Not fair!              :(

www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php

How does one make fake stones on these levels in Vue. I tried and can not figure this out. Displacement materials on several alpha channel layers perhaps?

Nifty, i want to buy the Sea Vue product and now this. Those caves and displacement mats look spectacular.

Z = > Y is right on the money.    :)  

Displacement is for the mat only. I do not know if modifying the terrain the way i did can be considered a form of displacement?

Also i wish i can do more extreme forms of displacing the terrain like what i used to do in Terragen 2 but the more displacement i use, the more Vue 6 has a difficult time dealing with this feature. E-On really needs to optimize this feature as it was easy and fast in Terragen.

Displacement does take a long time to calculate unfortunatley and if i add to many layers of displacement i run out of memory which begs the question on why does not Vue 6 use hard drive space as memory and only RAM? This most certainly would be most helpful for everybody.

I only have one gigabyte of ddr-ram and even this is not nearly enough.

This image here took 16 hours to render. High resolution size is at 3200 across. All parts of the terrain has displacement, both large and small elements. No image imports. 100% procedurals.

No overlays. Just layers and layers of micro-displacement and various other shaders like fake stones are used. I tried displacement but Vue slows down a lot and at times crashes with using this feature. Getting into the function editor is easy enough. I was just wondering if anyone ever tried at such small details of barrens terrains close up like this.

To me it seems to take longer to render using displacement although i may be wrong about this. Had anyone else experienced a slow down using displacement?

True, there is more control. I will admit that terragen is rather limited with it's own surface textures. Terragen 2 has perlins, voronoi and additional turbulent noise but these are all dedicated to terrains but what is nice about vue is a larger variety of noises. I think that diving into the nodal system that vue has is were the solution is and just not mearly the basic material editor.  

In fact as i was discovering the "granite" is very good for tiny noise.    :)

Thank you for the suggestions.   :)

Control is not the problem. Just details really. For example i can open up Terragen and make a simple surface and i get many sub-pixel textures just from that one surface alone, not to boast about Terragen but it is just that i have used it longer then Vue. Yet i like using Vue because it suits more the artist rather then having to get technical about Terragen's use.

I am thinking that many of the procedurals just need a sub-noise, a graininess that adds a grime to the surfaces that takes away from the obvious cg smoothness of each texture. This is what i am thinking. Any surface made in Terragen 2 has sub-noise by default so there is never a smoothness to any given surface. Most of this grime detail is of course for more natural surfaces like ground, rocks, bark and the like.

I do want to get Vue 6. That displacement sounds promising and hyper-textures as well. These might be the details to surfacing i am looking for. I just will wait until this version is mostly clear of bugs.     :)

Here are examples of Terragen 2 and Vue 5 Infinite - Simple perlin noise only. In vue i added a fine noise and i was thinking about using something like this to detail overall procedural textures. I figured by adding a few more noises that this might imitate terragen's noise to a certain degree. Softening the hard shadows might help as well.

img134.imageshack.us/img134/1759/compairef0.jpg

Making new materials from scratch is easy, i was just wondering why vue's own procedurals tend to look so horrid most of the time. I though some one might have had the reciepe on realistic materials.

I have those tutorials that you had linked to. To bad that others do not provide more in depth ideas on how to create more photo-real surfaces within vue only. I more or less mastered Genetica 2.5 but i thought why could one not do the same in Vue's material editor but i have looked into all of the materials that came with the software and honestly i tend to believe i can get more detail and realism out of Genetica. In fact some of my own work will be in 3D World Magazine for Feb 2007 on the CD.

The one problem with image mapped textures is repeats sense they are not procedural once they are exported outside of the software that was used to create them. So any vista-like scene would have to be very well layered to avoid that repetative pattern although this should not be necessary.

This is sick, heh,heh. I think i'll stick with drawing people only.     :)