New Cloud Control Inputs

Started by miqtidar, November 27, 2010, 04:01:34 PM

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Tangled-Universe

Thanks for nothing so far :)
Oshyan received it yesterday and will post it soon.
He first needs to correct my crappy (technical) writing skills ;)
So bear with him!

Oshyan

And here we are, the first pass. I'll convert it into an HTML format on the website properly a bit later. For now you can all enjoy the PDF version with links to the YouTube vids and separate resource files download.

http://www.planetside.co.uk/content/view/61/99/

- Oshyan

mhaze


Kevin F

Yes, Thanks very much guys, this looks really good.

mhaze

seem to be missing an image map - 1px_4px_blur_b.sgi

MrHooper

Awesome.  Thanks for this.  I was just wondering how to use this effectively.

One question...  When you say, using the existing network for your altitude inputs are slow... how slow are we talking?  Is it worth the tradeoff of man-hours to generate and match image maps? 

And for example, what would one plug in to use the existing network?

Andrew

Tangled-Universe

Hi Andrew,

I'm pretty sure that the process of generating an image from your terrain will be MUCH faster. It doesn't take man-hours, but minutes ;)

The reason that the cloud input functions should be as simple as possible is because these functions are called first while the cloud is still an unmodulated bounding volume.
Using a complex function straightly from your terrain would really slow things down.

That's how Matt explained it to us and it makes a lot of sense. (if it wouldn't I'd take it for granted anyway ;D lol).
Therefore I haven't pursued any ways to directly use the terrain functions as input.
I might give it a try though, some time and just to see if I can make it work, but I'm pretty sure I won't use it.

Martin

Gannaingh

Thank you for this TU and Planetside! I can't wait to dig into this!

dhavalmistry

"His blood-terragen level is 99.99%...he is definitely drunk on Terragen!"

FrankB

very cool Martin, well explained, good job!!

Cheers,
Frank

Tangled-Universe

Quote from: FrankB on December 02, 2010, 03:33:48 PM
very cool Martin, well explained, good job!!

Cheers,
Frank

Thanks Frank :)
People should thank you for it as well, because your ideas on the alpha forums finally made me figure it out to this level!

Cheers,
Martin

reck

Martin this is fantastic. You really have a skill for explaining the technical details of Terragen, not just in this pdf but also in your forum posts made here.

This must have taken quite a while to produce so thanks to you and Oshyan for taking the time to make it.


Tangled-Universe

You're welcome Reck and thanks for the compliments :)

In this particular case it wasn't that much work specifically, because a lot of the materials I made during the period I was figuring it out myself.
So the animations and stuff weren't initially intended to teach you, but myself :)
I hope you don't mind me being honest about that ;D  :D I think it took a whole day and a bit in total.

Good luck with it!

And for everyone reading/using it...show your tests/results in the image section!!!

Cheers,
Martin

dandelO

Cool write-up there, cheers, TU.

When I use shaders that also enter the main network to drive the cloud functions, I've done it with only shaders right at the top of the chain, meaning that if I use a terrain heightfield for a cloud function, it hasn't even passed through any other nodes at all yet. The heightfield shader node allows you to colour any terrain from a black base to white at the highest points, there's a depth map right there. Colour adjusting to invert this gives you the reverse, obviously, which can be used to modulate clouds only between the peaks, that still mimic the terrain forms. I don't think it warrants the use of a separate image map of the terrain every time, unless you're passing the mask through many other nodes(probably most troublesome would be 'compute terrain' as it would triple calculation time of the functions entering the cloud shader) before it reaches the cloud.
I'd think using the black/white colour output of high up shaders in the network should be fine in most cases.

miqtidar

#29
Wooowwwaa Thanks Planetside Team for this Tutorial.