snow on trees?..

[ton]

I've been trying a thing or 2.. but to little succes.. Using the xfrog models, I tried add snow to the trees.. hoping the slope constraint (using object/ y normals) would do the trick..
So did anyone find a way to do this?

thanks, Ton

[3DGuy]

I think you need a treemodel which has snow already on it. AFAIK the terrainshaders don't work on objects.

[BPauba]

I think you need a treemodel which has snow already on it. AFAIK the terrainshaders don't work on objects.

That is what I was thinking....

[MeltingIce]

Yea you cannot add snow to the trees using Terragen 2 shaders, you would have to make a model with snow already on it.

[irender]

Heres a stab at some snowy trees....18 min render...just a test.

[absolutehavok]

*

[Oshyan]

Editing the actual texture files would be easiest, but *is* possible to adjust and add to textures on objects from within TG2. I'm actually doing this procedurally and adjusting it by height in a scene I'm working on right now. The higher up on the terrain the trees are the more snow they have. I did this by going into the texture network for the object, putting a Surface Layer *beneath* the Default Shader that normally loads the texture, and then connected the Default Shader through that to the Multi-shader. I set the color in the Surface Layer and adjusted coverage to taste. This gives you the ability to adjust color and coverage on the textures for your object. You'll need a separate Surface Layer for each texture that you want to adjust. To get the additional control over height I had to connect the Compute Terrain shader to the Input port of the Surface Layers (so that it would key off the terrain), then I was able to adjust height constraints appropriately and it worked on the whole population, across instances.

- Oshyan

[ton]

Editing the actual texture files would be easiest, but *is* possible to adjust and add to textures on objects from within TG2. I'm actually doing this procedurally and adjusting it by height in a scene I'm working on right now. The higher up on the terrain the trees are the more snow they have. I did this by going into the texture network for the object, putting a Surface Layer *beneath* the Default Shader that normally loads the texture, and then connected the Default Shader through that to the Multi-shader. I set the color in the Surface Layer and adjusted coverage to taste. This gives you the ability to adjust color and coverage on the textures for your object. You'll need a separate Surface Layer for each texture that you want to adjust. To get the additional control over height I had to connect the Compute Terrain shader to the Input port of the Surface Layers (so that it would key off the terrain), then I was able to adjust height constraints appropriately and it worked on the whole population, across instances.

- Oshyan

That's -exactly- the effect I was after!! Cool.. I'll give it a try... very curious to see your final result, by the way!

edit: just tried it.. getting the texture coloured is easy.. but.. getting height control still puzzles me..  I've piped the default into the input of the surface which is piped in the multi. But 'compute terrain', where does is go into? (child??) and how did you pipe that?


Thanks, Ton.

[monks]

-that sounds awesome Oshyan. That's one feature that I really missed in WCS. I'm looking forward to seeing the results.

monks

[RealUser]

Now i am aroused!!! 

[buchvecny]

keeping eye on this, post more guyz =)

[rcallicotte]

Yeah.  Awesome.  More, more...oh, maybe I should add some.

[crazymonkey]

  sounds awesome...

[Oshyan]

Unfortunately there's no way to directly add a specific shader to a generic Input from within TG2 (as far as I'm aware). So I just edited the .tgd file directly and put "/Compute terrain" into the "Input shader" part of the relevant nodes.

Here's an example of the results I'm getting:
[attachimg=1]

The shadows are super dark because GI is off to save render time as I'm just testing the texturing stuff. Notice how the whiteish bits on the foreground trees fade out into the distance. This is the result of controlling texture blending over a population by altitude.

- Oshyan

[ton]

Cool, looks good.. I've been experimenting using the redirect shader, putting compute terrain into Y and feeding that in the input of the default shaders, then in the surface use Y for alt. sort of works but also distorts the geometry... which we don't want..
Another solution, less elegant though, is using 2 populations but that wouldn't look very real.. ..

So, if you pipe compute terrain into the input of the surface shader, where does the default shader connect to the surface shader?

Thanks, Ton.