Scandinavian inspired coast

Started by blattacker, August 24, 2018, 12:30:31 PM

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blattacker

Hey everyone, it's been a bit, real life work got in the way of my hobbies for awhile, but I'm working on a new image. After getting started on The Vikings tv show, I felt really inspired to do a Scandinavian inspired landscape. It's still far from finished, but here's where I'm at now. I think I need to work with the sand layer a bit, smooth it out so it looks more like a coast and less like, I dunno, sandstone or something. I'm also using very basic trees right now, and plan to replace them with better ones. Any other suggestions are welcome!

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blattacker

As an aside, I built the general landscape in World Machine, and I was wondering if anyone has had any success exporting, for example, a select height mask to use as a coverage map for populations in Terragen? Right now, I'm using surface layers with altitude constraints and basic fractal breakup, but for the future of this project, I'd like more tight controls of the actual coverage (though maybe not as tight as I'd get with a painted shader), and I think the easiest way to do that would be to grab a couple select height masks, maybe modify them a bit with slope selection (different masks for each type of tree, since conifers would be much more common at higher altitudes than broadleaves), and then export that, but I've never tried that before, so I'm curious if anyone has, and if that's a good way to go about it.

blattacker

Working on it more, it took me way longer than I'd like to admit to figure out how to smooth out the terrain along the coastline. Right now what I'm doing is I have the original heightfield plugged into a heightfield smooth node, then I feed both the original heightfield and the smoothed one into a merge shader using a distribution shader to limit the smoothed terrain by altitude. Let me know if you know a better way to do it! Did a little post work on this one just to get a feel for how I'd push levels and whatnot, though when I do it for real, I'll spend a bit more time on it.

N-drju

#3
Deeper sky color in the second picture looks much better. And colder too, just like Scandinavia should be.

I'd just check the cloud on the left side. Too flat. Otherwise, a well-composed, relaxing image.

As far as terrain smoothing goes, I find simple shape shader masks to be particularly useful. I always use those for islands with flat beaches.
"This year - a factory of semiconductors. Next year - a factory of whole conductors!"

bobbystahr

What N-drju wrote would be pretty much my advice and maybe tilt the view so to see more beach area....Carry on.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

DannyG

Nice start, I look fwd to your progress
New World Digital Art
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