mimicing Vue Ecosystem

[Stephen.Tarheel]

Good morning,

I'm new to the forum and have a few questions about Terragen and if it's right for me.

I'm looking at Vue and Terragen for use in creating illustration landscapes - I'm leaning towards Terragen because of the price and xFrog allowing for really alien effects.  However, one of the two questions I have about Terragen is how I'd setup something like Vue's Ecosystem for controlling where populations occur, making sure that trees are just on flatish surfaces, controlling grass with distance to water, snow lines.

If anyone has any starting points for how to achieve this effect, that'd be awesome and much appreciated.

-Stephen

[Dune]

Welcome to the forum, Stephen. I advice you to grab the free version and try some things out, perhaps starting with this: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=19 There are a lot of possibilities with shaders to control distribution of trees, snowline, etc. Virtually endless. If you have any specific questions, post it, and there are plenty nice users here to help you out.

[Stephen.Tarheel]

Dune,

I've worked a bit with the free version, the learning curve is rather, ahm, vertical. I deeply appreciate the link and the Ben McDuff tutorial - both are invaluable for figuring out how Terragen wants things to happen. 

Now that I think I have that figured out and the fact that it's all node based, I'm confident that I can do what I think I want to do (now, if what I think I want to do is what I need to do...that's a fun question).

Thanks for boost:)

-Stephen

[Stephen.Tarheel]

Dune,

Here's my first image after working through the tutorials.

-Stephen

[Dune]

Well, you got it nailed quite ok, I'd say, for a premiere. The search button is also invaluable; almost every issue has been debated here in previous posts. Reading through these older posts gives you solutions and files to use, which makes the learning curve a lot less vertical. It took me a couple of months to dare using the node system, but that's all I do now.

[Stephen.Tarheel]

Dune,

I'm pretty happy with the results that I got, though their appears to be a lot of noise in darker areas - I think that's from the atmospheric effects.  Now I just have to figure out how to export a depth pass from Terragen and I should be all set to do that in post so its consistent across elements.

[Matt]

Hi Stephen,

Rather than export a depth pass and have to create your own atmospheric effects, you could render an atmosphere pass, a surface/terrain pass, and comp the atmosphere over your other elements. On the render node there are checkboxes "Visible surface" and "Visible atmosphere". Rendering with only one of those checked will give you a surface or an atmosphere pass.

In a future update you will be able to export both of these 'passes' from a single render using Render Elements.

Matt