Curvature mask

[sboerner]

Is it possible to extract a curvature mask in Terragen? To isolate edges, for example, so they can be shaded to show wear, etc. I'm guessing it can be done with blue nodes but don't know where to start. It would be nice to be able to do this both with imported objects and native displacements.

[WAS]

Hmm. Interested in this as well.

I imagine a favor rises could be used similar as well, but may only effect stuff facing the sky.

[WAS]

As a note, I tried doing lateral, but unfortuantely, when you add a Texture Coordinates shader, it breaks the intersection effect entirely. And without it, it doesn't understand the lateral and gets huge and blotchy.

[Dune]

If it doesn't matter if a little extra displacement is added, you could use a color node that gives off some wear color and displaces a bit more. But if you need the real edges, an intersect would be the first way I think of. On a small scale on a sideline for each feature that needs the wear.
Or use a difference mask from a smoothed and normal version of that displacement.

[Hetzen]

Intersect Underlying is the only way I know how to do this and I'm not surprised it's not working with lateral displacements, without a Compute Terrain in between, IU uses a softer version of the displacements to work out what's prominent. I guess you could use blues to reconstruct this functionality but I think you'll be back trying to figure out the settings specific to your scene, as we do with IU.

[sboerner]

Thanks, all. I was sort of hoping that there might be a way to do this with imported meshes, primarily. I'm not sure how other applications do this, as it's a built-in function or (in renderers like Arnold) a shader. You'd have to compare each face normal with its neighbors, I would guess, so it's probably not a simple problem.

[Dune]

You could maybe fake it with additional bump, and color that bump like wear...