Realistic planet and heightmap export

[Matt]

I would like to see the capability of feeding additional nodes into the alpine shader to allow different effects to occur with the displacement and erosion disposition, flow etc. settings themselves. Should produce some unique fractal features i'd think.

Definitely

Matt

[CCC]

I would like to see the capability of feeding additional nodes into the alpine shader to allow different effects to occur with the displacement and erosion disposition, flow etc. settings themselves. Should produce some unique fractal features i'd think.

Definitely

Matt

So would you think it would then be possible with such features to create new type of erosion like deep flows, alluvial fans, long winding flows etc,?

[Matt]

The Alpine Fractal Shader is not really capable of that sort of complexity, because basically it's just a certain type of noise which is analytically combined in a certain way to attempt to look like eroded mountains. I can only do this with a noise basis which works a particular way. One of the most important things that's missing is narrow erosion channels. A different approach would be needed for that.

What I meant is that sedimentation, local amplitude and maybe erosion power and some of the other parameters could be modulated by functions/shaders on a point by point basis to give you some really interesting variety if you choose good functions, but essentially the shader would still be limited to the kinds of shapes that are already possible by changing the parameters.

It's a lot easier to do this stuff with raster heightfields, hence the reason why my Heightfield Erode node does a better job of creating narrow channels.

Matt

[CCC]

Interesting. Well, all the same at least some interesting variations could occur with what is already there in the alpine shader and just to make it plugable should be nifty. I agree about thin erosion channels but that is serious stuff procedurally speaking of course.   

[CCC]

One more thought. Do you think that certain type of alpine shader noise you have for the erosion look could be modified in the future to achieve length, width (incl. tapering) and turbulence variations?

[vooood]

And I still don't know how to export heightmaps

[cyphyr]

What did you not understand in my mini tutorial ... ?
richard

[Cadmium77]

Quite honestly I'm not sure Terragen is the right application for your needs. TG2 does create very nice terrain, but a big part of its value and the quality of its output lies in its procedural detail and rendering engine, neither of which you will benefit from if you simply export a heightfield. If the heightfield is all you need, I would suggest instead a dedicated heightfield modeler like World Machine, L3DT, or Geocontrol, all of which are capable of generating large, seamless textures, potentially up to planetary scale. World Machine and L3DT are particularly capable in this area. Not only do they have better technology purpose-built for outputting multiple tiles of large-scale terrain, but they also tend to have more powerful terrain editing tools for heightfield-specific terrain. TG2 has the advantage of displacement, but you lose a lot of the benefit of that in a heightfield format since there can be no overhangs and the resolution is very limited by comparison.

Don't down play TG2 capabilities as terrain generator. I made a few tests and found that the erosion functionality did create very realistic features, much much more realistic than L3DT ones (try it using strong erosion on a flat terrain and you will see a slew of obscene artifacts) probably better or on pair with WM 2 and only somewhat inferior to GC2.

Obviously terrain generation is not TG2 main mission, but this does not mean that it can be a real contender in this arena.

Bye!!!

I took your word for it and for the first time I tried out the erosion node on the imported DEM files I was working with. It is indeed a very cool tool. The more I see of Terragen 2 Deep the more deeply impressed I become. Thanks for the tip;

[Cadmium77]

If only you could turn your .ter files into .obj files and then create a normal map or displacement map with a retopologized base. But even that would be frikkin huge.

[TheBlackHole]

I don't know if this fits into the discussion or not, but Wilbur does a pretty good job of making heightfields for entire planets. You can then add erosion, but there is a problem with erosion that you should be informed of: if you do it on a planetwide heightfield, you'll have a pinch-pole effect with the erosion.