Rock surface

[domdib]

I was doing some experimenting with rock surfacing, and this is the first one I'm moderately happy with. Still early days though. C + C welcome.

[Henry Blewer]

It looks like some of my stuff when I really take time to make a good surface. (Better actually) What I found was that it comes down to scale and masking. Where does the surface need to be rough, like where something has broken off. Or smooth, like where it has been eroded away by water. Getting it just right is like looking for the Holy Grail. You can get close, but often end up in terrible peril in Castle Anthrax.

[Marcos Silveira]

Hey, BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!

[Thelby]

Put this in a Cafe and you would have 'Hard Rock Cafe' 
Really though, this is very nice and natural looking.

[inkydigit]

really nice looking - almost igneous!

[domdib]

Thanks everyone, for your comments. njeneb is certainly right that getting the scales and the masking right is important.

[TheBlackHole]

Put this in a Cafe and you would have 'Hard Rock Cafe' 

Lollerskates falling out of a roflcopter.

[Dune]

This rocks! Did you guys ever try to set up a network of rocky displacement shaders (twist, strata, etc) and then feed this into the terrain generate (from shader)? I did. It wouldn't use the sideways distorted areas, I figured, but you can add erosion then and might end up with a nice terrain.

---Dune

[domdib]

Thanks Dune. I'm not quite clear what you're asking re the rock shaders though. Are you talking about taking a procedural terrain with other "sideways-displacement" shaders added, and then generating a .ter from it? IN which case, why not make the .ter straight from the procedural, then the erosion, then add the "sideways-displacment" shaders in later? Or am I missing something? I've made a .ter from an Alpine fractal, which already has erosion built in, and I'm planning to use this surfacing on it.

[Dune]

We're on the same line, but once you have the erosion and then displace sideways, it wouldn't be 'real' erosion anymore. Very interesting, though. What I just meant was that it would be interesting to put a whole lot of nodes before the shader input in generate terrain, instead of just one fractal. And then apply erosion.

[Tangled-Universe]

We're on the same line, but once you have the erosion and then displace sideways, it wouldn't be 'real' erosion anymore. Very interesting, though. What I just meant was that it would be interesting to put a whole lot of nodes before the shader input in generate terrain, instead of just one fractal. And then apply erosion.

I've tried this before, it's dead slow, but cool

[domdib]

@Dune - I see what you mean - so eroding a terrain with overhangs etc. isn't possible (I can kind of understand, as the program will effectively find two different values for the height at the same spot, which probably throws it into a loop). I wonder - do GeoControl or World Machine allow this?

@Martin - When you say "it's dead slow", do you mean generating the terrain is slow? Because presumably once the heightfield is generated, it renders pretty quick?

[Henry Blewer]

Probably the render. I have done some very complex displacement work, and it takes forever to render on my machine.

[Tangled-Universe]

No, the render and heightfieldgeneration is just fine.
I meant that the erosion operator is very slow.
It often crashes here, and if it works, an hour or more is not rare.

[Hetzen]

so eroding a terrain with overhangs etc. isn't possible (I can kind of understand, as the program will effectively find two different values for the height at the same spot, which probably throws it into a loop). I wonder - do GeoControl or World Machine allow this?

No they don't, for exactly those reasons. These systems generate verticle displacement only. Of course you can then push/pull these things in TG to create overhangs. But another good aspect of these programs, is the ability to export masks for each layer of erosion. So for example you could use a fake stones shader only on a generated scree slope...