I'm sure this has been covered but I cant find a relevant link. The image below shows what I dont want. The smaller stones have covered the larger stones. The effect I am looking for is the exact opposite. How can I exclude the smaller stones from the surface of the larger stones? I have brightly coloured the individual stones for clarity. I'm trying to get larger stones to lay ontop of smaller stones, is this possible? Attached are the tgd file, the render and a screen grab of the Fake stones node network.
Thanks in advance.
Richard Fraser
(cyphyr)
Just guessing, but could you feed the output of the top stone shader into the blending shader of the second one and then in the second shader tick 'invert blending shader shader' and so on for all others?
edit: just like this, seems to work:
[attachimg=#]
what 3d guy says is correct. but i don't know that works right if the color of the stones is anything but white. I'm almost certain that if you change the stone color via the simple color slider of the fake stone shader, it won't work correctly. I don't know what happens if you use a default shader to change the stones shading.
Would it be possible (I haven't explored all of the node types yet) to set the stone shader color differently for each of its outputs, by passing through other shaders en route to the inputs of subsequent nodes?
It definitely is. You could use a color adjust shader to make the areas where there are stones white, and plug that into the blending shader.
reverse the order so you start with tiny rocks and end with big ones
yeah that'll work, put the shaders so that the smallest stones are at the top of the shader list and the largest at the bottom.
Hey I just made a quick tutorial on how I do this thing of rock over rock question.
you can find it here
http://terragenfmtoffolo.blogspot.com (http://terragenfmtoffolo.blogspot.com)
I don't know if this is the right way of doing it, but i've tried all the other ways i found in this forum, and all of them gave me trouble. So i came up with my own way.
Fer
You might try reversing the order of you stone layers. The way layers work in Terragen is the bottom of the list is the top surface therefore the large stone should be at the bottom of your layer list not the top.
Here is a great thread that talks about fake stones.
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=231.0
Hope this helps.
actually, when putting the little stones shader before the big stones shader i get the stones with different color allright, but the big stones carry along the displacement of the little stones shader...(first pic)
By masking you can get the same but free of unwanted displacements(second pic)
Can I either see your TGD to understand the masking or could you explain it or show the node network and explain it? I would like to mask only a certain area which will have the fake stones and the rest of the picture will not have the fake stones.
Quote from: fmtoffolo on February 26, 2007, 03:06:44 PM
actually, when putting the little stones shader before the big stones shader i get the stones with different color allright, but the big stones carry along the displacement of the little stones shader...(first pic)
By masking you can get the same but free of unwanted displacements(second pic)
The explanation is in my tutorial at
http://terragenfmtoffolo.blogspot.com
There you have an explanation and a screen of the node network
Any doubt just pm me
pd: I'll be uploading a video tutorial of this tomorrow(27/02/07) in my blog, so check it out if you want!
Similar discussion http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=98.0
(http://keep4u.ru/imgs/b/070227/7a33bdc75c47bc4b5f.jpg)
(http://keep4u.ru/imgs/s/070227/1daf6c4ad5630496c4.jpg) (http://keep4u.ru/full/070227/1daf6c4ad5630496c4/jpg)
Those are pretty real looking stones Victor
Good job
Sea stones can be made well, but now I cannot receive the realistic form of stones in mountains? :-[
It would be desirable to receive realistic sharp angular stones (with sharp enough sides) (such, as in mountains where there is no strong influence of water of a sea surf). There are ideas?
Hi Victor,
fmtoffolo has posted a wonderful tutorial in this thread. He uses displacements on his stones. It is just a matter of scaling the fractal up for getting sharp shaped stones.
Regards, Volker Harun ;)
I try, but I do not receive good result. Forms of stones turn out sometimes interesting, but it not "real" stones. :(
Hi Victor,
when you have the default shader attached to the fake stone - go to the displacement tab.
Set the displacement multiplier to -1.
In the displacement function add a new power fractal shader - open this new one and got to the colour tab.
Enable here 'Apply high colour' and 'Apply low colour', set the colour contrast to 1.
The most important setting now is the colour roughness. Set it to about 1 or less for decent results.
You can set the lead in scale to about 100 and smallest scale to 0.1 for finer details.
Volker Harun
Victor, I love what you've done.
fmtoffolo, I watched your tutorial but it's sort of small. Anyway, I appreciate your input in the post here and have learned from that. As well, I learned from BigBen on masking and it appears to be working as I want it.
Thanks for all the replies guys. I can now achive the results I'm looking for with two layers of stones (not too haard) but if I use more than that I seem to have to make a choice between which layer of stones I use as a mask, since the blend layer dose not have any way of using two or more layers as inputs. Its cirtainly got me stumped.
Richard
You can feed your stones in order (smaller into larger) through the inputs and then put your mask on the Blending Shader of each of your fake stone nodes. I don't have it here or I could show you. If you don't figure it out by tonight, I can send a picture of what I've done.
Or am I misunderstanding you?
I uploaded a video tutorial to my blog. http://terragenfmtoffolo.blogspot.com
And regarding the type of rock you want, realistic or not, that depeneds entirely on the kind of fractal you use and the amount of tweaking you want to make. IMO most fractals give good results(it mostly depends on how much you displacement you use...).
And of course, the masking thing, i'm sure there are tons of ways to do it, i just made a tut about one of them.
bye
fer
Here's a sketch of what I've done and it works okay. The mask is using a texture behind it, which is the red you can see. The fake stones come through that part.
Well I finally sussed out the Stones Layering issue:
Important Note (the mask layer taken from the previous stones layer must have its colour vairation turned OFF). I've attached the tgs file for anyone else as dim as myself :) One issue remains (not a big one) it would appear that when stones lay on the boundary of the heigher stone shader the masking can cause unwanted "cut off?" artifacts. I reccon this is a small problem and could probably be solved by setting a different seed number for the affected layer.
I do have one final question about fake stones. What dose Separate Geometry do? Every time I enable it the stone layer becomes invisable, is this a function still waiting to be enabled?
Thanks once again guys
Richard
Ignore the "separate geometry" option for now. ;D
- Oshyan
Hate to revive this, but...
So using these methods (cyphr's has been the successful one for me so far) how would one include slope and altitude masking, since the final blend shader is being inverted? I didn't see anything mentioned on it in the thread so it has to be something really simple, but I can't for the life of me figure it out.
I've tried everything I could think of - inverting the surface layer attached to the stones mask, but to no avail.
Take a look at this method that Frank B suggested:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3796.msg41840#msg41840
Don't know if it will enable you to include slope and alt masking though, but worth a try.
Quote from: EBAndrew on June 24, 2008, 11:32:47 AM
Hate to revive this, but...
So using these methods (cyphr's has been the successful one for me so far) how would one include slope and altitude masking, since the final blend shader is being inverted? I didn't see anything mentioned on it in the thread so it has to be something really simple, but I can't for the life of me figure it out.
I've tried everything I could think of - inverting the surface layer attached to the stones mask, but to no avail.
just keep your stones as child layers of a slope/alt restricted surface layer?
yep or distribution shader...