Sharp Edges Away from Camera Tears Terrain

Started by WAS, May 24, 2020, 06:54:18 PM

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Dune

I should see some nodes to grasp this, so I may have a look myself. I always make the greys first, then use them to displace. So, "thinking of that half-way point as the displacement (Y)" is not how I would do it, or see it, but again, I may not grasp your method.
You also tried using a bias and gain scaler after the smooth steps? These are handy to have better control over once established soft corners.

Matt was just ahead of my latest reply, but that is what I meant as well. Soft clamping, so to speak.

WAS

I don't understand how this would help. It's just a smooth step from A to B, It's not like soft minimum / maximum scalar where I can target the end, and then how soft it's going to be to create a rounded edge towards the point of the voronoi... It'd just get hard edges in the soft step. Example is a voronoi stepped down to around area I need, but creates no soft edge on the upper limit. And because it's stepped so tight, I then can't create a soft edge after.

WAS

#17
Quote from: Dune on May 25, 2020, 04:17:21 AMSo, "thinking of that half-way point as the displacement (Y)" is not how I would do it, or see it, but again, I may not grasp your method.

This is a good way to think about scalars though when doing basic disp. They're just Y data (height), so when thinking about how they're going to look in displacement, it's good to translate the raw scalars to displacement in your head. If you wanted tight cracks in your voronoi, you're working with the base of the scalar. I'm not going to show the node networks here as this is for a purchasable shader pack I'm working on. It's just sad Terragen has such a problem with hard edges, which are natural phenomenon in nature. This means, because of a limitation of TG I can't have a realistic setup to some of my references, and all must be like worn, older cracked muds. Same goes for truly vertical cliffs and their ledges without rounding them, which is not realistic always.

Terrible example but sorta how I would be envisioning it. In reality the soft minimum scalalr would more align with the base voronoi but wanted to show it without too much overlay

Matt

Quote from: WAS on May 25, 2020, 01:31:22 PMI don't understand how this would help. It's just a smooth step from A to B, It's not like soft minimum / maximum scalar where I can target the end, and then how soft it's going to be to create a rounded edge towards the point of the voronoi... It'd just get hard edges in the soft step. Example is a voronoi stepped down to around area I need, but creates no soft edge on the upper limit. And because it's stepped so tight, I then can't create a soft edge after.

Hard edge in = hard edge out. Don't clamp the input to the Smooth Step. Use the Smooth Step to do the clamping for you, then multiply it down to the correct height.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

WAS

Quote from: Matt on May 25, 2020, 02:54:49 PM
Quote from: WAS on May 25, 2020, 01:31:22 PMI don't understand how this would help. It's just a smooth step from A to B, It's not like soft minimum / maximum scalar where I can target the end, and then how soft it's going to be to create a rounded edge towards the point of the voronoi... It'd just get hard edges in the soft step. Example is a voronoi stepped down to around area I need, but creates no soft edge on the upper limit. And because it's stepped so tight, I then can't create a soft edge after.

Hard edge in = hard edge out. Don't clamp the input to the Smooth Step. Use the Smooth Step to do the clamping for you, then multiply it down to the correct height.


Huh? I didn't... that's teh raw voronoi noise plugged to the smooth step. Like you said, hard in, hard out. So your comment doesn't make much sense to me. If I wanted "smooth" out, wouldn't I want the smooth clamped scalar? Not the raw, hard, voronoi? This doesn't help with the intensity issue though (if feeding soft scalar), and soft min/max scalars work much better alone.

WAS

I'd love to see an example. Voronoi is pretty easy to output and show an example. I don't know how it would help. Soft Minimum / Maximum Scalar does exactly what I need, but the resulting scalars are clamped to their intensities. I need a way to know their exact values or normalize them between 0 and 1.

Here is an example of soft minimum and maximum, as you can see, for the most part the edges have been softened, besides edges towards the center of the voronoi, but oh well, bias/gamma can help there I'm sure. Still though, tighter cracked setups are "lower" than the gapped cracks.

Matt

OK, well I'm afraid I don't understand your question.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

WAS

What one? :o

This was about the tear lines coming towards the camera from edges facing away from the camera. It seems this can't be remedied without high RDM or softening the edges like I've done.

The issue I face with softening the edges is because I'm clamping at different parts of the voronoi scalar (end points) the intensities of these two different scalars are different. When mixed together they have different displacement. So I was wondering how to have these smooth edges and have it uniform between the two types so the displacement matches.

This is where my other topic about finding the actual scalar values of a map would come in handy. I could then just use math, but I'm in the dark so It's all a guessing game and trials. Knowing the absolute maximum and minimum scalars in a map is really beneficial, and honestly crucial to functions.

WAS

#23
I also don't feel high RDM is a fix here, cause it doesn't fully fix the issue with the line tears, and in a full scene, micro displacements and textures, will cripple render times. Especially needing to exceed a value of 1 with already pretty high MPD.

In a world of PBR Materials now and microdisplacements and imperfection maps, I think we need a little more refinement of sharp edges etc. Despite you saying "You will get it" etc, this does appear to be severely remedied in other applications, such as Substance Designer and other renderers. It would be nice to see that level of detail in TG without blowing out settings. TG even has issues with PBR materials from substance designer etc where edges are involved.

Matt

It looks like the hairline fractures can be fixed by turning Fully Adaptive OFF.
 
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

WAS

Sweet, I'll give that some tries. I wasn't sure what that was off the top of my head yesterday and just left it alone.