Hi, long time lurker. This is probably my first *real* attempt at a render. The terrain was composited in World Machine via dems from the Dead Sea area as part of a much larger terrain modelling project I'm involved in. The hills are meant to be the hills of Haradwaith from Tolkien's Middle Earth.
Some of the flow is a bit black, uhmm -crept into the network somwhere... :D I'm running a render overnight which hopefully will tone that down a bit. I used the bigfatatmo with some tweaks from nwda presets. Crits welcome!
monks
Beautiful lighting and terrain, Monks. I do like the dark flows. The only crit I would have is about the huge rocks. They seem out of place somehow.
+1
Thanks guys. ;) I put the stones in to try give it some scale and a bit of interest- but when the final render came out the textures were more varied than what they appeared in the preview. I might try them with a different colour.
Before I put the rocks in, I was trying to introduce displacement to the flat area driven by the power fractal. The power fractal is driving the breakup on the surface layer. Didn't seem to work though. What's the diffrence between plugging in a pf to the displacement node, and using a diplacement node?
I tried another render last night but it wasn't an improvement.
Are there any resources explaining sun heading and noise scales (scale, lead in, etc)?
monks
Hi Monks, great image, some interesting details. One point as alluded too by others; the scale of the rocks or actually I'm wondering, what is the size of the terrain? I would have thought a landscape of that size to be in the tens of kilometres (which would make the boulders some 100m across). When you import the elevation map add between the "Heightfield Load (green node)" and the "Heightfield shader (Red node)" a "heightfield resize (green node)" and type in the actual size of your terrain (in meters, everything in Terragen is measured in meters). Apologies if I'm on the wrong track here.
Keep at it!
:)
Richard
Thanks very much! Yes, the original idea was to have the boulders to be like huge outcrops- not so much boulders as outcrops of the bedrock. But I guess, being fake stones, they look like boulders. Probably need another method of creating them. I think just adding diplacement to that area would be enough, but I had trouble with it...scaling I think.
I'm onto the heightfield operators Richard ..one thing I did remember from previous tinkering. :)
Ah, ok, so everything is in meters, including noise settings. That's helpful. The terrain is 8k pixels @ 12.5m, so it's roughly 100 km across. The view only shows a small fraction. So those rocks are enormous. ;D I think maybe with some displacement of the terrain around them, they'd be less obviously "sitting on the top" of the ground.
monks
i agree about the rocks... they seem out of place with the rest of the scene.
the terrain is great imo, but some of the textures look a bit blurred.
I would add a billowed (or voronoi-based) outcrop fractal, blended by another fractal to restrict the number. Or paint in some areas where you want those outcrops. With the displacement shader you have less control over the noise, it uses the color of a fractal to drive it's displacement. The PF displacement can be used even without it's colors checked. I'd play with the displacement settings (roughness over 1, limit at 0.3-0.5 or so), and some decent sizes for the rocks, say 0.6/10/0.2. Depends on the actual size you want, really.
Thanks for the feedback, so much to learn from you folks, and really wish I had more time to devote to the rendering end of things.
zaai, yes the texture does look a bit blurry, could be crisper. Not sure why that is. It could be the slope settings on the shaders. I tend to find in World Machine that there's a sweet spot for every terrain. I've disabled fractal noise in the terrain import because I wanted to make sure that the noise wasn't added in the eroded valleys and I wasn't sure about the scale of the noise setting at that point. Maybe I should try adding a bit back in now.
The shaders are applied via image maps so that could well account for the lost of procedural detail.
Also, makes me think- is the "Add fractal detail" in the heightfield shader imparted to the heightfield load operator? Would I see the fractal noise show up in the terrain?
I've set to detail to 3, AA = 5. Atmo = 64. GI is at 2.
Dune, I like the sound of the billowy voronoi. I think I need to try a few things out in another project first.
monks
There's so much you can do by just playing with the settings and combining. Great fun!
Nice image and I like the improvement on the 'rocks'; much more 'outcrop-y'... (I wonder if they would look more like your outcrops if you were to texture them with the same texture as the terrain (although scale would be an issue?)... it's a lazy fix I sometimes use in Bryce to make things placed on terrain fit in better).
Regards, Mark
:) Nice one! That's something like I imagined- the strata too. I did two version of the terrain, the other is canyonised stratas. I think texturing them with same terrain might be the way to go. Putting the nodes before the compute terrain is not something I would have thought of doing...but that makes sense looking at it.
What does the colour adjust do?
I ran a render last night but I left the crop on. D'OH! I'll try incorporate something like this.
monks
The color adjust is just to get the 0.1 white of the PF back to full white for the color in the lower areas.
I tried another render and it seemed to stall right at the end. Timer wasn't moving, and hard disk was spinning for about 30 minutes :( After an 18 hour wait, that was pretty disappointing. But anyway, it wasn't really a render I'd call a keeper.
So I'll have a go at putting in some outcrops that Dune suggested.
monks
...so...been playing with this on and off afte adding Dune's nodes suggestion, and I'm having a basic problem of controlling where the terrain produced by the network Dune posted is added to the heightfield shader....
I'm trying to control the distribution of the addition of the terrain set up in the nodes he posted. Seems to me, the easiset way is to plug the heightfield shader into a distribution shader (some node that has altitude constraints settings) and then plug that distribution shader into a merge shader...see pic. But all I'm getting is the terrain added everywhere. The altitude constraints in the distrib shader controls how much the terrain is added, not where the terrain is added... ???
Merge shader settings
mix to A = 1
controler = distrib shader
choose by alt = all
merge mode, both set to Add
Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?
monks
The shader that's plugged into "mix controller" is only asked to produce colour. The displacements on that branch are never called, so the Heightfield Shader will never produce any altitude that the Distribution Shader could use.
In your setup, the Distribution Shader sees the altitudes from whatever displacement was done by the Input of the Merge Shader.
Matt
I think I might have been wrong about what the mix controller sees. I think the way the Merge Shader works, the mix controller never sees any displacement from any of the inputs.
If you're just adding displacements to an existing terrain, why not use the "blend by shader" option? The distribution shader will work in that case.
Matt
Thanks Matt, I 'm not understanding some basic things- like there was a division between colour and displacement in TG. But now you point it out it does seem to be theme in the nodes and would make sense, xy and z. My biggest problem is understanding the node input descriptions.
I'll keep playing with it but I'll probably need to take a detour into a tut or two :)
monks
I haven't looked closely at this, but just from the sound of how you're talking about using the Distribution Shader, it sounds like you're going about in a slightly incorrect way. You would want to plug the Distribution Shader into Merge Shader's "Mix controller" input to control the mixing of your Heightfield with the base terrain. Alternatively you could plug the Distribution shader into the Blend Shader input of your Heightfield.
However the biggest problem with what you're trying to do is probably that it all comes before the Compute Terrain, so there is no existing computation of slope/altitude for the Distribution Shader to work off of. See this fine explanation from Martin in another recent thread:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=14673.msg143626#msg143626
- Oshyan
I understand the Compute terrain node now. Basically that's the computation of the surface, so better to have all major terrain alterations before that- or so I read. Apparently you can also use get x/y position from the heightfield to place textures. Looking briefly at that thread yes!...texcoords from xyz and the I was beginning to think that more than computer normal could be useful- I was in the habit of thinking that you only had one compute normal in the network because that's how the default project is laid out. But of course, there's no hard and fast rule like that.
I did try using the distribution shader into the mix controller that way and I seemed to be getting somewhere at that point. Then we had a power outage in the area...and I lost it. The thread will be more help. If I can get to the point where I can view the nodes (or combination of them) as equivalents to World Machine nodes, then I'll be happy. I think that thread and basic workflow explanation by Martin should be put into some kind of tutorial. ;)
monks
I think I can do this another way since I'm not combining two heightfields, I'm combining (with altitude constraints), a fractal terrain with a base heightfield. So basically if you put a surface layer in the network it doesn't necessarily hide the terrain that was before it in the terrain, because all you do is alter the height/slope constraints. Obvious...but what's less obvious is I have to plug the fractal terrain into the child node of the surface layer. But the child node is above the parent node in the network view, when the whole flow of the network is down to the planet node. That's the confusing aspect. The Shaders tab view makes visual sense.
monks