with TerraDome (if that) and maybe 3-5 minutes of render time with IDL (render dimensions were around 1200x1000 for my render which I reduced to post here).  I have my render settings up pretty high. Cast shadows, displacement and raytracing were on.

BTW, I had to scale Terradome to 99% in order to get the ground to appear properly in the preview.

Oh, and don't be put off that there's a manual with Terradome (as if it's hard to use).  It's simple to use out of the box.  Load the base figure from Figures, inject the morphs you want from Pose and open the Materials to choose your material for each zone and the sky dome.  Very simple.  The manual helps with these basics plus other more detailed tips, including render tips.

Quote - Here's an early one from me. Poser 8 but no IDL yet. My first pick of IDL settings gave me splotchy shadows. From BB's beta posts, it looks like SP1 will be much better on that front. Meanwhile, so far, so good.

Whichway

This looks great. Which lighting did you use? Is this the sunset skydome?

Quote -
 the 20% coupon code.

What 20% Off Coupon??

The last I saw was a 10%

Tks

anodolaurina - Yep, it's the stormy sunset HI.

Whichway

andolaurina: That's pretty nice for a quickie render. I think I'll find this useful. Hopefully, it'll work better than IC for me. I bought TerraDome a couple hours ago... won't have time to play today tho.

mariner: I got a new email from Rendo last night called "Get wild with these savings from Renderosity." The 20% code is in there. Valid until Aug 31, $25 min purchase.

Quote - mariner: I got a new email from Rendo last night called "Get wild with these savings from Renderosity." The 20% code is in there. Valid until Aug 31, $25 min purchase.

TKS, I will check my mail again.

A quick render in Poser 8 using IDL!

It render very quick for me, no problems in that area at all, even the atmosphere is rendering pretty fast.

While the landscape items are easy to use, the atmosphere is harder to use. It has a lot of options and settings, it will take a while to figure that out. The other thing is render settings. Took me a while to figure out what looked best.

Don't expect to create the same stunning images as in the promo in minutes. As you can see in this thread, most of them aren't even close to those. I'm not saying you cannot create such images with TerraDome, on the contrary, you can, but it will take time to do so. It's not like the Millenium Enviroment or Infinite Cove, where you have a 'landscape' in a minute, it's like a very improved version of MicroCosm, to use it you need to build your own world.

I've attached my first try with TerraDome, the setup of the scene took a few minutes, figuring out the best rendering settings took longer. Rendered with Poser 8, tone mapping on. I didn't use IDL at all, used the lights provided with TerraDome. I see others have done IDL rendered images and since IDL has failed to impress me, I didn't didn't do any renders with it. I love the improved rendering speed of Poser 8 and I'm not prepared to hand it in for a little realism gain. I did the same scene with IDL, but I didn't find the results worth the lot of extra rendering time.

Back to TerraDome. Great system.

Pros:

• Reasonable selection of morphs for the zones (which make the mountains) included.
• Excellent selection of Atmospheres included.
• Easy to use.
• Excellent light sets, they do light scenes very nicely.
• Reasonable selection of materials included.
• Not a huge load on the system resources and memory.
• Renders fairly fast.
• Tutorials included (see cons also).
• A lot of potential.

Cons

• Lack of skies and light sets, only a very basic selection included, too basic imo.
• Renders only well with high render quality settings. For TerraDome itself that's not a problem, but if you fiull your scene with figures and props, the rendering times are getting long. Lowering the render quality has gives terrible results.
• Lack of water.
• Even though tutorials are included, they're too limited. I expected a tutorial how to learn to create one of those stunning scenes, but the turorial for that part was way too basic.
• Price vs Lastibility. Although some good stuff is included, overal I do find it a bit too little. For the price tag I expected more. How long will TerraDome last me before I will desire add-ons? Not too long. For the price I expected a bit more. More morphs, more terrain textures and expecially more skies/lights.
• The promo images. Yes they are a con, since they make you go wow and after your first render you go.... oh, that's it? After a while the excitement get's back, but to create images such as the promo images will be quite a challenge. There are two images I'm really wondering about. The mill scene is the first one. I somehow doubt that was done and rendered in Poser. I can be totally wrong of course. The second one is the one woth the orc on the bridge. I'm wondering how that can be achieved with the stuff that is provided with what've got now. Perhaps parts of a coming add-on where used for that one? Again, I would be wrong..... completely.

I guess that sums it up. I'm sure I will enjoy TerraDome a lot and it's a great challenge to try to duplicate the promo images, if that can be done. Inspite of the cons, it's a great and easy way to do landscapes in Poser, that I as a landscape freak cannot do without. It's pretty stunning to see this in Poser and beats all of the other landscaping systems for Poser easily. I'm looking forward to see additions for this released to make up for the current lack.

Here's another one...a bit larger.

LINK TO VIEW (too large to post here)
http://www.andolaurina.com/rendersamples/terradome3.jpg

Again, I didn't spend much time on this at all.  Dies Nefastus from another angle and added the Sun Tower textures from DAZ and the base.  Rotated the Skydome to get a little different view.  Same texture on zones 1, 2 and 3.  Same skydome sky.

This time I added "Advanced Atmosphere".

Rendered with IDL, same render settings as the last one.

This time it took almost 2 hours to render - yikes!  IDL took forever to calculate.  Me thinks that was the Advanced Atmosphere addition (although well worth it) or possibly the higher res Sun Tower materials.

I made no adjustments to lighting or the Sun Tower textures (which need work).  And, if I had to do it over, I'd mess with the camera more (focal length, etc.) 

No postwork.  Feel free to give feedback, especially if you can figure out the weird aliasing issues on the Dies Nefastus columns.

Wow, I love that sky.

Believable3D, thanks. Appreciate that. :-)  I don't have IC, but it does seem like this is far more robust.  Yet, it's easy to use.  Honestly, it's one of those things that you can look at and say, darn, why didn't I think of that!  Point being, it shouldn't be too hard for people to make freebie extensions (morphs, textures, skydome photos) for this (or for profit), which would be really nice. :-)  Also, some prop extensions would be nice, too.

It is lacking in water textures.  In an expansion pack, it would be nice to see some varying water materials for the zones (I have some already but I'd like to have better ones.)  And, there do need to be additional prop planes/overlays with some morph geometry for lakes, terraces, plateaus, individual mountains (with separate material zones for peaks) and other random topography.  I'd love to see some nice waves added between zones 1 & 2 that worked similarly to the Atmosphere, which could connect sand to sea.

Oh, and it would be amazing to see good-looking clouds as a ground texture/morph or overlay.  This would be fantastic for airplane/zeppelin/hot air balloon/heaven/angel renders.  Sure, you can get that through postwork but I could see some cool potential in a rendered version.

andolaurina,  the amount of render time is going to be much slower with IDL, that's a poser thing, not a product thing.  In all actuality, this was not built with IDL in mind, in fact I think that they recommended to not use IDL but to use the lights that come with it as a start and go from there. 

It reminds me a lot of Bryce, you would load a sky and the correct lighting would come with it, I LOVE that, about this.  

I would suggest any wishes you have for expansions that you take them over to RDNA and start a thread :)

That way at least the creators will see them :) 

I do know that there will be plenty of expansions coming, I'd get my wishes in soon :) They have pretty big plans for this, the actual getting the base product out was just the beginning :)

The render looks really good :) 

I found some seamless tiles, some spherical textures like IBL, and some panoramic (none equirectangular) skys at Flicker.com. Also, my runtimes has some seamless tiles of ground and grass.

I have a lot of seamless textures on my hard drives that I can look through. Some might work for this. I believe Poser World has offered some in the past. With a target product like TerraDome for Poser, they might just offer some more high resolution texture maps of rock, ground, sand, snow, etc..

LMK

Attached Link: CG Textures

Quote - andolaurina,  the amount of render time is going to be much slower with IDL, that's a poser thing, not a product thing.  In all actuality, this was not built with IDL in mind, in fact I think that they recommended to not use IDL but to use the lights that come with it as a start and go from there. 
The render looks really good :)

Yeah, I was just surprised that between my first render and second there was an hour and a half difference (or more).  The only real changes were switching to the Sun Tower textures and adding the Advanced Atmosphere.  I used IDL in both.  So, I'm not sure if my PC randomly choked on the render or if the Advanced Atmosphere slowed it down. 

I tried with and without IDL and IDL looks far superior, I think.  (but I only posted with IDL here)

Yep, I should mosey over to RDNA and post some ideas.  Just feeling weekend lazy.

Quote - For  tons of textures, including 360 skies, you may want to look at CGTextures

Sweet! Thanks! I had forgotten that they had 360 skies.

Of course, to get the same results as Terradome, you'd have to create an IBL for each sky and a light setting and parent one of them to the skydome...

What's this about parenting an IBL? IBL lighting can't be rotated in Poser. I don't know why, the math is straightforward. You can rotate the light, but the lighting is unaffected.

Dunno, BB.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding this or wording it poorly.  This is what the Terradome user manual says:

"Another great feature of the TERRADOME lighting system is that the sunlight is parented to
the skydome. What this means is that as you rotate the skydome throughout 360 degrees the
sunlight rotates with it projecting from the correct place in the scene and casting
corresponding shadows."

what is terradome? 

It's an environment-builder add-on for Poser that's been created by two 3D artists, Traveler and Colm.  It's being sold over at Runtime DNA.  I assume that it's OK if I link to it since it's not my product.

They describe it as "A Revolutionary Atmospheric Landscape Generator and Daylight Rendering System for Poser 7, PPro and 8"

http://www.runtimedna.com/Runtime-DNA-s-TerraDome.html

Quote - Dunno, BB.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding this or wording it poorly.  This is what the Terradome user manual says:

"Another great feature of the TERRADOME lighting system is that the sunlight is parented to
the skydome. What this means is that as you rotate the skydome throughout 360 degrees the
sunlight rotates with it projecting from the correct place in the scene and casting
corresponding shadows."

And it works great, I've done it and indeed the shadows fall very differently as if the sun is moving. Great feature for animations.

andolaurina, I think your looking at it and reading "IBL" and it just says  that the sunlight is parented to the skydome :) When I read it I see that while it has an IBL image probe light, the sunlight is a different light in the set up :)

Quote - andolaurina, I think your looking at it and reading "IBL" and it just says  that the sunlight is parented to the skydome :) When I read it I see that while it has an IBL image probe light, the sunlight is a different light in the set up :)

I'm still in the early "play" stages of this (but I'm loving it already!) 

but..

IF the sunlight is rotated and the IBL stays put, as IBL's should.. Wouldn't you potentially get totally wrong lights then? If the IBJ says "light from left" and you rotate your sun to the right?

I haven't tried rotating mine yet, I just rotated the zones inside and the house I've put in it...

But it looks promising. I just hate their Morph injection thing. Why not have all the morphs LOADED on the zones. It's not slowing things down THAT much (And I always load the lot because I don't know which ones I am going to need...)

Quote - Dunno, BB.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding this or wording it poorly.  This is what the Terradome user manual says:

"Another great feature of the TERRADOME lighting system is that the sunlight is parented to
the skydome. What this means is that as you rotate the skydome throughout 360 degrees the
sunlight rotates with it projecting from the correct place in the scene and casting
corresponding shadows."

That's fine, because it's talking about sunlight, which is modelled with an infinite light, whereas you were talking about IBL which is not implementing the sunlight. IBL is implementing the secondary lighting from sky and ground.

 Oh and Andolaurina... Nice pic. I'm not sure where the artifacts are though but I'm wondering.. did you turn off smoothing for the tower? That often helps with weird artifacts.

Quote - > Quote - andolaurina, I think your looking at it and reading "IBL" and it just says  that the sunlight is parented to the skydome :) When I read it I see that while it has an IBL image probe light, the sunlight is a different light in the set up :)

I'm still in the early "play" stages of this (but I'm loving it already!) 

but..

IF the sunlight is rotated and the IBL stays put, as IBL's should.. Wouldn't you potentially get totally wrong lights then? If the IBJ says "light from left" and you rotate your sun to the right?

No you woudln't get wrong lights. The sunlight tracks the position of the virtual sun, which you can move around if you want. The sky light and ground lighting doesn't really change much from a GI perspective even as the sun moves across the sky.

I have checked Terradome out, very briefly. (I get it for free being a RDNA team member.)

I highly recommend this product. I'm sure there will be many add-ons for it in the future. I have not spoken with Colm or Traveler about it - I'm just telling you what I see. I think it's very clever, very well done. The advanced atmosphere has got some very nice effects. I think I see a little teeny problem with the fact that the AA is just a limited number of concentric spheres, but I haven't studied it enough to be able to say that with any certainty, so don't believe me on that yet. I like this product a lot.

I notice it's missing water - I will provide a free set of water shaders for it soon, after I get my daughter off to college.

I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't recommend products very much. Like once a year maybe.

Quote -
No you woudln't get wrong lights. The sunlight tracks the position of the virtual sun, which you can move around if you want. The sky light and ground lighting doesn't really change much from a GI perspective even as the sun moves across the sky.

OK cool! Thanks for explaining that!

Quote - I have checked Terradome out, very briefly. (I get it for free being a RDNA team member.)

I highly recommend this product. I'm sure there will be many add-ons for it in the future. I have not spoken with Colm or Traveler about it - I'm just telling you what I see. I think it's very clever, very well done. The advanced atmosphere has got some very nice effects. I think I see a little teeny problem with the fact that the AA is just a limited number of concentric spheres, but I haven't studied it enough to be able to say that with any certainty, so don't believe me on that yet. I like this product a lot.

I notice it's missing water - I will provide a free set of water shaders for it soon, after I get my daughter off to college.

I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't recommend products very much. Like once a year maybe.

I noticed ^_ ^ An endorsement from you is about all any product can dream of :)

Also.. when's your daughter off to college? Huh? Is it there yet? Huh? 

GG

Water shaders will be a nice addition. As well as some more morphs and plants. But it's very nice "as is"

Here's my first render of it. With IDL and everything - and NO postwork other than my name.
(only thing is.. it's the "overcast" sky and light.. so the shadows are really too sharp.. but it still looks nice I think...)

BTW I had to turn tone mapping OFF - not sure if there's GC on the textures used.. it was totally washed out with Tone Mapping on.

I'm quite sure Trekkiegrrrl all that you are asking for will more then likely pop up from Colm and Traveler for this product.  I myself am so totally stoked about this that I'm almost giddy LOL!!!

But then I'm an old Brycer so there ya go :)

LOL!!!

Quote - > Quote - Dunno, BB.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding this or wording it poorly.  This is what the Terradome user manual says:

"Another great feature of the TERRADOME lighting system is that the sunlight is parented to
the skydome. What this means is that as you rotate the skydome throughout 360 degrees the
sunlight rotates with it projecting from the correct place in the scene and casting
corresponding shadows."

That's fine, because it's talking about sunlight, which is modelled with an infinite light, whereas you were talking about IBL which is not implementing the sunlight. IBL is implementing the secondary lighting from sky and ground.

Oh...I see the confusion now.  As I suspected, I poorly worded it.  Sorry! 

I wasn't talking about rotating the IBL...just a light in a light set (vague and poorly worded).  When I said, "parent one of them" I meant to parent a light to the skydome to act as a sun.  Honestly, I hadn't analyzed it closely enough to see if a spotlight or infinite light was being used. 

When I said IBL in that series of commas, I meant that you'd have to create an IBL to go with the 360 skydome image.  Those were muddled, consecutive thoughts.  In other words:

* Create a 360 skydome texture + material pose

• Create an IBL image that matches your new 360 texture (if you want it to match), corresponding light, etc.
• Parent an infinite light (I now know) to the skydome so it will rotate with it in the spot where the sun is on the 360 skydome texture
  (Plus other steps that I'm overlooking, I'm sure! )

My point was that you can't just stick a 360 texture from CGtextures in there and expect the work to be done.

But, I'm definitely no lighting expert like BB (I'm being very serious), so I still may be screwing up the explanation but that's what it looked like when I dug into the files.

Quote -  Oh and Andolaurina... Nice pic. I'm not sure where the artifacts are though but I'm wondering.. did you turn off smoothing for the tower? That often helps with weird artifacts.

Nope! Forgot to do that.  That's it. 

Quote - I just hate their Morph injection thing. Why not have all the morphs LOADED on the zones. It's not slowing things down THAT much (And I always load the lot because I don't know which ones I am going to need...)

Agreed - that is tedious.

 I didn't know you could parent infinite lights?

Must admit I've never tried. I just thought only spotlights and points could be parented?

 Aeilkema.. are you rendering with Tone Mapping on? Try switching it off. My first attempt was a lot like yours: Nice enough but at the same time strangely flat and kinda washed out. Almost like a Bryce render.
Once I disabled tone mapping it looked a lot better. The colours were more vivid and there was a better depth in it :)

I really like your pic btw. And it's funny because I ALMOST made one very similar in idea to this :)

What's the best use for tone mapping anyway?  

I lloked around at the free stuff here, and there are lots of seamless tiles, and some IBL lights. For those who don't mind a little do-it-yourself tweaking. There is plenty of material for variety.

LMK

Yes, tone mapping is on. I've atttached the none tone mapped image, but I do find that a bit too dark. I've never liked the too dark Poser images that FireFly produces. With Poser Pro I always use Gamma Correction to get them brighter overall, with P8 I've got Tone Mapping on. It's normally on 2, but for TerraDome I'll still have to lower that a bit to get the best results. Still playing with that.