Gradient Hacks

[Oshyan]

There are plenty of feature requests for additional basis functions and we've been well aware of that lack since before the Technology Preview release. More have not been implemented yet for 2 reasons. First is simply a lack of time and the fact that other things take much greater precedence (e.g. making the renderer faster, multi-threaded, and more stable). Second is that TG2 is focused on realistic landscapes and the vast majority of other functions besides those currently available are simply not that useful for realistic terrain or texturing. They may be implemented at some point, but when considering the addition of new fractals and other generators we are generally looking at specific real-world uses for representing natural phenomena. It is intended that any such generator be fairly flexible to allow for things like the amazing "spires" work of Efflux and Volker, but still the implementation focus is on realistic, "real-world" results.

If nothing else the eventual availability of the SDK should allow others to add as many interesting basis function as they desire.

- Oshyan

[efflux]

That's what I guessed. Matt will know what basis functions to give priority. Voronoi will probably be the first because it provides beautiful rock surfaces. I'm just hoping he considers sine at some point but real world type functions can have other uses. Sparse convolution was considered a real world realistic terrain function but gives you craters and spires as well which is pretty much all it ended up being used for. Sine is one basis function that gives pretty abstract results but it depends, you might want to create tiles or paving or something with it. It's pretty good for those things. The more real world basis functions you add the more fantastical results you can have as well. That's why Mojo can achieve such weirdness. The ones more suitable for real world results give the richest results no matter if used to create rocks or whatever else odd things.