Population on sculpted object

[spacematt]

Hi everyone, I'm working on a scene which requires one mountain to be a very specific shape, and to have trees on the flat parts. The specific shape has already been crudely modelled in Maya. How best to proceed?

I get that I can't have a population on an imported OBJ, and also I know that I could render a depth pass of my OBJ from above and use that to create a heightfield. I'm ready to go ahead with this, but the mountain has some cliffs and I'd love to be able to sculpt those vertical surfaces into something cliff-like before importing.

I've seen the thread about Mudbox vector displacements but can I apply those displacements to something which is populatable? As far as I know only terrains can be populated, but other than heightfield is there any other way to create a terrain from a mesh?

[mhaze]

Vector displacements can be populated.

[digitalguru]

if you have Mudbox, there's a alternative way -

create a flat plane the same dimensions in x and z as your sculpted obj and bring those both into mudbox - extract a 32 bit Tiff displacement map using Raycasting and bring that into Terragen (use an image map shader set to displacement and plug straight into a Compute Terrain)

[spacematt]

Ok, great. Thanks guys, I'll try that out.

[Oshyan]

And we'll be working on populatable imported objects in the future too.

- Oshyan

[Kadri]

Nice...That smiley looks like it will not be a much distant future Oshyan 

[bobbystahr]

indeed that smilie looks hopeful don't it....

[Oshyan]

You guys can read a lot in a smiley, eh? 

- Oshyan

[Kadri]

A basic yes or no would be easier of course

[kaedorg]