Blender Terrain

[efflux]

I've been messing with Blender terrains. I started to get decent ones so I thought this render ended up good enough to post here. Four large Blender terrains so basically four islands. These are voronoi based fractals. They work much better than perlin for larger scale terrains. Also essentially Mojoworld fractals because they are Musgrave. It's the same forms. Only three power fractals creating colour surface with some altitude blend distortions. A strata and outcrops was used. Two cloud layers but I don't use mist to fill the whole space. The mid height density is all clouds. Only very low mist.

No hundreds of nodes scenes now. My files are actually getting simpler and simpler and quicker to create.

Blender has massive potential to create all kinds of terrain and there is no limit to the res. As high a Terragen can deal with. I asume that's whatever RAM you have.

[mhaze]

Very convincing terrain although I'm not keen on the strata. Lighting and clouds create a strong mood. It reminds me of the times I've sat on the top of a Scottish mountain late in the day.

[Saurav]

Interesting terrain, I like the atmo and colours.

[efflux]

I'm actually not keen on the strata and outcrops node except when you want angular strata. Then it works great. We should be able to drive a fractal via altitude for strata type effects. Voronoi basis fractals works well to do that.

I didn't spent long on this scene. It was just a test to use the Blender terrain. However, it threw up another issue and I'm finding a lot of my scenes have this problem. I sometimes tend to use quite gloomy lighting and Terragen's shadow lighting is poor compared to other apps I've been using lately. It doesn't compete with Blender Cycles or Modo. I know there are improvements to this with Terragen 3. This is actually seriously needed.

[efflux]

Just another point about the surfacing. It took me about five minutes. I could even remove one of the fractal shaders without a lot of difference so this scene could be two power fractals. I got away with this minimum because of the altitude distortion. Ideally I'd add a lot more surface detail but the atlitude distortion is a very powerful way to beak things up. I did a thread on this. I think the thread is called altitude distortion but it's just a question of plugging your surface fractal shader into distribution shader then into a warp shader with warper fractal. The displacement value of this fractal controls the warp. That messes up the altitude straight line. I can't stress enough how important this is to get great effects with minimum shaders.

[efflux]

That thread is here:

http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,14060.0.html

Don't even read the first parts. I started off with absudly complex ideas. Go later in the thread where I take it to simpler more useful methods. Other people have done this as well but I put some files on there with the set up.

[efflux]

Of course once again we come to a Terragen graph limitation. This hooks in with what I said about strata before. You can distort the altitude blending of surfaces but all of that surface is distorted. Also. if we could use a fractal driven by altitude then we'd have more methods to adjust blending via altitude. If it wasn't for all these limits I'd be able to start lots of threads on various methods.

[efflux]

And if you had a curve graph you could adjust the curve of the blend region i.e. how it fades in and out. This can quite important. All hard wired in Terragen though, sadly.

[efflux]

Then if you want to use the original terrain prior to compute terrain to blend the surfaces which would act like altitude, well you can't because you can't get the undisplaced position, at least not without a lot a graph nonsense.

I've got the Vue demo. Just need to install it. I have absolutely no intention of buying it (unless it was mind blowingly awesome which it won't be) especially since I'm primarily Linux now but I'm going to check what the score is with all these graph techniques in Vue. I know at some of them are possible.