Pantopia SE (Special Edition)

It's the Planet I'm developing for an attempt to shoot a snippet of "animation on location" - "Soecial Edition" means it's a little different from "my own" version. Mine has fewer material features and a different, more "realistic" Terrain outside the main continent.

There is the main continent. It's for rendering a large variety of Landscape Mojogrqaphs and perhaps close-ups of rocks and material blends.  Almost all conceivable kinds of "natural looking" MJW land shapes are there, somewhere, with the exception of canyons (as far as I know, anyway). I was aiming for what I call "Natural Realism": trying to make it look like something grown naturally, without trying to force it to look like photography. IMPORTANT: It's a river terrain with a lot of local detail. It takes a while to calculate when you open the file, or when you jump to a different location. While navigating, every once in a while the RTR pauses briefly to calculate more rivers for the trip ahead. It happens less often when you move close to the ground. This is normal with River Terrains. It will still render faster and easier than most you come across.
Up North the snow line drops down to lower altitudes. Approaching the equator, stretches of arid rocky desert start taking over from the otherwise lush vegetation clinging to the rugged rocks wherever it can. I thought good and hard about this: there is no ice on the rivers and no snow on the beaches. At altitudes where snow occurs, the rivers are too rapid for this to happen. Speaking of rivers and rapid: There  was a problem: There were white water rapids forming right across huge lakes, unexpectedly. I tried tweaking, and tried, and tried some more... until Jim "Riverman" Bardeen mentioned that it's a bug and he's fixed it - for future versions. So, I had to leave the white water rapids out of the materials mix, for now. I would also have liked to place pebbles and rocks on some of the beaches, but this will also have to wait until "the next version". We'd be running the risk of jaggies along the water line.

Outside the main continent, there is the area which the natives call The Reef. It's for rendering colourful "graphic design abstracts". Here is my story to explain it: Greedy rogue prospectors came to the mineral rich planet of Pantopia and offered the little humanoid natives MP3 players and transistor radios in return for mining rights. The Reef is the result of centuries of indiscriminate out of control mining, which only stopped when the powerful Pandropolitan Mining Company stepped in and put an end to the plundering of Pantopia's natural wealth. What is left now is one big lumpy desert of huge mineral crystals, interspersed with suction marks where the huge atomic powered extracting machines (up to 30km across) attached themselves, melting thousands of square kilometers of land while proceeding with their ruthless despicable activity.

I scaled and sized everything the way it is on the only "real" planet I have been to. If you want to see waves on the water, ripples on the desert sand, roughness on the rocks... you'll need to move closer than a few hundred meters. I tuned the displacements and blends so that there is no aliasing to speak of, anywhere, as far as I can make out. Anywhere I looked, it seems possible to render good quality landscape pictures with a soft appearance reasonably fast at both, AA and GD set to 3. The tallest mountains rise to altitudes similar to the tallest mountains on Earth. The rivers, though, are huge, forming lakes and swamps with backwaters which make the Amazon look like park land by comparison.

Pantopia has three moons: Ludwig, Pyetar and Harryhausen, named after three artists I like a lot.

there are 11 sliders to control the atmosphere, 3 to change the colours of the Reef, and one to spread the desert aacross more of the land.

Thanks to Jim "Riverman" Bardeen, the author of the Rivers Plugin, for his help with this project.

I hope this isn't too easy to qualify for the "Challenge" tag. If so, render a fly-over animation at AA/GD 2/2... :)
enjoy
G