Painted shader and populations

[Mandrake]

Choronr, the best tip about the paint shader was from dandelO, just after I first tried it.
And that was to position the camera for paint, wait til it finishes the preview render and then hit the pause button so that it won't keep rerendering.

[bobbystahr]

I'm having too much fun with the Paint Shade but I have a query...can cloud masks be painted...I can't seem to paint the sky except with over paint from doing a ground mask?...Help please.. ...

[Mandrake]

Never tried it Bobby, but maybe you can just paint the ground and use it on the atm.

[cyphyr]

I know it can be done, seen it here and done it myself, but I'm rendering atm so I'll have to get back to you on this. Keep playing and you'll trip over the right solution. One thing I just remembered is that you have to have the brush truly MASSIVE!
- richard

[j meyer]

Hi,
one other way is to paint with black in the fractal view of the
cloud fractal;or you could take a plane object and rotate it so
that you can paint in the preview,just experiment and have
fun.
HTH,J.

[bobbystahr]

Thanks all...as is my general practice when I need help I ask everywhere and some kind members at ashundar set me straight and I should have something decent soon.. ...

[bobbystahr]

Never tried it Bobby, but maybe you can just paint the ground and use it on the atm.

Here's my first successful attempt...I used the paint shader I  made from the top down position for the cloud mask also as a means of displacing the terrain in the heightfield shader. To locate my clouds I rotated till I found them, saved the camera position and then also in the top down view I moved my terrain into the camera view. All textures are image maps masked in place with Paint Shaders...some for example the rocks one and the cliff wall also have grayscale displacement maps as well.

[al91]

Hi,

Hopefully everyone is enjoying the painted shader and exploring the possibilities it opens up. I've seen some pretty cool stuff in various threads which I certainly hadn't thought of when we first talked about it.

I'd just like to point out its usefulness for populations, in case it wasn't obvious :-). You can use a single painted shader as the density shader for multiple populations. By varying the parameters for the populations you can quickly and easily get mixed populations. As a simple example you can paint an area alongside a body of water then use the shader as the density shader for rock and grass clump populations to give a rocky and weedy foreshore.

If you decide you want to tweak one or more of the populations you can duplicate the painted shader, which of course duplicates what you've painted, and hook that up as the density shader for the population(s) being tweaked. You can then edit the new painted shader to refine the distribution of individual populations within the mixed populations.

You can also use the intensity of the painting to control the density of a population. Greater intensity (brighter white) will give give greater population density. I've attached a couple of images showing this. You see from the image showing the mask that there are more trees in the brightest area. I've painted around the white area with the brush using a reduced flow, and you can see that the density of the trees is correspondingly lower. You can also use the falloff to increase the intensity of the brush, a falloff of zero will make the brush into a solid dot while increasing the falloff will make it progressively softer toward the edges.

For the adventurous you can potentially use the function nodes to perform complex combinations of painted shaders. To what end I can't really think of right now, but you could certainly do it :-).

Regards,

Jo

hmmm i cant seem to do it =/ any help or suggestions ?

[bobbystahr]

You might want to check out this tutorial on cloud paainting from Mr Lamppost if that's causing you the confusion it caused me at first:

http://www.ironworld.org/mr_lamppost/TG2/guides/paintsky.htm

If there's more queries, please be specific about what you don't understand.. ...

[al91]

hmm im not very good with words but. what im trying to do now is to control the density of the population with the painted shader.

[al91]

but thanks alot  i found the way of controlling the population using the painted shader after a few times of trial and error

[bobbystahr]

or you could take a plane object and rotate it so
that you can paint in the preview,just experiment and have
fun.
HTH,J.

This is something I'd like to know...just how do you rotate the plane object to perpencicular? You mention rotate so I'm assuming you know the trick.. ...

[choronr]

Perhaps a different subject; but, I the density of the screen mask is too heavy making visibility of the areas you want to paint hard to see. Could the gray color be less dense to produce better visibility of the preview screen?

[bobbystahr]

That choronr, is something I as well keep forgetting to ask...thanks for bringing that up.. OT a wee bit...don't it just make you chuckle when the omnipresent spell checker pops up and tells you you've spelled your own, or someone who's name you know, incorrectly...LOL...the weak link that.. ...

[j meyer]

Hi there,
it's a bit tricky and can be confusing sometimes,but basically you have to
use combinations of 1/0/1 or 0/-1/0 or -1/0/1 (hope you get the idea) for
the basic rotations.It helps to use more camera views,because the plane
has only one side,so sometimes it seems to disappear.There is more to
it (finetuning in small increments),but i haven't figured that out completely
myself as of now.
If you need exact settings as an example i can look it up later as i don't
have any examples handy right now an here.
J.