Advanced Coloring Techniques?

Started by blattacker, June 20, 2019, 04:17:29 AM

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René

Forgot to post the TGD of the previous post.

bobbystahr

Quote from: René on June 27, 2019, 08:56:12 AM
Forgot to post the TGD of the previous post.

thanks...will be handy.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Dune

Adding a bit more info to René's file; there's actually no need for the compute fed into Power fractal shader v3 01, and neither for displacement in that PF. Outcome is the same and it only seems more complicated.

René

Indeed, and it renders slightly faster.

Dune

Yes, and that's why I also strive to not use any compute terrain. But not always possible, like in your file.

bobbystahr

Quote from: Dune on June 28, 2019, 09:23:15 AM
Yes, and that's why I also strive to not use any compute terrain. But not always possible, like in your file.

I almost never add Compute Terrain except at the bottom of the shader stack to have a landing spot for populations that takes into consideration all displacements after the Terrain editor.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Dune


bobbystahr

Quote from: Dune on June 28, 2019, 11:48:13 AM
On a loose line, I hope!

yup a dangler, I think you turned me on to this valuable tip.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

WAS

#23
Quote from: bobbystahr on June 28, 2019, 10:33:14 AM
Quote from: Dune on June 28, 2019, 09:23:15 AM
Yes, and that's why I also strive to not use any compute terrain. But not always possible, like in your file.

I almost never add Compute Terrain except at the bottom of the shader stack to have a landing spot for populations that takes into consideration all displacements after the Terrain editor.

I always use a compute terrain since I'm always doing lateral work. Even on a shader level I tend to use compute normal for additional lateral/normalizing work. An example would be the Power Sand Shader, just using a PF with noise set to Billow, and uniform settings, than a compute normal at 0.001 or what is appropriate for your scale, and than a duplicated PF, same settings, except using a small offset of 0.005 or so with some displacement for detail, and boom, dense sand grains/gravel without fiddling with exploded fake stones.

For populations, I also use a Compute Normal, as it's default patch size is 1, and more appropriate for populations, such as grass and leaning to terrain normals.

blattacker

So I've been hard at work, checking out tutorials and files and such, and this is about where I'm at now (smaller image file for quicker renders), and I have a few questions.

So far for strata layer coloring, I've been using the strata and outcrops shader piped into a displacement shader to vector node, and using that as a mask to define where the texture is applied. I did recently discover the contour shader, which I've found can be used to create the same effect without the use of the conversion node in the mix. However, with both methods, when trying to warp the mask to give slight variations to the layers (or at the very least, make it less of a hard, obviously digital, line), the nodes do not seem to respond to any kind of warping or transforming. Does anyone have any tips or explanations on this? I've even tried just putting a fractal warp node as the final shader, and it seems to affect every other shader in the tree, but not the contour or strata/outcrops shaders. Is there something I'm missing, or just not understanding about this process?

In a similar vein, I'm using World Machine to create the heightmaps for my images; is there any way that anyone knows of to have Terragen "see" the terraces that are output and color them accordingly, or am I stuck with using max/min slope constraints? I can't seem to find a way in World Machine to just output a heightmap/mask of just the terrace slopes.

I thought I had more questions, but I guess that's all I can think of for now. Thanks for everyone's help so far, and I look forward to more input!

Matt

#25
Contours are derived from the shape of the terrain. They are not based on texture coordinates, and that's the reason they can't be warped. I was thinking you might be able to work around that by adding more displacements after the Compute Terrain, but I tried and unfortunately that doesn't work either.

Something you could try is a stretched fractal. Fractals with XYZ stretch factors of something like (100, 1, 100) should work. And with less extreme values like (10, 1, 10) you can get lots of variation across the landscape. Additional displacements applied after the Compute Terrain will displace these patterns because they will stick to the 3D texture space generated by the Compute Terrain. And if you want to warp them separately you can do that with a Warp Input Shader or Warp Merge Shader whose "warper" is some displacement. The Fractal Warp Shader probably won't help much because it warps laterally, when I guess you want to warp it vertically, so just warp it with a fractal displacement which will apply along the normal by default (although you might want to try changing that to Along Vertical).

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

WAS

Quote from: Matt on July 21, 2019, 06:13:54 PM
Contours are derived from the shape of the terrain. They are not based on texture coordinates, and that's the reason they can't be warped. I was thinking you might be able to work around that by adding more displacements after the Compute Terrain, but I tried and unfortunately that doesn't work either.

Something you could try is a stretched fractal. Fractals with XYZ stretch factors of something like (100, 1, 100) should work. And with less extreme values like (10, 1, 10) you can get lots of variation across the landscape. Additional displacements applied after the Compute Terrain will displace these patterns because they will stick to the 3D texture space generated by the Compute Terrain. And if you want to warp them separately you can do that with a Warp Input Shader or Warp Merge Shader whose "warper" is some displacement. The Fractal Warp Shader probably won't help much because it warps laterally, when I guess you want to warp it vertically, so just warp it with a fractal displacement which will apply along the normal by default (although you might want to try changing that to Along Vertical).

Matt

Would converting the terrain displacement to scalar in a separate chain, modifying it however one would one, and than feeding that back through displacement and contour work? You'd have essentially have a duplicate base terrain to use for the contour.

Matt

I'm not sure, you'd have to try it.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

WAS

#28
Quote from: Matt on July 21, 2019, 06:40:59 PM
I'm not sure, you'd have to try it.


It... seems to act very bizarrely. For example. You can disable all the shaders leading to the contour and it will still contour the terrain. But if you enable them, you get a completely different contour in the 3D preview of the shader itself, but what's applied, is the same contour that exists with disabled input.

It seems the surface shader could read what's being displayed by the shader itself, but it goes by the base terrain altitude rather than new input.