help with setting up surface shaders

[carbon_adam]

Hi everyone,
                Im new here and im a teragen 2 nooby but I have been playing with world machine and other terrain programs for quite some time.  Currently im working on a politcal computer game about border areas in Europe and im at the stage of making 3d and 2d skyboxes for the source engine.  At the moment i have a basic terrain file set up in terragen that has my height file for a mountain coast region in Ceuta/north most part of morroco.  I used nasa's world wind with a plugin called crossection to extract dem data into a raw file then worked on it a bit in photoshop then finally did some smoothing and a high rez output from worldmachine 4096 x 4096. 

Now for the hard part.  I am interested in producing something like the following image for the surfce shaders

http://www.planetside.co.uk/gallery/f/tg2/Norwegian+Valley+-+02b_jpg.jpeg.html

I have some reference images from the actualy moutains so you can see its slightley differnt that that image.

here is a few images of the actual area
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/157416
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/385644

coast edge/water line
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/469169
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2335244

Anyway if anyone has and adivice on maybe what params i would need in the surface shaders to set this up I would be really helpful.  Aditionaly if anyone has any project files that they might be willing to share I woulde also be very grateful.  If your interested in maybe help set up some of the environments for out game perhaps you might like to email me and we could talk.

I would attach the height .ter file for you all to play with but even zipped its 5 mb.  So if you at all interested let me know and I will email it.

thanks for listening
sorry for my spelling
you can see who I am and the game as it is at the moment here
me ..http://www.adamdonovan.net/
Frontiers the game..new website comes soon
http://www.servus.at/subcute/bordercrossing/index2.htm           really really old beta images on the site..looks much more realistic now

[rcallicotte]

Welcome to the Planetside forums.  It's good to know others are busy about Terragen.  Hope you find the help you want.

[carbon_adam]

yeah thanks..actually ive seen some of the nice work you have done around here..be chatting more I hope

[Matt]

Hi Adam,

Norwegian Valley was created by sjefen who was kind enough to post some information about the image here:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2112.0

He used texture maps to achieve the realistic rock texture, which can be applied using an Image Map Shader. I would add a Surface Layer first and then add an Image Shader as its child layer so that you can use the Surface Layer settings to control where the Image Map Shader is applied to the terrain. The tricky part then is choosing the right projection settings but I think there is some discussion about that in the above thread. Additional Surface Layers would then be added for the sandy areas and possibly for the distant vegetation (or for a first draft of the vegetation before replacing it with some real geometry). The Surface Layers have built-in controls to adjust the maximum slope, altitude and fractal coverage.

Judging by the look of the reference images, a lot of this could probably be done without image maps. The Power Fractal Shader (with its displacement settings) is a good starting point for adding rough rocky details. Again you would probably add this as a child layer to Surface Layer so that you can adjust its distribution by altitude and slope using the settings in the Surface Layer. You could then experiment with the Fake Stones Shader which is designed to cover a surface with small rock-like features of some chosen scale, but with a few different Fake Stones Shader applied with different scales you can build up fairly convincing rock faces.

Welcome

Matt

[carbon_adam]

ahh ok thanks matt, im having fun with that power fractal shader now..one quick question though.  I know i can limit the effect of the power shader though angle and height but what about making occur at a specific area, I was thinking of using the strata on some of this terrain but I want it to occur just on one side of the mountain where it appears strongest.
cheers and nice to meet u
adam

[rcallicotte]

carbon_adam - You need to mask to get these effects through the Blending Shader node of the power fractal or utilizing a camera projection.  Masks can be created via image shaders, cloud shaders, other power fractal shaders, etc.  There are some great masking techniques around here that a few of the skilled on this site have gone to great lengths to explain.  From trails to isolated spots, it's possible.  You might need to do a little searching to find some of these explanations and tutorials.  And you can always ask someone, if you have questions about their techniques.  Of course...   

I would tell you more, but I'm still learning how to do these and don't have a sense of being qualified enough to explain clearly.  Basically, use the Blending Shader node of the Power Fractal to control what goes where for the general masking and use camera projection for specific locations.  I know some people have done some masking that is specific that didn't use the camera projection and I'm not certain how this was accomplished.

[carbon_adam]

yes great calico and thanks again, I found some of those doc you were talking about..guess its just not so clear where everything is here unless you have a really good poke around, starting to get my head around blending now.  I guess one of the things that thew me off to start with was that the surface layers are kinda upside down to how something like photoshop works..so I got stuck for a while wondering why the blending was not having the effect I thought it should...makes sense now