Quote from: Erwin0265 on July 18, 2013, 07:08:35 AM
Thanks for responding.
The scientific method is one where one parameter is changed, keeping all others as they are; and observing the outcome.
This is based on zero knowledge of any and all other parameters' functions [at least, initially]; existing knowledge of other parameters' functions can lead to pre-conceived ideas that can result in "observations" being biased/manipulated to fit a pre-conceived idea.............
OK; that's the scientific method [same scientific method now being thrown out the window, in favour of asking others how to approach testing/observing].................
Yes changing one parameter at a time is best.
Also going into one direction is far easier to be able to see what's going on and to understand it.
That was actually the thing I found difficult in your approach, as to me it seemed you were trying all kinds of things without a systematical approach. But hey, I'm me and you're you
(that can't be English, lol)
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The lead-in scale; as I understand your explanation; is the size of areas where the noise is being generated.........?
Yes that's a concept you can at least get started with.
If lead in scale is smaller than feature scale then you will notice there are no "islands" of noise, but noise everywhere.
The lead in scale normally creates these "islands".
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Something else that has me confused; colour setting within the terrain tab.
Colours set within the terrain tab do appear on the terrain but only until the base layer in the shaders tab is enabled. Is this correct?
What, then, is the purpose of colour settings within the terrain tab? I'm thinking that it's to allow one to see where certain features are located whilst building the terrain. These are then obscured by the base layer in the shader tab when colouring/texturing is done.
Am I anywhere near the truth here? Or am I making no sense at all?
Yes this is a rather confusing concept for beginners I recognize.
Let me try to explain why:
The idea of building your terrain and shading is to this in stages.
The first stage is setting up your terrain, be it a heightfield or procedural (fractal terrain) for example.
Then, if necessary, you can displace the terrain further to add additional features or finer details.
This happens in the green terrain group in your node network.
You will see this group ends with a compute terrain.
This is where the surface of terrain (heightfield or procedural) and the displacements is being evaluated and updated for coordinates which can be used by surface shaders to shade the surface.
The compute terrain supplies the renderer with information about altitude and slope for each face of the surface.
So surface shaders can use this information which allows you to restrict your surface by altitude or slope or both.
This is what you will do in the shader tab; adding colours to your surface.
How the default is set up:
The default scene has a "base colours" node and if you open it and go to the colour tab you can see it has both high and low colour activated.
This means that this "base colours" powerfractal (it is a powerfractal shader) covers the surface 100%.
So any colour previously added in your terrain tab will be overridden, because this fractal has 100% coverage.
The two colours are black and grey and the contrast and roughness tab control how noisy the noise is and how much contrast there is between the noise features.
The offset shifts the coverage to either the high or low colour.
High colour = use this colour where fractal is present (white)
Low colour = use this colour where fractal is not present (black)
So if you disable the low colour then you'll only add colour where the fractal is present and vice versa.
If you use colours in the terrain tab then they won't show up as you may understand now.
Furthermore it is important to know that if you use a powerfractal to displace that the colour tab's settings do NOT affect the displacement.
The powerfractal is a versatile workhorse which allows you to displace or colour a terrain. You can do both actually, but that's rather advanced.
An advanced workflow would allow you to displace the terrain and use that same fractal to colour the terrain with the exact same pattern as the displacing fractal, but that's something which I'm not going into as it will become too confusing quickly.
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Taking your advice [perhaps too literally]; the base colours preview window shows me nothing but shades of grey. Don't I first need to have some sort of terrain first before going on to the shader tab?
Now you should understand what these shades of grey are. It's the fractal pattern where grey represents the shape of that fractal pattern.
You don't need a terrain or any connection at all to see what the fractal pattern of a fractal looks like.
They generate the noise on its own without the need for input.
The gnereated noise can be affected of course when you connect a blendshader (mask) to the noise.
So just go into that preview window and start playing with those scale and other colour settings.
Later you can disable colour and start playing with the displacement settings to see what displacementfactor, offset, roughness and spike filters are doing.
(preview will automatically show solid grey for surface when no colour is enabled)
Have fun!