Add variation to "twist & shear"?

[TheBadger]

Hey,

Was curious if there is a easy way to vary the amount of slope to a twist and shear, so that some outcrops lay down and some stand straight and then some- someplace between.

Also, I have a valley, and I want the spires on one side to go in one direction, and the spires/outcrops on the other side to lean in the exact opposite direction. But I would also like a slight random variation to the direction of the lean too. Just a bit.

Some of the things I want to do I know I can just make a bunch of masks, but the T&S node seams to effect everything above it no mater what. And making masks for every little thing is kinda depressing. I mean I would not like to make masks for every few spires/outcrops, and then also the effects that I want to add to those spires.

Anyway, maybe what I want is simpler than I am making it, just want to see if there was a way to do things that I had not thought of.

[fleetwood]

Two or more different Twist and Shear shaders could be merged using a power fractal as the control.
This example merges a plus 1 twist in X with a minus 1 twist in X.

[TheBadger]

most gratful.  Gona look at it now.

[bobbystahr]

Wild...liking this thread a lot.

[TheBadger]

Yeah the merge shader did it. I always forget about that shader. It actually worked for me in this. Most of the time in the past, I did not get what I thought I wanted from it. But it did exactly what I wanted this time. 

@ fleetwood
Hey you did everything in the shader area. I mean as apposed to terrain. I tend to do anything macro in the terrain area. IS there any reason that it may be wrong for me to think that way? I only use the shader area for color and fine/micro displacements...

Just curious now if the way I do things is normal or not.

[fleetwood]

Well I just used tall fake stones for the quick example. If I was making big towers or spires with crater shaders or some other way I would put the spires in Terrain.

I don't make any claim to correctness but I always put fake stones in the shaders area because I like to do a lot of special surface color and small displacement with stones and if you put them in Terrain before the base colors all the color will essentially be wiped out due to the usual case of both high and low color being checked active in the Base Colours node.

Another big reason is I like to put fake stones after the compute terrain because the patch size setting of the compute terrain has large effects on the conformation of the stones. Try two renders with the same fake stones. One with the standard patch of 20 meters and one with 0.1 meters and you should  see what I mean.
Fake stones respond well to tiny patch size and though some blotches can happen with small patch size, the blotches don't look out of place on most stones. Render time still seems reasonable with small patch size.




 

[TheBadger]

Interesting. Thats a pretty good tip. Thanks.