What's the best solution for natural erosion?

Started by KirillK, June 28, 2012, 08:34:20 AM

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KirillK

To make a kind of dry riverbed  for example or gully  etc.   Maybe some external soft?

N810

well its either the erosion node or world machiene.... or perhaps some sort of negitive fractial displacement..?
Hmmm... wonder what this button does....

penboack

Another option would be GeoControl:
http://www.geocontrol2.com/e_index.htm

The river possibilities look interesting.

Unlike World Machine it is available for both Windows 7 and OS X.

KirillK

Thanks penboack and N810
Where is  that erosion node in Terragen?  I cant find it.

Matt

#4
It's a heightfield operator (green node), called Heightfield Erode v3. You can add heightfield operators from a menu by right-clicking on a heightfield node in the network view or by using the "Add Operator" button after selecting a heightfield node in the Terrain node list.

Matt
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KirillK

#5
Thanks Matt.   I have a question. When I push Erode now after a few tweaking  the whole program hangs or looks like unresponsive for too long. I even  don't see a progress bar.   Perhaps it's due to some extreme settings in the node.  What should I avoid setting too high?

N810

Yea you should probaly start with just barely moving the slider bar.
you might have been flatening the whole shader to 1 meter high or something.
Hmmm... wonder what this button does....

KirillK

I actually want to make a kind of dried water streams with some scattered boulders on a mostly flat ground. Not some Grand canyon things.

I tried both World machine and Geocontrol2. Looks like Geocontrol   have some more advanced erosion at a first glance  plus some  painted partly by hand nice rivers.
Did somebody have a chance to compare both programs more deeply? Which one is better?   I am also need some solution to get tillable (repeating smoothly) height maps to use in a game endgine. Are they able to do so?

penboack

#8
Having watched the video on the Rivers and Lakes tool in GeoControl, http://www.cajomi.de/Forum/showthread.php?t=512, I would say it is a must have!

If you can then I would say buy both! Compared to most CG software these are quite inexpensive. The way I look at it is that what you need is a toolbox with lots of tools in it, you can then pick the tool most useful for the project that you are currently working on. Similar to the way in which an artist's studio or workshop will usually contain a wide variety of tools for various tasks. You can then get away from the whole "which software is better" thing.

KirillK

Thanks for an opinion penboack. I am looking toward Geocontrol mostly.  It just works fine straight after the first few minutes of the trial.   Although the world machine looks like having more features.    I am trying to figure  out which one are capable to do tillable patches.  Geocontrol have some "seamless" feature but not  for a usual repetitive texture.

Henry Blewer

I use a power fractal with ridged noise. The scale/s vary by how close you are to a face with the camera. I then stretch the noise in the Y axis. A setting of 1.2 for the noise variation is enough. Finally I use a distribution shader to constrain the lowest slope and highest slope angles the 'erosion' will effect.
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
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