Classic Erosion plugin

Started by Daniil, November 03, 2017, 05:14:19 AM

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WAS

Oh aweosme! Just installed it. :D Thanks for all the work, such an amazing plugin.

Quote from: blinkfrog on November 11, 2018, 03:54:15 PM
Classic Erosion v1.1.1
Multiple small changes, most notable:

1. Some old bugs fixed. These are important fixes as they degraded erosion quality. These bugs were added accidentally while working on rivers, so early CE versions (before rivers) had better quality.

2. Two hidden parameters are revealed. First (it is called "Retardation of downcutting", but this is too long for GUI, so it is "Downcutting retardation" in GUI) controls downcutting behavior - slows down erosive flows at some places, effectively preventing downcutting. I added this mechanics just after initial CE release and hesitated about adding a parameter, controlling this mechanics, as there are already two parameters for downcutting, but finally I decided to add this. And the second is "Talus settling" in thermal erosion.

3. Added built-in check for updates (may be blocked by firewalls).

4. Added option to turn normalization off for deposition and wear maps. In this case it's outputs are in meters, so you can adjust while and black points in meters, and they aren't dependent on maximum values of these maps (very useful if you try to animate thermal erosion).

5. Classic Erosion now works correctly if Terragen is started without GUI (from command prompt). Also it should work on Pixel Plow farm. Important note! Currently it works on Pixel Plow only if erosion cache (.erd) file is provided, so you should precalculate it on your machine and upload with your project. Don't forget to turn "Read erosion data on project loading" parameter on (although possibly you can do it in Pixel Plow already, or may be it is overrided there).

Daniil

Dune


WAS

Really thinking about having some stuff rendered on pixel plow now as I can do some funny and cool stuff from a distance without much worry of 3 pop limitation to have good variation in veggies.

sboerner

Any plans, Daniil, for porting this over to the Mac? I would love to be able to take it for a spin.

KirillK

#169
I installed the free version and nothing seems  working on my loaded terrain height image. I see flat surface and nothing else.

What am I missing?   

Daniil

Quote from: KirillK on November 15, 2018, 05:12:11 AM
I installed the free version and nothing seems  working on my loaded terrain height image. I see flat surface and nothing else.
What am I missing?   

Could you please describe your scene setup briefly? I suppose you have Heightfield with your terrain loaded and Classic Erosion inserted just after this heightfield? If so, it should work, but please check the position of your heightfield - it can differ to default (0.0, 0.0) if your image has any georeferencing information.

Quote from: sboerner on November 12, 2018, 01:30:36 PM
Any plans, Daniil, for porting this over to the Mac? I would love to be able to take it for a spin.

I'd like to make a Mac port, but unfortunately Mac-version of Terragen SDK isn't ready yet.

Daniil

sboerner

QuoteI'd like to make a Mac port, but unfortunately Mac-version of Terragen SDK isn't ready yet.

Thanks – I understand that your hands are tied here. Planetside – any chance that the Mac SDK could be given a higher priority? I can't speak for other Mac users, but I can't help but feel left behind here. And perhaps other third-party developers besides Danill are being affected too.

Mini-rant over. Thanks for listening.  :)

Oshyan

We have been discussing this internally. No verdict yet, but we are definitely aware that there is interest in the SDK on Mac (and Linux).

- Oshyan

René

Quote from: sboerner on November 16, 2018, 08:49:54 AM

I can't speak for other Mac users


I for one am eagerly looking forward to working with it.

sboerner

QuoteWe have been discussing this internally. No verdict yet, but we are definitely aware that there is interest in the SDK on Mac (and Linux).

That's encouraging news, Oshyan. Please let us know how things develop. Thank you!

KyL

Many thanks for the improvement on this!

I am catching up with the various updates (regarding both TG and Classic Erosion) and enjoy both. Really glad to see the new features implemented here.
Being able to export the maps and to normalize them is a really nice feature, and the river mode is giving me excellent result. General erosion also look really believable! Really well done.

Regarding this, I think I have spotted a bug leading to an inevitable crash: Starting with a fresh instance of TG, adding an erosion node in river mode and saving the .erd file to a disk. If I try to load the same file or reload the scene TG becomes unresponsive and I have to kill it. Look like it is related to the river mode as the default mode is fine. I also find myself having to erode several time my scene before resulting in the expected result. Looks like enabling/disabling the node or restarting the scene results in seed change (despite the seed stating the same in the related input field).

I am running Terragen 4.3.18 with Classic Erosion 1.1.1 on a windows 7 64bit machine.

Also one last note about the normalize maps: at the moment it looks like you are doing this internally inside the node itself. However the saved maps are not normalized. So if you were to save and load the map elsewere, it would look quite different. Also normalizing the map on export would optimize the usage of the file's bit depth :)

going back to play with it now!

Daniil

Quote from: KyL on November 25, 2018, 11:22:57 AM
Regarding this, I think I have spotted a bug leading to an inevitable crash: Starting with a fresh instance of TG, adding an erosion node in river mode and saving the .erd file to a disk. If I try to load the same file or reload the scene TG becomes unresponsive and I have to kill it. Look like it is related to the river mode as the default mode is fine. I also find myself having to erode several time my scene before resulting in the expected result. Looks like enabling/disabling the node or restarting the scene results in seed change (despite the seed stating the same in the related input field).
I am running Terragen 4.3.18 with Classic Erosion 1.1.1 on a windows 7 64bit machine.
Also one last note about the normalize maps: at the moment it looks like you are doing this internally inside the node itself. However the saved maps are not normalized. So if you were to save and load the map elsewere, it would look quite different. Also normalizing the map on export would optimize the usage of the file's bit depth :)
going back to play with it now!
Thank you Bastien for bug report, the bug with loading landscape with Rivers mode is fixed in new version. Any already saved .erd will be loaded.

As for somewhat different results on every eroding - this is the peculiarity of algorithm, so, unfortunately, this can't be fixed. The only way to workaround this is to use single thread for calculating erosion, but this would degrade the performance greatly. I thinked about adding parameter limiting threads numberm but I think it is better to save .erd if your scene is very sensitive to erosion variations from different runs.

I possibly misunderstood you about normalization of saved maps. Do you mean export maps to .png files? Deposition and Wear maps are always normalized when exported to .png.

Daniil

Daniil

Classic erosion v1.1.2.1

[attach=1]

- Some bugs fixed (including the bug with crash while loading .erd file with rivers)
- New parameter in thermal erosion tab: "Talus washing away".

I can't remember exactly, but it seems I've posted this pic earlier:
[attach=2]

This was done using early prototype of current thermal erosion. But this picture isn't easy to replicate in recent CE versions.
To get pronounced mountain range both Fluvial and Thermal erosion should be used simultaneously. But sometimes there will be too much of talus, occluding the valley. In real life debris from thermal weathering partly are transported away by water streams, the same for Classic Erosion. But Classic Erosion model isn't very effective in this area, so I added additional faked mechanics for this. Actually this mechanics very rarely is useful, add here that this is faked, so I decided to hide parameter controlling this. But in the end I decided to reveal it back: "Talus washing away". Again, use it only in cases then you feel that there is too much talus that would be carried away in real life.

The modern example of use of this mechanics:
[attach=3]

Daniil

KyL

Great! Thanks for the fix, it works like a charm now.

I see what you mean with the threading issue. It is good to be aware of it and knowing that single-thread would give a consistent result is probably enough. I usually find that running the river mode requires much less resolution so it would be not that slow anyway.

I probably did a mistake when comparing my exported maps versus the scalar output from the erosion node. I was indeed talking about the .png files. Should the image map shader use a gamma of 1 or 2.2 to match the erosion node output?

Thanks for the quick fix!!!

WAS

I honestly think the valley talus effect is more realistic with alpine valleys like here in WA state. There's actually little level terrain until you're right on the river, and sometimes not even then.