Hey Ricknard... thanks for stopping by my page...

A little tidbit for you about ultrafractal... There is a coloring algorithm in the mjw.ucl folder called Direct Displacement Map... it can be used to create displacement maps with up to 16million gradient values for height.. instead of the usual 256 garnered from a bitmapped image... You may know about it already.. and if so.. disregard this.. but if not.. enjoy!

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Waste your time, fight for the lead, I've trained my eye on the hand with the whip.

Why not visit my wife's gallery? *SethraLavode

Proud Member of *Ultra-Fractal *MindOfLead ~DeviousFractals *Apophysis

many thanks... I have not committed too much learning time yet, as work has gotten strangely busy (unpredictably demanding, unpredictably lax, alternating), so what time I have had in the last month has been put to going through the Xeno Dream tutorials... and not much time at that. YET. A little on Apophysis every now and then, but very minimal, judging by what others have whipped up and presented here. Very inspiring, all, tho.

I noticed that when I used that UF derived image for Terragen mapping, it was composed of very high spikes, which would indicate very sharp color gradients, which is directly in line with what you mention about the number of colors. Like the difference between 1000 ft/300 m contour lines and 1 ft/.3 m contour lines on a topo map... that and reducing the ranges for max/min altitudes that the colors represent... might get to a more realistic land mass at some point. I do like the ability to take mathematically complex graphs (which is what fractals actually represent) and use them to render geographic-like scenes.

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Someone who works with their hands is a laborer.
Someone who works with their head and their hands is a craftsman.
Someone who works with their head, hands and heart is an artist.
-Chinese proverb

Fall down seven times, get up eight.
-Japanese prvr

not a problem... I took note of it only because I am learning vue and wanted to import fractals for texturing and like you, terrain.

Regretably, I only had the chance to play with xenodream in it's infancy... and have as of yet to grab a copy of the newest one. I drool, but it's as far on the back burner as can be as far as budgeting goes... so I wait patiently... I have seen a lot of great shapes created with it.. especially on Renderosity.. many outlandish plant shapes that would fill an alien landscape like filling in a pie...

--
Waste your time, fight for the lead, I've trained my eye on the hand with the whip.

Why not visit my wife's gallery? *SethraLavode

Proud Member of *Ultra-Fractal *MindOfLead ~DeviousFractals *Apophysis