Terrain Altitude Blend

Started by efflux, March 08, 2012, 04:42:45 AM

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efflux

Hi Choronr.

That's great to see because it's obviously planetery scale. You colours are nice and cool to see the trees. I've never got into trees so have no idea what problems that poses. Probably the set up in my file is a bit overall the same charactor in several ways but that's where all the time spent tweaking  things around comes in. I'm trying to make these files demo just the ideas so other people can add the details.

I meant to do more TG2 in the last few weeks but I'm trying to do too many things. I need to work on concept stuff in 2D because I have a ton of this type of thing and 2D drawing is fast. I have hugely overambitous plans for animations (including soundtracks) but that requires me to concentrate purely on the concepts or I'll never get anywhere. I actually have a first class degree in Fine Art so I can paint and draw. I have a Cintiq 21UX here that largely gathers dust. To be honest, much as I love the idea of building 3D landscapes, it's not the best use of my skills and I do find it a bit frustrating because the results I want and what TG2 can do aren't always the same thing.

So odd stuff I add on this forum will be sporadic.

choronr

Thanks efflux for your reply. I am not privy for the use of the blue nodes; and, certainly appreciate what you have and others have shared here. My use of Terragen started almost ten years ago with 'Classic' where creations appeared as somewhat ethereal but beautiful ...had loads of satisfactory images - but, were lacking in having the fine details of what TG2 eventually offered.

I'm looking forward to continued learning; and, will be trying to incorporate you setup in future projects ...thank you again.

Bob   

Xynedia

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#32
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efflux

#33
Just trying to kick start this again. This is an incredibly easy way to create interest in terrains and this is just a starting point to mash the terrains up in other ways. I've shown a picture of the nodes. One fractal has displacement roughness of 1, the other 0. Those values are just reversed to get the different results in each picture. The stones are the voronoi.

efflux

#34
Here's a further variant on the previous terrain. Smooth low terrain and rough high terrain using the Tex coords from XYZ to altitude blend. The new lowest terrain is another smaller version of the bigger terrain but blended with a merge shader set to Highest raise. Since this terrain is less displaced it is below the altitude blend of the other two. Now we have a much bigger sense of scale. More like the actual scale because it looks like large hills with smooth deposition of rocks or stones or whatever rolling down then hitting the smaller terrain. The lower POV shot shows how this creates interest at these low level views. Ideally you'd put rocks on these gentle slopes to enhance the effect. This effect works simply because we know what real hills look like and these features give us the sense of scale.

The lower POV render also has some clouds as higher atmo. Haze is low and not so glowy. That's why the higher haze effect varies. I'm still experimenting with this and it needs further tweaking.

I'm not supplying the finished terrain in this case. Try tweaking the settings from previous files. My advice is to get a nice shape with one fractal before doing anything. Change the shape while the roughness is 0. That way you will see the general shape better before adding roughness. Start with quite simple shapes to see the forms and scales then add detail with higher roughness. Various results from tweaking the fractal settings is another thread though. I'm concentrating on why altitude blended terrains are good. The last few renders are just developments of how it goes when you get nicer terrain shapes and much better than this is possible.