Any way to apply a generated terrain mask to plane object?

Started by sboerner, November 08, 2021, 01:41:19 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

sboerner

Yes, the sphere works just fine. I ran across this problem because I needed to use a water surface plane for a scene I'm working on. It includes a stream bed that falls half a meter across the width of the scene, about 150m, enough to be noticeable if the water surface doesn't follow. Using a slightly inclined water plane seemed to be the quickest solution. It is also a little over 1km from the scene origin. So in this very specific instance the mask distortion was noticeable. I just wanted to determine the cause. Now I know!

WAS

You can also use disp to scalar to add displacement to your water sphere, and then offset it (with a surface layer offset) down, than use a hard mask to raise your streams from that sphere back up where they need to be, creating water that hugs the terrain

sboerner

Good to know, thanks. I'll give that a try. Not sure how/why I've managed to avoid this shader all these years. Looks like I've been missing out.

Dune

I sometimes use just simple shapes to raise or lower certain sections of water, say a lake up a hill with sea down there. One watersphere, a couple of surface shaders masked by simple shapes and using offset for each. Same for decreasing/increasing waves for each water section.

WAS

Here is a messy example for a terrain hugging river. The issue with this is it leans with the terrain. But if you properly prepare the area with larger masks similar to how the river surface is done it may help. Ulco's method is certainly much better for a simple hill where the simple shape slope is fine enough, I've done this merged with a smooth version of the terrain just to ever so slightly accent the slope (like 0.05 on the merge mix).