procedural population variation

Started by Dune, September 24, 2010, 09:04:37 AM

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otakar

Brilliant. Now, if you could tie the grass color to the normal vector's affinity to a specific cardinal direction, you could make north facing slopes appear greener than those exposed south facing ones :)

Hetzen


Dune

I second Otakar. But
QuoteYou might find this set of shaders useful then...
Unfortunately, these formulas are unfinished business, but maybe a mathematical wizzkid will arise and venture into this...

Hetzen

The only thing missing is the y orientation on the "green to scaler", which isn't needed for creating a north facing mask. Set the direction heading to 0, then use the output from "Clamp 0" as your blending mask.

otakar

Hetzen, thanks for the link. I'll have to study this as the thread only confuses me. ???

Dune

#95
The stack of perlins works well, and offers several possibilities, like snow on trees etc. Here's another test I did yesterday (not the snow one) with only 2 trees.

The only problem I encountered is the 'line' due to the displacement intersection and clouds (?) bug.

Volker Harun

Line??? Which line? ... Or do you mean that road in the distance that you made on purpose??? :)
Does the line vanish if you turn off the clouds?

FrankB

Quote from: Dune on September 30, 2010, 02:26:02 AM
The stack of perlins works well, and offers several possibilities, like snow on trees etc. Here's another test I did yesterday (not the snow one) with only 2 trees.

The only problem I encountered is the 'line' due to the displacement intersection and clouds (?) bug.

Ulco, I know this line. It comes from intersect underlying in combination with a fuzzy zone. Turn it off and you will see.

Cheers,
Frank

Dune

Thanks guys. I set the fuzzy zone to 0 now. See what happens. I'm now rendering another one, where I made a gradient with 2 distribution shaders + the 3D perlins to partially cover some pines with snow. So, playing along happily...

Floating.Point

#99
Okay this was a great thread
(so great in fact that I don't even feel like I need to apologize for resurrecting it  ;D)

All this is fairly full on for me (and perhaps/surely others)

Here is what i have done so far...
(Using a Grassclump population as my example)

1. Grabbed DandelO's clip from this post: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10810.msg111255#msg111255
Plugged it into the color function of the parts shader of the Grassclump

2. Grabbed & used Volker's beautiful fractal from this post: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10826.msg111379#msg111379

3. played with the Color Adjustments to get a nice smooth variation...

But all this seems to do is darken/lighten the green of my grass... how do I get the amazing differences in color...
like in Dunes post here: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10810.msg111374#msg111374

Would it be possible for a quick idiots guide to population variation ?
I don't think a full blown tutorial would be needed, just a bit of hand holding as to how to use the information accumulated within this thread (and its sibling threads)

Cheers!

-FP

Edit: Attached my little example project

dandelO

You could set the colour function of the object-part shader to 'white' and then use different colours from each perlin function that feeds into it. That should distribute each colour used over the populated parts.

Haven't time to have a look as it's my eldest's birthday, maybe tomorrow I'll have a play with TG again.

Volker Harun

Agree with the above ...

The attached image might give you a clue :)

Floating.Point

Thanks DandelO and Volker,

Can you explain to me the reason for the Multiply Colour Function, and what is feeding into its input 2?

Many thanks

-FP

Volker Harun

The merge shader is for getting different shades of green and brownish colours.

The multiply colour is for getting darker and lighter areas (those tiny spots). The right input is fed with the other perlin function which is in the internal network of your colour variation shader.

Floating.Point