Why Terragen?

[Oshyan]

We don't have a way of keying off of face angle or anything yet, unfortunately. You can do shading based on normals, but it's not relative to neighboring surfaces or anything, so it's not really going to get you "cracks" or "ridges" or anything like a "dirt map". I'm not sure the best way to handle this honestly, but I think if you used the same noise shader to displace/make the rock shape as you did for surface shading/making surface shading, you could potentially get something similar.

- Oshyan

[DPS]

Thanks for the reply, I have a few more question regarding Terragen.

What sort of procedural goodness would you have at your finger tips if using terragen to texture/embellish a height field that has already been generated externally from Terragen? Specifically with regards to creating texture masks for valleys and where water would flow - but without running any additional filters that will alter the heightfield?

I've been experimenting with the world machine demo - I'm quite impressed at the moment (apart from the low res world on the demo which isn't great for a proper evaluation). I've imported both a heightfield generated from lidar data and also one from a mudbox displacement map. I'm liking the software - I think the erosion filter is great, and the varying mask outputs. I'm currently trying to work out whether you can gain any of these flowmaps without running the filter and altering the heightfield.

Why do people tend to use both WM and Terragen in conjunction? Is world machine better for some aspects?

I will try Terragen soon - but I've also just bought a house so need to be sure that pick the correct tool(s), hence the caution.

Cheers

Dave

[Oshyan]

World Machine is undoubtedly better at heightfield modeling. So people use it for that purpose. Terragen is better at "infinite" procedural detail, clouds, atmosphere, and rendering in general ("better" in that World Machine simply doesn't do any of those things). They are essentially complementary products, if your goal is final rendered output. But of course both are used separately. World Machine would be the better choice if your goal with the output is a heightfield that you can use in an application you already have, or for some other purpose than rendering (e.g. game environment). Terragen would be the better choice if you are aiming, as I think you said at the beginning of this thread, to render out fully realized photoreal, animated scenes. All World Machine is going to get you is the terrain (it's great terrain, but it's just one piece of the puzzle). If you could afford it, having both together would be best.

- Oshyan

[DPS]

Hi

Thanks for the reply. And yeah I'm leaning towards that idea - just need to purchase in phases The Terragen atmospherics look sick and I definitely will be trying the demo soon.

One thing though - I mentioned in the previous post - is there a way to generate a flow map, or deposition map in terragen (or WM!) for an existing heightfield, or texture procedurally based on similar criteria?

Attached is a test render in 3DS Max - so in this test I've used a deposition map from the WM erosion node as a map to distribute the boxes and a flow map for a mask between land and water. But ideally I'm looking for a solution where I could do this without applying any additional erosion filter or the like. For artistic purposes it would be fine but if I'm working on a construction project, then I may be using a site survey and I probably would want to avoid creating my own erosion so as to not confuse anyone.

[PeterParker]

Hi DPS, welcome to the forums!

TG stability and customer care should probably made as example to the industry.
Together with this forum I think in the past 6 years it almost never happened that somebody was not helped by either forum users here as well as representative of the company behind TG, Planetside.

So that's something you should definitely not worry about.

Learning TG has mixed feelings for many. Some pick it up relatively quickly, some not.
If you're familiar with node-based workflow, like nuke, or how to set up shaders in Max with nodes (Which you probably know) then you will at least already understand that concept and the flexibility it offers.
I think, after observing this community for about 6 years, this is one of the key issues with getting started in TG2 and TG3 (they use the same UI and approach/workflow) for many people and perhaps mostly the ones without any prior experience with node-based workflow.
I was one of those and taught it myself in my spare-time next to study/work in about a year.
At least I knew how to operate it and how certain things worked. From there it expanded further and so did my capabilities to make more photorealistic stuff.

In regard to your animations. What are you looking for? Photorealistic, noise-free fly-overs of forests with detailed GI and at full-HD?
Perhaps with a bit of water or clouds here and there?
Then TG, at this moment, will not be your best choice. Nor would Vue by the way! It's as simple as that.
Such frames take multiple hours each to render at that quality. Vue is a bit quicker perhaps, but has a strong cutoff point where its performance dramatically drops. Often because of high-poly instanced objects or when scene-scale gets too large.
That's where TG shines though, it swallows many many high-poly instances and renders these relatively effortlessly, though relatively slowly, on full planet scale. The ideal situation would be to have the best of both
Unless you have a bigger renderfarm than we think now. By small I suppose you mean anything <10 machines?

About XFrog. The newest collections look pretty good, but the older ones look a bit outdated, although the majority is still useful for mid- to background distant work.
Silva3D also sells great models for low prices. Definitely should have a look there!

Cheers,
Martin

Support is 1a++ and i agree to all other terms!

[Oshyan]

Hmm, very late reply here. One thing I've played with in the past - with some success - is running the erosion sim in say WM and then outputting the masks, but applying them to the original terrain. The idea being that this is how erosion would have occurred, thus implying it's how water might flow anyway. Maybe not strictly realistic, but still useful perhaps. Also I think there's a way using blur and subtraction to get a sort of "crevice map", contrast detection of a kind I think (or perhaps there's a more direct way in WM now) that could be similarly useful...

The options for such things in TG are currently limited as those are mostly raster-oriented operations, and TG's heightfield tools are basic at this point. But tools like WM already do a great job and TG can make use of all their various outputs.

- Oshyan