Recent posts

#91

Terragen Discussion / Re: Render subdiv settings

Last post by digitalguru - May 21, 2025, 04:09:36 AM

Agree, but on closer examination, the fake stones lose shadowing, which is a shame as I like what it was doing on the larger features, though I suspect it is technically not correct.
The animation feature that changed the shadows was Stabilse ray detail in motion. I'll experiment with that a bit more, but I suspect I might have to go back to the previous "blobbier" version

Render times were pretty much the same for both renders.

#92

Terragen Discussion / Re: Render subdiv settings

Last post by Dune - May 21, 2025, 02:09:31 AM

Interesting. I like the animations render better, so maybe for stills those settings would be good to try. Is there a difference in render time?

#93

Image Sharing / Re: Happy accident

Last post by Dune - May 21, 2025, 02:05:25 AM

Cool indeed. Lucky accidents do happen. You could add a pop of the internal grass where the trees are on bare rock to. Set it to follow the rotation of the terrain, and make the underlying grass object a little smaller by reducing XZ to 0.5-0.6 or so (you get 5-6m blocks of grass then, which are less prone to float), and maybe make the stems longer (0.5m, and sink them a little, say 0.2m). Give them a fractal color followed by a transform shader set to world/final position, pulled into the color input of the grass' default shader.
Mask the pop by max slope, and perhaps some fractal.

#94

Terragen Discussion / Re: Displacement map question

Last post by Kevin Kipper - May 20, 2025, 05:12:34 PM

You may have to add a Compute Normal node after any terrain displacement and before the displacement from the jagged rock image.  Then, you could use an Image Map Shader node (with jagged rock) with displacement enabled and a Distribution Shader as a mask.  Set the Slope Constraints in the Distribution shader.

#95

Terragen Discussion / Displacement map question

Last post by rolland1013 - May 20, 2025, 04:00:07 PM

I not having any luck getting this to work. I have a displacement map of a jagged rock surface that I want to apply to my terrain surface. But I want it to only affect terrain with a slope greater than 30 degrees. I've tried using the altitude constraints in a Surface Layer node, but it doesn't work. As a test, I created a small painted shader, and that works. But that isn't a practical solution for what I'm trying to do. Is there a way of doing this that uses slope and elevation to mask a displacement map?

Thanks,
Niel

#96

Image Sharing / Happy accident

Last post by Belmont224 - May 20, 2025, 02:17:12 PM

This is my first image worth posting, and it's creation was an accident. I thought it looked cool though. Literally... I need to fix the trees growing straight out of the rock.

The accident was when I unchecked the box to light surfaces with the sun. This created this cloudy, cold looking image.

#97

Terragen Discussion / Re: Heightmap problem

Last post by digitalguru - May 20, 2025, 08:59:59 AM

How are you mapping the displacement? can you post an image?

#98

Terragen Discussion / Heightmap problem

Last post by rpleak - May 20, 2025, 05:18:08 AM

I am having a problem using heightmaps. I have created a small planet with a radius of 43780 meters, but when I load heightmaps to give it a cratered surface, all the hieghtmaps load at the top of the planet, and drape down the sides. This produces a a surface that is smeared down the sides from the top, and aren't perpendicular to the sides of the planet.
Any suggestions?

Thanks;
Rob Pleak

#99

Terragen Discussion / Re: Render subdiv settings

Last post by digitalguru - May 20, 2025, 04:49:26 AM

I rendered a short section last night - results were interesting

no popping or artefacts in the non animation setting render - the only difference I see is in the shadows. The animation settings had shadows with a softer falloff, whereas the non animation had a harder terminator. Looks better to me and in comparison the non animation version shadows now look a bit "blobby"

non-animation setting:
fully_adaptive = "1"
microvertex_jittering = "1"
force_all_edges = "0"
detail_jittering = "1"
detail_blending = "0"
displacement_filter = "1"
jitter_shading_points = "1"
ray_detail_multiplier = "1"
stabilise_ray_detail_in_motion = "0"
ray_detail_stabilisation = "3"
override_size_of_subdiv_cache = "0"

animation settings:
fully_adaptive = "1"
microvertex_jittering = "1"
force_all_edges = "0"
detail_jittering = "0"
detail_blending = "0.5"
displacement_filter = "1"
jitter_shading_points = "0"
ray_detail_multiplier = "1"
stabilise_ray_detail_in_motion = "1"
ray_detail_stabilisation = "3"
override_size_of_subdiv_cache = "0"

non animation settings render:


animation settings render:

#100

Terragen Support / Re: Exporting an FBX camera ou...

Last post by digitalguru - May 19, 2025, 08:58:45 AM

Millions of miles? Sounds like you're flying through a solar system?

Matt is right, get the scale working in Maya first, then export that camera to TG. You may need a further scale factor when you export the camera to get the scene looking right.

Maya is not great at huge scene scales. I remmeber a show that had a pretty detailed layout of a section of Edinburgh that was modelled at real world scale. Due to floating point errors animation was going nuts and had to be baked at the origin then moved to its final location, so make sure any "hero" anim takes place at the origin.

Don't think you need to go as low as a couple of metres, but I'd have to experiment with something like this, but couldn't say for sure.

Thinking about this, if I was doing something like a fly through of the solar system then coming to Earth and ending on a landscape, I'd consider splitting the anim into two sections - at different scales and blending the two.