Tranquility Bay

[elipsis1]

I like this one, especially the planet in the sky.

I am a little curious as to the lines in the sky?  As I edited in Photoshop CS5 these became more apparent.

Is that a function of not enough color levels available in the Tiff file, or a render issue?

My guess is the tiff needs to be higher bit depth to avoid the streaks?

[Tangled-Universe]

Nice crisp work

I also see the banding. There can be various reasons, mostly it's due to lack of bit-depth, so not enough information to store the precise gradient.
Sometimes it also occurs when saving it to a compressed format, so if you don't see it in your TIFF/EXR(32-bit) output then it's likely compression.

But, it can also occur in the renderer when you reduce the sample jitter in the sky (jitter should be considered as a randomnization function to distribute sample-points (samples) for calculation). I don't think you reduced that as that's not the usual thing somebody starts playing with.

[TheBadger]

Hi elipsis1

I'm still not sure, how much is render and how much are you doing in post? Whats your work flow? Just curious.

[elipsis1]

Sometimes it also occurs when saving it to a compressed format, so if you don't see it in your TIFF/EXR(32-bit) output then it's likely compression.

When I load it up in photoshop it says it is an 8 bit tiff? How do I enable 32-bit TIFF?

Oh and here is a newer version of the image with less banding.  I changed the mode from 8 to 32bit, then did post work.

Thanks for your help!  

EDIT: too much sharpening?

[efflux]

Cool. Nice composition and this terrain works well with water.

[elipsis1]

Well I got my banding issue fixed.  Save as "EXR" got me a 32bit file.  I guess the Tiffs are only 8bit?

Have to convert down to save as jpeg.  So much learning to do!

Thank you all for your comments

EDIT: hmm banding is still there, but much less pronounced... argh...

[Kadri]

There are many topics on this if you search the web.
It is a common problem in some situations (like a sky with little or no other objects and a gradient)  and not only in TG2.
If you look at the EXR file you directly saved from TG2 there are no banding or very little at all.
Try to use a lower contrast in the image etc.
Use some dithering or-and noise to break the banding.
Try different converting methods with dither-noise etc. if you have to.
With very little dither-noise added you will probably get no banding , Elipsis1.

[jo]

Hi,

I also suspect some of the banding may come from JPEG compression. A common compression scheme will compress the blue channel of an image more than the others, which can mean blues are more prone to showing artifacts like banding. That's a bit tricky for those of us commonly rendering blue skies! Obviously you were also having issues with the TIFF though, which doesn't do any compression.

As Kadri says banding is a common problem in some aspects of images and there's quite a lot of info on the web about how to minimise it.

Regards,

Jo

[elipsis1]

I tried "add noise" in photoshop and tweaked the amount, but didn't like that very much... I just chose add noise, perhaps there is a different option for dither noise?

Anyway, I did find that I liked the Gaussian blur / mask combo quite well, although that can be problematic with masking. I suppose there is a way to render a mask in Terragen? Distance shader or something?

[Henry Blewer]

Try adding a very thin cirrus cloud layer. Reduce the edge sharpness to 0.2 and increase the base softness and wispiness to around 0.9. % or 10 meters for the cloud depth. This should let the celestial objects to shine through, but break up the sky gradient.

[Xynedia]

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