Painted shader and populations

[jo]

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

[dandelO]

So, you just need to use an object spacing of '1' and then, spacing can be controlled seperately with different levels of grey/white? Is that right?

[jo]

Matt will need to chime in with the actual formula for this. However what I do is mess about with the spacing until it seems appropriate for the brightest part of the painting and then go from there, assuming darker tones will give less density. Just using '1' probably won't give you the results you're after. In the images I posted I boosted the scale of the object to 10, just to get it show up, and the object spacing was at 50.

Regards,

Jo

[Mandrake]

I'm having fun with the paint shader, but now I need a super computer for all the stuff I want to add.
I have four paint shaders on this river test, thanks dandelo, for explaining the river displacements.
I comboed the river shader with the rock population.

I've added dandelo's no frills painted river example.

[bigben]

One of the things I've always wanted to do is to have a different surface beneath each tree scattered across a paddock.  With the painted shader you can preview the instances of trees and then just dab a spot in the middle of each wireframe.

[lonewolf]

Not sure if this has happened to anyone else, but my painted shader won't work on a piece of terrain, and I have no idea why.
See the screen grab for what I mean. The whole left side is meant to be white.

Iain

[lonewolf]

I just unpaused the 3d view and this happened. 
Very unusual.

Iain

[lonewolf]

Tried going all around the camera with no luck. Does the camera have a boundry that things cannot cross?

Iain

[Mohawk20]

What works for me is to zoom in or out so everything I want to paint is visible, then I let the preview render to 100% and then I pause it. That results in the smallest triangles that are painted, so better view of coverage.
That way the painting is precise and smooth, and well visible.

[cyphyr]

Whilst the painter shader is great I've found some instances where the more traditionally painted (bitmap in photoshop etc) method works better.
Hopefully PS will add a way to export painter shader bitmaps for fine tuning at some future date.
richard

[bigben]

Exactly.  Here is a combination of image map and painted shader.  While the original image map was cnnected to several colour adjust nodes for different masks it was quite simple to add the painted shader in. In this case I was painting black to remove the masked surfaces from the slopes.  I'd also use the same shader to add minor tributaries where needed, where the resolution of image map is not adequate

[choronr]

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

Question: Can the painting of a mask be done for the purpose of creating selective placement and clumping of vegetation in certain areas on the 'Preview Window'; or, must it be done on the orthographic view of the entire terrain? If it needs to be done on the overhead view of the terrain; then, it is almost impossible to see where the vegetation needs to be placed. You just cannot accurately place vegetation where needed in this manner. Can you shed some light on this Jo?

[Mohawk20]

If you just paint in the preview on the ground where the population should show up, you can then add the painted shader as blending shader for the populations density shader.

You can paint from orthographic view, or just from the camera position, whatever works best for you...

[choronr]

If you just paint in the preview on the ground where the population should show up, you can then add the painted shader as blending shader for the populations density shader.

You can paint from orthographic view, or just from the camera position, whatever works best for you...

Thanks Mohawk20, I'll give this a try. A tutorial on this would be very convenient.

[choronr]

Using the Painted shader for ideal vegetation distribution is a snap ...so much, much better than working with the Distribution shader, especially on distant scenes!