Quote from: efflux on June 17, 2015, 06:32:38 PM
As for Terragen. Leaving asides the fact that you can work on a whole planet, the thing that shines is the surfacing. You can't build up multi layers the same way in any other app. I'm less into the idea of doing everything procedurally on planet scale. Smaller scenes are fine with more content of heightfields, imported meshes etc.
This is really interesting, because I have the same idea for quite some time. Planet-wide scenes are seldomly depicted/made.
Limiting TG's functionality to smaller scale scene might be shooting themselves in the foot as it's a unique feature, but given the limited use of it I can't really say it's a unique selling point!
I don't know, but I think my observation that planet-wide scenes are rare is a correct one. The assumptions I make following that, well...I don't know for sure of course.
If you limit TG to smaller scale scenes I'm pretty sure that more is possible in terms of erosion simulation and such.
Of course Daniil Kamperov's erosion is told to be planet-wide (where is he??) and thus lessen the need for smaller scene scales, but there are more natural erosion phenomena which are likely only feasible to be simulated on smaller scales than planet scale.
Also this would allow for easier terrain manipulation with brushes/sculpting etc. Less to deal with.
And with less to deal in terms of scale and geometry, there's likely also more possible with the renderer.
Secondly, about the layering of displacement and such:
I think TG would greatly benefit from allowing a user to let fractals apply their displacement in 'tangent space' instead of 'object space'.
In TG you always displace outwards from the centre of the object. From then on (after a compute) the surface is evaluated in a 2.5D fashion, where it is *always* dependent on the underlying surface. With a tangent space based surface interpretation you don't have this limitation.
With a completely tangent space based system you can have your vector-based shapes become independent of the underlying surface. This will prevent those weird stretching of your noise function on parts of the terrain which quickly change in slope.
See it, if you like, as a more volumetric interpretation.