Announcement: TU Canyon & Rock Surface Pack now available @ NWDA

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Jay,

I'm sorry to hear you have difficulties using it.
What is it exactly that you find really hard to do or understand?

I admit this isn't an easy pack when it comes to integrating into your own scene since there's a lot of nodes involved, but if you use it as a base for a new scene and build your own stuff into/around it then it should really be easy to use.

Please let me know how I can be of help.

Martin

[Seth]

i used it to do this one some weeks ago : http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6387.0

[folder]

hi tu

have your canyon pack - 2 questions, did you ever make the mesa file changes and still unsure how to use the 2nd tgc file other strata,  have spent some time studing your file and have learned so much

thanks

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Folder,

It's a quite advanced and comprehensive set of nodes and it's great to read you've learned much from it.

The .tgc file produces an other type of strata. You should replace the entire strata group with the one from the .tgc.
Just connect the top and bottom node in the chain of nodes.

I'm not sure what you mean with the mesa file changes?

Cheers,
Martin

[folder]

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7092.0

Hi TU thanks for the info the above thread is the one i mentioned before called new principle for  canyon mesas

thanks again

btw is that wall packet in progress at nwda yours or franks


david

[rcallicotte]

What happened to the link to this?  It's broken.

[FrankB]

What happened to the link to this?  It's broken.

fixed it. Thanks for pointing it out. We changed the web hosterto www.nwdanet.com

Regards,
Frank

[what?]

I'm completely new to Terragen and have been using it for about 2 hours now (not counting the overnight render time ;-).

I want to model landscapes to use as references for drawing, so I'm not interested in color or surface texture and photorealistic renders much, but more in the ease of creating shapes. I bought TU's Canyon Pack, and made my first canyons. It all works well, so I'm happy, but I have two questions:

1. I tried to paint a hole in the side of a mesa that I had left standing, but this did not work as expected. Is it possible to create caves or overhangs by cutting away lower parts of vertical walls?

2. I'd like my canyon to be not 800 metres deep but only a small ravine of  maybe 5 metres and with comparably larger surface structures. What exacty do I need to do? There are some words in the accompanying PDF-file that say I have to adapt this-and-that, but I haven't found the relevant parts in my version of Terragen (3), or if I have, I have not understood what values I would need to enter for the effects I'm after.

I understand that Terragen is a powerful tool for expert modellers, but creating references being only one small step in my extensive workflow, I really don't have the time and motivation to exlore the depths of this probably wonderful software. If using Terragen is too hard, I'll have to continue finding photographs to draw from on the web. But I'd be very happy indeed, if I could find an explanation for what I want to do that is more newbie-friendly than what is current on the web.

Thank you!

* * *

I'm sorry if this is in the wrong section of the forums. The Canyon Pack PDF said to post questions in these forums, but I could not find a newer thread for that pack.

[Oshyan]

Hello and welcome!

When you say you tried to "paint a hole", what method did you use? It sounds like you were maybe already using the Painted Shader, which is the right approach for sure. What you need to do though is create negative displacement from your Painted Shader, which you can do by feeding it into a Displacement Shader and setting its amplitude to a negative value. You might need a value in the 10s or even 100s depending on the scale of your scene. You should use Along Normal displacement, but you may need to try Lateral Only. It may not work exactly as you want it to because you're painting on very steep walls, which often have long, vertical polygons, and it can't subdivide them adequately. But it's worth a try.

The other thing to know about that is that you can create any shape this way, just using the Painted Shader and a Displacement Shader to paint terrain forms (either positive or negative). So for your needs that might be quite handy indeed. After you create a basic shape you can use procedural displacement functions to give it more realistic shape.

As for the depth, looking briefly at the canyon pack setup here I see that the initial heights come from two Heightfield Generators, which are adjusted in height to specific values. If you change the values in the Heightfield Adjust Vertical shaders, you get lower heights. The canyon width doesn't change proportionally however, so you'd need to look around to figure out what controls that.

Last but not least, you can always feel free to start a new topic/thread here in the forums with your questions, unless it is really a direct reply to an older thread or on the exact same subject. In this case either approach is fine.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

Here's a quick and dirty setup with 2 painted shaders, first one to raise terrain, second one painted after raising the terrain. You can use a lateral displacement after computing the normal, or use the vector displacement without the compute normal.