Scaling.... The "true" scale of a landscape...

[BPauba]

I have seen an explosion of procedural texture creation threads in the past couple of weeks and I love it! I really wish I had the time to learn and dabble with you guys, but I cannot complain because I have a couple weeks off starting tomorrow! But anyway, lets get back on topic. The major problem I have seen (along with a couple others) in this sort of process is the scaling of the texture. So this thread is here to discuss the problem and hopefully find a solution to it. As many of you have pointed out, we have a problem with how to work with these textures in different scales.

It seems to be difficult to work in accurate scales in Terragen because mentally it is hard to visualize scaling in the terrain window. How do we solve this problem? Would it be better to assume everyone is working in a accurate scaled scene, and then base our texture creations off of real life scaling? Or should we be creating an efficient way to quickly change the variables of our texture linearly so anyone could use the textures at any scale? I hope SOMEONE understands what I mean, and hopefully in the morning I can write something a bit more flowing... Ill be waiting to reply!

Brent.

PS: A Really nice feature would be a default 6 foot figure placed in the scene that would be used to gauge the scale of the scene. This would give us something to proportion our hills, mountains, cracks, rocks, etc etc off of. I think a simple "tool" like this would make it plenty easier to create "earthly scaling"....

[bigben]

The main thing I have found recently when trying to adapt other people's clips to my TERs is that the result depends largely on the underlying detail. This in turn is made up of two other factors... the terrain resolution and the displacements applied to the terrain before the clip.

I have had very few problems swapping TERs in and out of projects as long as their resolution matched.  A TGD developed for a 10m res terrain may not necessarily work so well on a 90m res terrain. When it comes to borrowed clip files that were originally built on fractal terrains, I've found that most of my problems were related to fractal detail added in the heightfield node. While it's a very good feature for adding detail to a terrain it presents a unique set of challenges for further tweaking of displacments, especially with clip files constructed on basic fractal terrains.

As for scaling, I usually use a 1m sphere for reference (tip from Oshyan), or a tree of known size (easier to interpret but takes longer to render). I usually start with a sphere because when you add it it is placed in the middle of your camera view rather than at 0,0,0. I then add a tree if needed and copy the coordinates from the sphere to get it into the shot. (This technique is especially useful when you have your camera a long way from the planet and you're trying to place a plane/space craft in the shot.)

The other problem with borrowed clips is that different people have different prederences for quality settings. Increasing the render detail can make some features look smaller as the extra detail is added.

[gregsandor]

Good topic.

I start with dem's and orthoimagery.  If you cut a .ter out of a .dem, then open in Terragen.9x, the landscape dialogue will tell you the size in meters.  Then in TG2 you can overlay your imagery, which also has a known scale.  When adding a 3d model, scale it to the imagery.  

A useful utility is to make some square tiles with borders.  I have a set I made at 256x256, 512x512, etc.  I set each to represent either 1 meter, 10 m, 100 m etc.  Ill upload them for you in a bit.  They're handy when setting up the texturing and slo are great when you're texturing 3d models to import; everything gets a consistent scale.

[Volker Harun]

When building textures I use a sphere ... size depends on what I want. Range from 1m to 400m radius.
I play as long as I understand the tweaks and am ready to place the texture on terrain.
The camera is very often on a low, close up position. FoV is about 70-80°. Getting too high messes almost always my atmospheres.

I think it is a good idea to have a common solution for scale, when sharing files.

[BPauba]

When building textures I use a sphere ... size depends on what I want. Range from 1m to 400m radius.
I play as long as I understand the tweaks and am ready to place the texture on terrain.
The camera is very often on a low, close up position. FoV is about 70-80°. Getting too high messes almost always my atmospheres.

I think it is a good idea to have a common solution for scale, when sharing files.

Maybe we should setup a default render scene Like most of the major 3d apps do, the question is, what kind of object would be suitable for natural textures like we are creating?

[gregsandor]

When building textures I use a sphere ... size depends on what I want. Range from 1m to 400m radius.
I play as long as I understand the tweaks and am ready to place the texture on terrain.
The camera is very often on a low, close up position. FoV is about 70-80°. Getting too high messes almost always my atmospheres.

I think it is a good idea to have a common solution for scale, when sharing files.

Maybe we should setup a default render scene Like most of the major 3d apps do, the question is, what kind of object would be suitable for natural textures like we are creating?

Its easiest for me to use non-organic stuff for scale checking, like a  meter sized cube.  I agree a default starter scale setup would be a good thing.  I'll see if I can find my metered terain shader and post it.

[BPauba]

Those are nice, and the will work very well. I have a question though, how do you know they represent a square meter in the tg world? Did you make them in terragen?

[gregsandor]

Set TG to meter scale.  Each one tiles at 1 x 1.  If you work from digital elevation models and orthophotos, you have a known scale with which to check the scale. 

[BPauba]

Set TG to meter scale.  Each one tiles at 1 x 1.  If you work from digital elevation models and orthophotos, you have a known scale with which to check the scale. 

Ah, alright cool. Thanks for the help!

[gregsandor]

When you set it up remember to adjust according to the size of texture tiles you use; my rock tex for example is 256 so when I change from the meter tile to rock it needs no adjustment.  When I use a 512x512 rock tile, I change the tiling scale to .5.

[Volker Harun]

Well, when I go for scenes, there might be a cube once in a time ... so it could (should) be part of a standard scene.

Much more important, for shading terrain and objects, are various slopes. Shaders can behave very different on inward or outward slopes.

A standard scene should have - imho - two cubes, two spheres and a ridged terrain. Scale for cubes and spheres could be 1m and 5m, sitting on the terrain. This should cover about 99% of surface shading functions.

Volker