Aurora australis and bioluminescence

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ChrisGreaves
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Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by ChrisGreaves »

Now this image looks eerily like those "views of other planets" constructions that were popular some ten years ago.
I remember that the constructed images would have two or more suns (mandatory!!) and craggy mountains with no vegetation, tangerine skies, violet seas, etc etc.

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Chris
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HansV
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by HansV »

Perhaps Tasmania IS a different planet?
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ChrisGreaves
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by ChrisGreaves »

HansV wrote:
23 Nov 2020, 13:41
Perhaps Tasmania IS a different planet?
Well, Hans, I'll grant you that it is part of The Eastern States, but still and all we refer to Tasmania as "The Soccer Pitch", so i suspect it is terribly terrestrial.
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Chris :basket:
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LisaGreen
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by LisaGreen »

ChrisGreaves wrote:
23 Nov 2020, 12:51
Now this image looks eerily like those "views of other planets" constructions that were popular some ten years ago.
I remember that the constructed images would have two or more suns (mandatory!!) and craggy mountains with no vegetation, tangerine skies, violet seas, etc etc.

Cheers
Chris
Shouldn't that be tangerine trees and marmalade skies! :-)

I believe a lot of those "planetscapes" were generated at least partly by fractals that at that time took an awwwwwful long time to create.

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stuck
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by stuck »

LisaGreen wrote:
23 Nov 2020, 16:57
I believe a lot of those "planetscapes" were generated at least partly by fractals that at that time took an awwwwwful long time to create.
Here's (part of) a planet I made earlier, in 2008.

Ken
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by LisaGreen »

Did that take a long time Ken? Aren't fractals notoriously calculation intensive?

Nice btw!!!

Oh... sorry.... might not even be a fractal!

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HansV
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by HansV »

A long time ago, I played with Terragen, I think Ken did too.
But at some point it became too complicated and technical for me.
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stuck
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by stuck »

The image was created using an application now known as Terragen Classic, back then it was just Terragen v0.9. It was free for personal use and a lot of fun too but boy did it strain my (Win 98) PC. I can't remember how long it took to render this image but it probably was several hours. I might even have left it running overnight. I don't pretend to understand how the code behind it works but I'm fairly sure fractals are heavily involved.

TG Classic is no longer available from the main Planetside website but is available from places like Softipedia. There never was a v1.0 release.
Instead the author abandoned the code base and re-wrote it from scratch and released this as Terragen 2. The latest incarnation is v4. TG 2 and greater are very different beasts to TG Classic. The pay-money version is industrial strength CGI and gets used in Hollywood films.

Ken

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stuck
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by stuck »

HansV wrote:
23 Nov 2020, 18:28
A long time ago, I played with Terragen, I think Ken did too.
But at some point it became too complicated and technical for me.
Yes, I was a fan of TG Classic but like Hans, when TG 2 came out, it was much more complicated and at the time I didn't have a PC capable of running it so I moved on, to real photos.

Ken

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HansV
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by HansV »

I briefly installed Terragen 2, but I was afraid it would blow up my PC - it used 100% CPU and GPU.
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Hans

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stuck
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Re: Aurora australis and bioluminescence

Post by stuck »

I've discovered I've still got some videos where the stills were rendered with TG Classic and then animated as a Bink video clip. I've just flown over the Sahara!

Ken