This weekend I thought of trying to use TG together with World Machine to get some realistic and interesting results.
If used properly these 2 products are destined/made for each other, but not many people have seem to been able to get very good results with it.
I had some ideas and I'll show you bits of the progress.
Starting off in World-Machine I created a semi real scale 2x2km terrain with a river running through.
The layout generator with its spline tools are very useful to create a river mask.
Subsequent combination of a slightly elevated ridged fractal and a normal ridged fractal gives the basic terrain with a river cut out.
2 erosion devices, one thermal and one fluvial, creates nice details and channels in the terrain.
Consequently the river gets filled with deposition, so I subtracted a bit of the terrain by using a another blurred version of the layout generators mask.
The outputs of the erosion masked are stored in one single .BMP file. Since the masks are greyscale you can put them separately in one of the RGB channels of your BMP.
Later in TG2 you can split these channels using the "Red/Green/Blue to scalar" function nodes. Very useful.
See the attached .tmd file for the World Machine project file.
In TG2 I rescaled the terrain to 1x1km and adjusted the altitude span to make the slopes less steep.
Essential in detailing the terrain is using the fluvial erosion flow mask from World Machine as an inverted blendshader for adding rock structures like strata and stretched/warped voronoi based cracks.
Sedimentary rocks were placed by using the same erosion flow mask as blendshader for the stones base surface layer.
Positioning of the vegetation is done in the same way. I didn't want too many plants grow in the erosion channels, so I also used the fluvial erosion flow mask as inverted blendshader there.
This is still a WIP.
I need to replace the tree model with the facetted trunk for better ones and need to think about distributing them in an interested way.
So far I'm happy with the grasses, weeds and flowers. I think.
Furthermore I need to change some aspects to sun elevation and lighting conditions.
It's very hard to get proper GI detail into the larger shadowed area and beneath/between the vegetation. I suppose it will be a long final render.
All the grasses, weeds and flowers are from Silva3D / Walli.
Trees are from XFrog.
Cheers,
Martin