Make River

Started by helentr, December 23, 2006, 02:36:53 AM

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helentr

Hello,

I have some problems with the HeightfieldMakeRiver.
On a new world, I generated a heightfield, then tried adding a river.

As I wanted to change the river's position from the default start 0,0/end 1000,1000 to start 1000,1000/end 2000,2000, I tried to change the numbers. It started making a river, as soon as I entered the first digit (1) of the first number 1000. I tried to ignore the generating window and finish up writing my numbers, but when I brought the window in front, it was generating its river again and again - I counted some 30 times, then closed Terragen. After a little while, the generating window closed too.

On reopening the world, it tried to carve the river before generating the heightfield.
I tried making a new world to see if there was some setting (like autogenerate) that I needed to uncheck. So I generated a heightfield and added the river operator, but I had no chance to see the settings, since it started carving a river multiple times, never finishing and restarting, until I closed the program.

Is this a common problem, or is it because of something I need to change?

Merry Christmas to all

Helen

Oshyan

Many of the heightfield modifiers are a bit buggy. I frankly would avoid tinkering with them for now, except perhaps the simple ones like Heightfield Adjust Vertical. I think you're better off doing complex heightfield manipulation in other applications like World Machine at this time. In the future these functions will receive more attention and will be much easier to work with but for now they're going to take a lot of patience to get good results out of.

- Oshyan

helentr

Quote from: JavaJones on December 23, 2006, 03:39:01 AM
Many of the heightfield modifiers are a bit buggy. I frankly would avoid tinkering with them for now, except perhaps the simple ones like Heightfield Adjust Vertical. I think you're better off doing complex heightfield manipulation in other applications like World Machine at this time. In the future these functions will receive more attention and will be much easier to work with but for now they're going to take a lot of patience to get good results out of.

- Oshyan

I am glad it wasn't because I had unknowingly made a dreaded loop somewhere. I will try to avoid them, but I do so love procedural heightfields - they can cover a whole planet - now eroding the whole planet ... ;D

Helen

Oshyan

There is a difference in TG2 between "procedural" and "heightfield". Although both technically have many aspects in common, in practical terms a heightfield is a finite array of planar data points while a procedural is a more "raw" mathematical descriptor that is visualized as a surface. A heightfield exists at a specific resolution, a procedural's resolution is determined at render time. This is why the heightfields in TG2 only occupy a relatively small, square area of the scene. The procedurals like the Power Fractal and Alpine Fractal are infinite and can cover the entire palnet. A procedural can be made into a heightfield or "rasterized", but this loses many of its advantages.

Processes like erosion generally only apply to raster heightfields because of the way their computational processes work. They have to operate on finite data sets of a specific resolution or the calculation time would be theoretically infinite. Doing erosion across an entire planet in that way is not feasible. There are some possibilities in current terrain modeling research for doing "procedural erosion", producing results like the Alpine Shader in TG2, but these are largely experimental.

In any case you can still play freely with procedurals. You were never able to use heightfield operators on them anyway (unless you used Heightfield From Shader, which as I said loses some of the good parts about procedurals), so you're not really losing anything.

- Oshyan

PatGoltz

I did succeed in making a river once. It would only calculate one time, when I made it, and whenever I opened a file that had it in it.

Pat

amadreea

Quote from: PatGoltz on December 26, 2006, 07:15:20 AM
I did succeed in making a river once. It would only calculate one time, when I made it, and whenever I opened a file that had it in it.

Pat

I did this trial thing to make a river... I gave up. Everytime starts to calculate entering in a loop that seems not to stop not even after 20 minutes... so no river carving for me till TG2 final one is not  ready. But I am mostly curious to see how the falling water will be possible.

PatGoltz

I thought I'd try making a river again, and then couldn't find it, because I didn't realize it was a heightfield. Once I found out, I got distracted with something else, so I haven't gone back to it. But I never saw it calculate more than once per occasion.

Pat

bugfish

I was able to get it to work when I was experimenting with the heightfield modifiers.  However, the earlier posts were correct.  It starts calculating as soon as you type the first number in.  This means, if you want to enter two 4 digit numbers, you need to sit thru 8 complete calculations.

bobbystahr

Well I did finally get it to make a river[requested help in another thread and was sent here by Helen], and it seems patience is a very big asset in working with TG2. When it was finished I had a meandering river running roughly diagonaly across my terrain, starting under the camera as it's position gave me a great starting point I just Ctrl C/Ctrl V'd into the requestor. Then I just kept on typing my requests into it till I had the info I wanted it to follow and that is where the patience came in...it took around 15-20 min to make it but it comes up fairly fast when I reload the .tgd file.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

bobbystahr

Further to Make River Heightfield...when you first initiate it. immediately click abort, and the remove the check mark fro the box, up left. Then you can type in stuff at will, without it generating all the time. Once you have the numbers you want, check the box again and that's where patience is needed, make a coffee, watch some tube, whatever for at least 20 min if you're going for a really long[corner to corner] one like I did...LOL.
Sure wish we could animate this free ver....sigh
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

king_tiger_666

so the river heightfeild is functional i take it?... just takes forever to finsh generating?...

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