Lake edge

Started by Alkin, August 25, 2011, 02:34:24 PM

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Alkin

Hello.

I have a small problem which i am not sure how to solve. On the picture below is my first terrogen 2 work. I spend a lot of time trying to make water edge more realistic but was unable to. Can someone advice how to do that?
Also fake stones are give me some problems but i guess its all matter of tweaking.

dandelO

#1
Looks like you need some transparency in the water shader. It seems that you either have no transparency OR that your water object is set to cast shadows. A default lake, you might have noticed, has the 'cast shadows' checkbox un-checked, if you've used a plane object for your water, you might simply need to un-check this box in the plane.

If there are no shadows being cast by the water object, the simplest way to determine transparency distance is to hover your mouse over the lake object surface roughly at the distance you'd like to see transparency from the shore turning to opaque, this will give you a set of coord's at the bottom of the 3D preview. The 'Y' ordinate is the one to note here. keep that number in mind and then, disable the water object temporarily and hover over roughly the same spot in the 3D preview again. You'll now see a new 'Y' number beneath the preview. Use the difference between the two 'Y' numbers(the one with water and the one without) as your transparency distance in the water shader.

Here, my water object(with shadows unchecked) is at 50 metres high. The terrain beneath it where I want to see the maximum distance into is at 46 metres, so I set transparency to '1' and decay distance to '4'.

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airflamesred

DandelO to the rescue again!

Nice work Alkin

Alkin

#3
DandelO
Thank you very much for your replay and explanations. I will trey to do the adjustments you are advising.

After playing with settings back and forth thats what i come up with. I dont think it improved by much and still looks not really natural.

Henry Blewer

Try plugging in the color power fractal for your sand color into the displacement input of the surface layer. You may need to adjust the scale and displacement of the power fractal. This will add some variation to the shore edge.
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T

Tangled-Universe

There are a couple of reasons why it looks unnatural:

1) The terrain is quite flat and has a gentle slope, this causes the straight lake edge since little changes in the terrain over distance. You'd need to roughen up the terrain a bit more by adding a powerfractal with a little bit of displacement. Not much, but just to break the even-ness.

You already have fake stones, but you can also choose to add a layer of 2 or 3 more much smaller stones to create a kind of soil.
This will cover up the edge and tends to make things look more natural.

2) The wavescale is very large (at default anyway) for the scale you're trying to depict it.
If the wavescale is large then straight edges may appear when the large wave intersects with the (large junk of) terrain.
If the wavescale settings are default (=10m) then try the following for starters: max size = 1, smallest = 0.005, roughness = ~0.015.

Cheers,
Martin

Alkin

Thank you for your advice. I did noticed myself that the coastline is to smooth which does not allow water curve around small obstacles as it wood on real world. I will try to work with surface shaders.

Oshyan

The color of the terrain also does not change at all when going in to the water, which is fairly unnatural looking unless it's very recent flooding. So I'd suggest doing some surface coloring changes by altitude and color what's under the water something more like dirt (less vegetation) or sand.

- Oshyan

Dune

Have a look at this.

Alkin

#9
Quote from: Dune on August 27, 2011, 03:29:14 AM
Have a look at this.

Thanks. This is very good example that help a lot. I will try to fix water and coastline issue.
And here is what i came up with.

Tangled-Universe

That looks a lot better. I'm pretty sure a smaller wave scale (and less roughness consequently) would add to the realism.

Dune

QuoteThat looks a lot better.
But it's not v2 yet.

Alkin

#12
Quote from: Dune on August 30, 2011, 02:20:09 AM
QuoteThat looks a lot better.
But it's not v2 yet.

Dune,

Your example created more questions. While i do see how natural stones looks i also noticed that the small scale stone and mid create a circle which does not look very natural. I tried to scatter it but it didnt work out well. Also if ill try to leave only large stones on the picture it seems like undoable due to merge shader.  I disable small and mid stones, and large are gone. Working with nods and moving large stones to beach shader does nothing.
Little help please? ))

Never mind. I figured it out. I wasn't connecting 10m stones in proper input nod.

Alkin

And here it is.

Henry Blewer

You may be loosing the smaller fake stones because the slope constraint for the later surface layers is set too high. Try using the intersect underlaying, favor depressions on the later surface layers.
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T