Can someone help me smooth the bottom out of my canyon?

Started by marshill, September 21, 2018, 09:45:43 PM

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marshill

Ok so I managed to paint myself a canyon, but I can't figure out how to get the bottom to be smoother, more rounded and not full of triangular peaks.  Is there a way I can do this?  I messed around with all kinds of paint layers, I tried painting a displacement layer on top of the main one but no matter what I do, I can't seem to get the lumps out from the bottom.   if anyone can help, I'd appreciate it.  I love this software, by the way.  It's pretty incredible.  I just need to get better at it :)  I am reading the documentation by the way, so I apologize for the posts I'm piling up here, I'm just eager to learn and some of the documentation has a steep curve. A picture of my canyon is attached.  Thanks!!

Dune

My way to start a canyon would be using a simple shape as a basis, warp it if needed and use as mask. Here's a quick basic setup.
Painted shader is handy, but also a bit awkward at times.

Best practise, btw, is to set up a thread for one project you're doing and follow up on that one, so that everyone can see progress following that thread, and help in the line of WIP's.

Oshyan

What's happening here is you're applying negative displacement using the Painted Shader, which lowers the terrain into a canyon-like area, but it does *not* remove the existing displacement - it just moves it all "down". What you probably want to do is *mask* the area by a Painted Shader. You could do this by plugging your existing Painted Shader into the Mask input of your terrain shader(s) and then apply *invert mask*, or use a Complement Colour node after the Painted Shader, before it goes into the mask input(s). "Complement" is basically the inverse, so it's the same thing as checking "invert mask", but you don't need to apply it to every shader mask input you plug the Painted Shader into.

Anyway, if you do it that way you'll basically "remove" the terrain where you paint, but it won't be displaced downward yet. So you could then add a Displacement Shader and feed the same Painted Shader into it, and use negative displacement to get it to displace downward. You should then end up with a much more flat-bottomed canyon, which you can add further detail to, for example use the same Painted Shader as the (non-inverted) mask of another Power Fractal, which will then only displace the canyon area itself.

- Oshyan

marshill

thank you for the help.  both the solutions looked great.  this product has a steep learning curve, but it's awesome