Planetside Software Forums

I'm spending time in Blender at the moment. I got into this after trying to create trees. It turns out Blender has a script for trees. It's quite good. Similar to Arbaro. I'm now getting deeper into Blender and especially to do with landscape type stuff. There are some limitations of course but working with vaste populations of objects is not one of them. Blender is really great for that. Millions of rocks or trees etc. I'm experimenting with clouds as well since this is a big weakness of any non specific landscape app.

I wish TG2 could ouput proper HDRI environments. That would be a very useful function since TG2 can handle large vistas of mountains and sky.

One thing I can say is that Blender's day has come. Just check out these two threads, especially later in the threads and especially some of the work in the UV and displacements thread. That is very clever. Cycles rendering engine is awesome. Really beautiful renders.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?273033-Sculpting-with-UVs-and-displacements

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?264568-Dyntopo-tests

How this relates to TG2 I'm not sure but it might be a while before I use TG2 again due to being bogged down in Blender. Maybe I can bring things back to TG2. Other big 3D apps have serious problems now. Blender makes redundant some purposes for using those.

I keep going back to Blender and the Blender community for great software and excellent tutorials.  What a great option!

One of the problems with Blender was difficulty in finding out how to use it. All these apps are like this. Maya, 3DMax etc. you don't just dive in and play around, it has to be learnt but now I see a huge amount of info about doung various stuff. This part isn't a problem now.

Terragen 3 will have a spherical camera, so you can output 360 environments quite easily.

- Oshyan

Great. I've just seen about TG3. Linux node rendering as well. That's cool. Of course I'd like a full Terragen on Linux but I understand the priorities. I'll probably be working away in other apps even when Terragen 3 comes out but I need to do that to get the content I really want. I've got tired of the pure landscaping thing and it doesn't please me to just use ready made content to put in the scene.

I thought Ubuntu read the windows files system, read and write.

Yes, linux can read and write Windows file systems. Windows can't read Linux unfortunately but that's OK. I do everything except TG2 in Linux so I'm on Linux all the time. It would be nice to have TG2 on Linux. The rendering node isn't an added bonus for my use but cool that we will have it. I know it isn't a priority to have full Linux TG. That is until more people are using Linux.

There are a number of ways Blender can play with TG2. I'll probably show results from that soon. You can make terrains in Blender. I've had large ones good enough to use as TG2 heightfields. I've yet to test how good this works in terms of getting them out of Blender into TG2. In Blender you can create large mesh terrains or any mesh then burn the displacement into a bitmap in some interesting ways. Because you can see and edit the mesh, you can do a lot before making the bitmap which can be exported in high bit depth. Editing a large terrain could be slow but you could also do tweaks in 3DCoat. Blender has a stack of fractal power so you can make terrains or a bunch of textures that you can't do in TG2. Blender is powerful in terms of procedural textures. There are some limits with displacements which is maybe why people don't use the procedurals that much but then again the same limits apply for bitmap displacements. I think it's more lack of knowledge about the power of it. So you could have exactly the same scene in Blender and TG2. Could be useful.

Basically what you can do is make any mesh and burn it to bitmap for heigthfield. You can add any shape you want to it since Blender is a modeller. It should work fine as long as the bitmap has no problems and burns into the UV nicely.

For people that use heightfields in TG2. What kind of resolution do you use? What can TG2 import and deal with? I never used Heightfields much.

this may be of use to you or others in terms of modeling and trees. THis seemed like the thread for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxAsfqqeAUM

and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvGX8ShwzKo

Hi Michael.

I've seen those. The landscape one has a bunch of flaws. You can do way better but it all takes time to figure out. I've got great terrains in Blender. The addon for creating terrains has some problems. I'm not using that. I'm making terrains as displacement modifier. these can then be burned as high bit depth maps for heightfield. In Blender you have all the node functionality missing from Terragen.  Curve graphs, colour ramps etc. You can assign shaders by altitude and slope. I'm working on it but there is no doubt that there should be a way to get great terrains out of Blender that Terragen isn't capable of. Still a few problems to work through though. The main reason for the potential is Blender's fantastic fractal power. I think you'd have go to something like World Machine to get similar or for some types of terrain, better since Blender won't do the erosion type stuff.

One example of what people aren't doing is that the mesh is totally controllable wherever it is in the scene. The procedural texture space always remains the same so once you have your terrain shapes you can fine tune the mesh. Close mesh has lots of detail far mesh doesn't need to. The terrain shapes don't change just detail. This is Blender specific though. I'm working on how to better edit terrains for use in Terragen.

As for trees. That obviously gets complex. I'm not working on that at the moment but it turns out you can create arrays of leaves along branches and it's super effective. These objects can be linked to the branch and this means any shaping of the tree keeps the leaves attached. Simple plants that can compete with Plant Factory are definitely possible right down to all details of leaves etc. Bigger trees with a lot more leaves gets more complex if you work from scratch.

One thing is clear. As long as I don't come across any major hurdles, I think I can revolutionise the way Blender is being used for landscapes and this means content to other apps as well.

Here's a quick preview of things I'm working on. It also demos a problem and Why I'm not using that addon you see in all the tutorials about landscape. The addon does something that creates a grid. It's not a poly grid either, it's lower level in the mesh. You can see it in this render. It may be problem that is solvable but I've moved to manually creating terrains as displacement modifier. This turns out way more powerful because I can blend up all sorts of forms in node graphs.

Blender is a serious app. Don't go by a lot of the work you see. A lot of amateurs use Blender. That's good but it means a lot of unskilled work.

(http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/8567/lmkc.jpg)

I've learnt everything Blender does. It took some time and I'm ditching Blender. Everyone if faffing around with the dynamic topolgy and Cyles renderer but other problems exist and are getting neglected. The texture nodes for mesh displacement modifier don't work. This kills off  complex terrain adjustments but worse, the new Cycles render nodes ditches all the basis functions in the Musgrave fractal. Ludicrous decision.

Over to Modo now. Looks like Modo 701has some serious texturing power including an insanely powerful gradient editor. Also, Modo handles vast poly counts which is always a plus. It will probably take me months to learn all this. If Modo can't cut it I'm ditching 3D forever.

Efflux, you work fast! How did you go from "One thing is clear. As long as I don't come across any major hurdles, I think I can revolutionise the way Blender is being used for landscapes and this means content to other apps as well" to "I've learnt everything Blender does. It took some time and I'm ditching Blender" in only 13 hours?! It's impossible to figure out what software you like and what you don't ;)

Matt

Matt, I get this all the time. An app has massive potential, I spend ages learning then a major stumbling block arrives. It didn't take me 13 hours to learn Blender. I've been working for weeks on it and on and off for years. It just took me thirteen hours to find the two stumbling blocks. One of which is a new change. I've noted on the development forum that removing part of the Blender Cycles procedural power is a crazy regression but who knows what they will do. Interesting that I find hardly anyone complaining about this. On Blenderartists.org most people even didn't seem to know that I was on about. I had to provide screenshots to show it. This is hard core Blender users and I was describing how the app works.

I find this kind of thing crops up a lot with open source software. They strip something out that if it was a commercial app they'd lose serious money. It would be like if Planetside removed the GI or something and brought it back next year. I'm not actually ditching Blender because it does do a few interesting things. It has a compositor which seems to work OK. It has various interesting ways of turning mesh to bitmapping textures and vice versa. The new dynamic topology is in fact very cool but doesn't interest me a huge amount. I prefer 3D Coat's voxel sculpting. The new renderer is very cool. Very nice results but then If I'm going to use Modo that doesn't really matter.

Wings3d is one app I learn't that I can totally stand by. Great modeller. Whatever I said about I don't take back.

I haven't used Modo in a while. I see a lot of features I didn't know it. had. I thought it lacked procedural texturing. It used to. Not now!

As for learning Modo. This won't be a few days that's for sure. For a laugh, here's the gradient editor:

http://docs.luxology.com/modo/701/help/pages/modointerface/viewports/GradientEditor.html

Leaving aside the ludicrous ditching of the basis functions in Cycles fractal node. Here's the showstopper that destroys Blender's potential to build fantastic terrains. You can still build terrains with displacement but the displacement modifier for mesh allows you to see it in real time and edit it manually. I had assumed I could use nodes which is vital to build up fancy networks:

http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=498&aid=32759&group_id=9

Here's where my Blender experiments ended. This isn't rendered in Cycles. It's rendered in the old internal. Cycles would be more realistic like Terragen. You get can all the atmosphere light interaction but at present that stuff is early days in Blender. I think it's hassle to set up but everyone will want it so developers will concentrate on it. Particle systems created the rocks. They are real geometry and you can create millions of them and even use physics systems to control where they are or where they move to (animation is dead easy and render times are fast). The whole ground could be covered in varieties of rock. The tree could also be replicated, probably into hundreds, maybe thousands. This is where an app like Blender is heaven compared to Terragen because it's easy to edit all this kind of stuff. The terrain is full geometry. You can move around it. The cloud was my first experiment at creating volumetrics. This could be taken way further for better results but obviously a weakness in non dedicated landscape app. For example, you have to use mesh to control it but that doesn't mean it has to look as solid as in this render. It's not that different from if you had to contain clouds in Terragen. The surfaces on the rocks and tree are (were) Blender's huge strength along with terrain shapes because Blender had massive fractal power. This gets into where it flops now. If I moved this to Cycles, none of those mats can be recreated. I only have some kind of noise basis, maybe perlin. I don't even know. None of all the voronoi basis. That's all gone.  One of the massive advantages over Terragen is killed. The terrain editing in realtime viewable geometry falls down because I wanted to make complex terrain graphs and that terrain could be used in TG2. The nodes for displacment modifier textures don't work. That was potentially a fantastic feature.

http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/2271/xyto.jpg

Next step is to move everything I learnt in Blender to Modo.

Blender has now settled into the workflow. Nothing tops Blender for shaping rocks because of the displacement modifier and the fractals to do this. This image here is from an animation in Blender. I haven't shaped the rocks here yet. To do that I'd subdivide the voronoi shapes then apply a modifier. They are a cube that I smashed apart into voronoi distance type lumps then created a particle system out of the results and then these particles collapse with gravity. Its actually a liquid type physics. The flow around once hitting the ground. The objects are controlled with physics. It's similar to stuff you'd do in Houdini but for free. The rocks land naturally even roll down that slope. They are simply geometry but that will change. Modo will handle the particle physics not Blender. In Modo I can create vaste clouds of all sorts and heavily micropoly displaced as well. The ground here could be a Terragen heightfield. Modo handles that kind of thing better though because this truly could be a vast Terragen heightfield with millions of small rocks raining down. This stuff is cool to work with because you can get rocks to roll and land in natural piles. That could be very useful to import into TG2. It goes much further than that though, especially when I get more into Modo.

(http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/9332/m7ud.jpg)

This video shows you how this can be useful to create objects for Terragen:

http://vimeo.com/38221113#

Here's another one but this isn't the script I'm currently using:

http://vimeo.com/38219515#

Or this:

http://vimeo.com/38450564

Thanks for those links. I'm going to learn the basics of blender and use that effect for something I've had in mind for years

I've been through a few apps and rocks are one of Blender's great strengths because you have various scripts for smashing objects apart then physics systems to arrange them. Obviously people want this for animation but the side product is that you're left with a bunch of broken up mesh. Then add in that Blender has this mesh modifier that displaces and it has fractals for that. This in in fact where Blender's terrain generation gets let down though because you can't use nodes for that modifier. It's fine or rocks but for terrain you'd want more functionality.

I'd recommend that people here get into particles and physics in other apps due to the way you can use things such as gravity to arrange objects. The output from this kind of thing would be really useful in Terragen. Houdini is the ultimate app for this but not needed. It's also really fun because it all animates. Doing stuff like firing a ball through a wall and smashing a hole. That's all great fun to learn and watch happening.

Further down the road, if you can do all these procedural animation type things in other apps with particles and such like, you then have things that can be composited in with Terragen animations. It's definitely very useful to learn this stuff.

I've mentioned this before but I don't see many people who are using these other apps diving into Terragen to create landscapes because of the massive learning curve to get decent results but Modo, Blender etc (the ones I've tried) that's much easier to learn than Terragen.

I am surprised at how easy it is to learn the 2.6 version.  The old one was a nightmare but 5 mins in with the basic tutorial vids and you are away.  It is a very serious and stable app, well worth the effort learning it.

It's definitely worth learning now. A no brainer really. Even if you find limits and move to another app, you won't find that so difficult if you know Blender first and there are still always going to be uses for Blender. The Cycles renderer changes a lot. That has very nice realistic look.

I've found a lot of improvements. it has Bmesh now which allows ngons.

I also don't believe the poor UI arguments are valid anymore especially with Cycles. the last area of UI confusion tended to be in the way materials and textures were dealt with. In Cycles that is hugely cleaned up because you just work with nodes in a really easy way.

Another thing that used to be complained about is the key command centric nature. That's not so relevant anymore but once you realise the massive key command power you see why that is brilliant. For example, lets say you want to move an object 1m in Y direction. Key command G then Y then 1. That's it done.

Back messing in Blender. Latest release candidate. Cycles is about 25% faster. I'm testing Cycles displacements. This is an "experimental" feature but it actually seems to be working quite well. I have a new method that could create terrains from Blender without too much hassle. The terrains possibilities are in there due to Blenders great fractals and node editing power even in the more Limited Cycles. It's just finding the way to create them and actually see them as you edit.

I've been working in Modo. Just in that time Blender is already upgraded. Modo's UI is terrible. It always seems like you're dealing with an app that is massively more complex than Blender but it isn't. Blender UI is brilliant. These people who say it's bad are talking crap. I'm beginning to think there simply isn't any point in using any of these types of apps except Blender. No way is Modo worth £1000.

Blender Cycles displacements:

(http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/2066/td8e.jpg)

Ok here's my first test using pure displacement this time. This can be turned to mesh in Blender for further modification or exported. I want to work out how to create falls off to the edge. Blender's node network means great terrains are possible. The problem is finding the right method. TG2's node network is useless in comparison. Blender's is massively more powerful. I can also get terrains probably four of five sizes this detail into Modo but I'm not sure I want to do that. I think Blender is better now or use these terrains in TG2.

(http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/4192/zjme.jpg)

Here's another one. All sorts of terrain types can be created in seconds unlike the hell of the TG2 nodes. All fractal functions can be driven by other parameters. All positioning is controllabe. Masses of fractal forms and this is the "crippled" Cycles nodes. I've got the ball rolling on that though. We may get all the basis functions reinstated eventually. Then you have curve graphs and gradients. These are all essential and that's why TG2 is completely crippled.

(http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/6453/ca6i.jpg)

Maybe Planetside can 'steal' some script from Blender, it's open source, right?  8)

Quote from: Dune on July 04, 2013, 02:59:18 AM
Maybe Planetside can 'steal' some script from Blender, it's open source, right?  8)

I always was curious about that too. I am guessing the codes must be made compatible, and thats probably a ton of work? Maybe it just takes less time to build it all up by your self in an original way, than to try to make two different languages work together?

Otherwise, yeah! Planetside and everyone should be grabbing that stuff up! Then again, maybe there is some culture in the industry that makes doing that an undesirable behavior? OR just the pride of doing it all your self?

Its a great question Ulco, I'm really curious about it.

I really don't know how that 'works', what's feasible or ethical. But it would be great to have ONE SOFTWARE that has it all.

^^HA! Yeah! I know what you mean. I read that the reason that autodesk does not take the best parts of Maya, Max and softimage, and spin them into one new super package, is because the user groups would cry about it.
I read that the idea is that users would be upset about having to learn a new UI and such. But what could they do about it? Protest by buying a competitors soft and learning a new UI? Its silly.

I really wish Autodesk would do that. It would go along way towards standardisation in the industry. But I think Ill never understand why anyone does anything.

On the other hand, if you have some software that does it all, it is probably way too heavy to even load, let alone work in it. Lots of stuff you don't need and have to buy because it's included. Like building buildings, trees, moving water, explosions and terrific landscapes, and animate that all into a fully fledged feature film, all in one TG5.

All Planetside has to do is to implement the needed features. This is why I'm doing this in Blender instead of Terragen. Of course these terrains are usable in Terragen then I can add what Terragen is good at. Clouds, infinite terrain, cool atmospheres and vey good displacements.

This is pretty cuttying edge though because I've been forced to use the new experimental features in Cycles i.e. displacement and this isn't without problems. For some reason the realtime GPU preview is much more displaced than the final render. Also, I actually don't want these terrains as procedural displacement. I need to burn them to UV so as to be able to export them as high bit depth displacement maps or use these to mesh modify a terrain in Blender then add another level of displacement detail. This method also allows overhangs and bridges since it's mesh. You can also do slope and all that stuff in Blender.

Where Terragen collapses is lack of fractal variety, lack of different basis functions, no totally open inputs to drive any of the fractal parameters, locked up positioning, no curve graph and no colour gradient. This is all severly crippling of Terragen's potential in particular for terrains. The Terragen fractal in it's present form excells  at surface detail but is not so good at defining larger form variety. We have the Alpine fractal but that's not very editable. That's OK to have a shader like that as long as we have other stuff that is powerful for editing.

Quote from: Dune on July 04, 2013, 04:59:25 AM
On the other hand, if you have some software that does it all, it is probably way too heavy to even load, let alone work in it. Lots of stuff you don't need and have to buy because it's included. Like building buildings, trees, moving water, explosions and terrific landscapes, and animate that all into a fully fledged feature film, all in one TG5.

It's true that Terragen is mucg better when dealing with large terrains as far as ease of editing etc because it can get a bit slow in these other apps and obviously Terragen is pretty much infinite. Blender can get sluggish but the terrains above are not too big to cause this. You might want more than that though. Modo is pretty good at very big mesh though.

The terrains above caused no slowdown at all because they are render level displacement. It doesn't get worked out until render time.

However, what Terragen is definitely not better at is handling tree and rock populations or whatever objects you are multiplying. Both Blender and Modo are massively superior for that.

The two terrains above used about say 50MB max of RAM to render. Once I get that to mesh it will climb. Depending on mesh subdivision maybe a few hundred MB or into GB. There are three methods in Blender now to shape things. You sort out a base terrain as mesh. The method I used above will probably be the creation method before I turn it to bitmap to displace the mesh which can be made a pernament mesh modification. This base terrain would be kept reasonably simple and not high detailed. This opens up the modifier for further fractal mesh displacement which could result in very cool effects like huge overhangs because then you are working with a mesh where normals are no longer coming from a flat plane. You could create bridges or caves etc. The final level is this new feature of proper displacement at render time. I think this can all be achieved with room for millions of objects.

Modo is limited at the creative end of mesh creation in my opinion although it has very cool materials now. Not like Blender for creating terrains at all. In Modo it's a question of bringing in a big terrain and using materials on it with populations of whatever. Modo should excell at the mesh handling. It seems to be able to handle insane replications. You can take a million poly object and seemingly replicate it into thousands. Literally going into billions upon billions of polygons. I've not even seen this pushed to limits.

Clouds are possible in both Modo and Blender but that's where Terragen is much superior. However, that can be used as HDRI background in both Modo and Blender.

There are many ways this could all be mixed up. It would much preferable though if we could create lots of variety of terrain in Terragen easily. World Machine and Blender are both much better. Some apps just excell at certain things and always will. World Machine creates really nice erosion for example.

I read somewhere that The Foundry wanted Cycles renderer for Nuke but Ton told them where to go. Nuke is £2500. They had to settle for the Modo renderer so they bought Luxology. If this dosn't tell how mad this whole area of software is I don't know what does. These big compaines are going to be in trouble eventually.

"Ton "? whats that?

What do you know about "Arnold" renderer?

I don't know anything about Arnold renderer except the results look really good and apparently it's supposed to work in a similar way to Cylces at least in terms of the way the displacements work. I just read that on a forum though.

There's no question that Blender Cylces renderer gets extremely nice results and is totally pro quality. It looks very realistic. I think it looks better than the Modo one but it's still early days of development. Modo is quite mature.

Ton Roosendaal is the main man at Blender.

I've also got Mojoworld back running in Linux wine. A bit complex because my Linux is 64 bit but it's working be it with some kind of open GL wine regression. The reason for this is thatnMojoworld is still unsurpassed by any app in terms of procedurals so I can use it to create terrains and textures.

Terragen is staying on Windows though so I have 64 bit version and there are some problems with it in wine anyway.

Another point is that the performance of these cross platform apps is shockingly poor on Windows and OSX compared to Linux. This is most noticeable with Modo when you're dealing with huge data. The Windows version is chronic. Spinning blue circles when you do stuff that pushes data around. This crap never happens on Linux.

Quote from: TheBadger on July 04, 2013, 04:46:35 AM
^^HA! Yeah! I know what you mean. I read that the reason that autodesk does not take the best parts of Maya, Max and softimage, and spin them into one new super package, is because the user groups would cry about it.
I read that the idea is that users would be upset about having to learn a new UI and such. But what could they do about it? Protest by buying a competitors soft and learning a new UI? Its silly.

I really wish Autodesk would do that. It would go along way towards standardisation in the industry. But I think Ill never understand why anyone does anything.

I think some apps could do almost everything but there are some problems with it. Certain workflows are different even when using similar tools. Modo as compared to Wings3d is a perfect example. I don't like Modo for my purposes but if you were modelling various products, cars etc then Modo is good. Also, there are certain ways features flow through to other areas of the app and that effects design. In Modo for example you can model an object while you actually see it animating. Then you have pretty specialised apps like Houdini. I've watched some videos on that and it loos really cool but is geared towards procedural modelling with physics and such like.

I don't expect Terragen to be able to handle objects the way a modeling app would. That's clearly never going to there. It could be better but my main gripe is terrain generation or any basic procedural freedom to hook nodes up much more powerfully. That could easily be improved in TG2 and not effect any work flow.

Here's another one. Now I'm into using painting. That's why this one falls off to the edge. However, I can paint anything including using a fractal brush. The low areas could be voronoi stones. 3D Coat would be best for that but it seems Blender can handle it not too badly if the result is displacement at render time. Then I can bring in thousands of real geometry rocks, trees or whatever. I can't even show you the full detail. The renders are huge. That's another gain. Super fast rendering when you're scene is limited to a stage set type scenario.

Everything you see in this is everything that is hell in Terragen. To get those steps I'd have to mess around with complex graphs and bias ballony instead of a curve graph. Then you see a proper gradient colour following the fractal. Also not possible in Terragen.

(http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/4910/sj0m.jpg)

Please explain what a curve graph is when talking about procedural terrains. How do you imagine this should look like, and function in terragen... I have heard you and others gripe about this, but I never asked why its so important.

"using a fractal brush"
This sounds interesting. Please explain what it is.

You know, I think the points you are making are that T2 can do most of what you want it to, but just that its too hard, or too time consuming?

Some things are do-able in Terragen but hard. In particular controlling steps but other things are hard as well.

Here's three Blender nodes. This is also the limited Cycles nodes. In the old Blender internal, not only do you have a bunch of fractal shaders but you can choose lots of basis functions. In this fractal node notice that you can plug things into all those inputs. Some of that can lead to very interesting effects. It's not Mojoworld class but pretty good. Next node is the curve graph. In this case I'm using the curve graph to create the terrain profile. Those steps are the steps of the terrain. The graph is showing a range of -1 to 1 Y within it's box but it seems this fractal setup wasn't far into - value so that's why it doesn't go there. Fractals can be all over the place in values depending on your edits. You can control all of that and zoom in and out. The minimum and maximum curve values are editable. This can take the whole curve and make it apply to different ranges. You could for example get it to repeat. You can also clamp the input and output of the curve. Notice all the features that this builds into one easy to use node that in Terragen is a nightmare concoction of blue nodes to replicate. Next node is the colour gradient. It's just grayscale here but as you can see you can create infinite gradients. This could control colour but could also act similar to the curve graph and vice versa. You'll see the curve graph actually has RGB so it can control colours.

(http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/6127/77f5.jpg)

Actually, there is also a vector curve graph. That last shot shows the colour one. Maybe that's why the fractal value doesn't go below 0.

One more useful node is a normal direction one. You have this ball and by moving it the normal directions change. For a real world example, say you have nodes that are on a particular slope, you can use the normal node to change the direction slightly so snow might be more piled on one side of a hill or whatever. It's all very powerful.

A curve graph could perhaps be a nice feature request to add.
I don't know whether procedural will work, but it could already be nice to have it for heightfields only.
World-Machine has a node which does something similar. There you can even draw your curve free-hand.

Eventually I'll move this stuff onto the Blender forum then there it can be more Blender specific after I've solved a few more Blender specific problems. At present though, this is all useful for Terragen because it's a way of creating terrains.

Quote from: Tangled-Universe on July 04, 2013, 10:25:23 AM
A curve graph could perhaps be a nice feature request to add.
I don't know whether procedural will work, but it could already be nice to have it for heightfields only.
World-Machine has a node which does something similar. There you can even draw your curve free-hand.

As far as I know a curve graph is planned. When will we see it though?

Heres a shot I used on the Blender forum. It's relevant here and probably we'll see this back in Blender eventually then Blender becomes hugely more procedurally powerful than Terragen. Look at that list of basis for the fractal and that's just the Musgrave one. This stuff is needed for landscape apps and Blender isn't even specific to that.

(http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/4899/2sdm.jpg)

Wow, that's a lot of noise!

Quote from: efflux on July 04, 2013, 10:26:38 AM

Quote from: Tangled-Universe on July 04, 2013, 10:25:23 AM
A curve graph could perhaps be a nice feature request to add.
I don't know whether procedural will work, but it could already be nice to have it for heightfields only.
World-Machine has a node which does something similar. There you can even draw your curve free-hand.

As far as I know a curve graph is planned. When will we see it though?

Oh is it? I don't know anything about that, actually. I may have missed that?

Quote from: Dune on July 04, 2013, 02:22:27 PM
Wow, that's a lot of noise!

Hmmm....not so impressed honestly.
Those voronoi noises are variations on the original voronoi diagram, relatively  easy and straightforward to implement those if you already can create F1 and F2 noises.
Vue's noises are greater in number and variety.

Yeah but at least it has variety. I'd add in sine for a basis as well if I could have it. Sine basis in a fractal is cool.

As well as basis for the fractals. Blender also has these as simple noise functions. Just the editing power of these alone is hugely easier than the simple noise functions in TG2 because you have some editing power rather than hooking up lots of blue nodes:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Textures/Types/Procedural/Voronoi

There are also about ten various texture shaders creating various forms from fractals to more geometric stuff like bricks. All useful.

Nothing tops Mojoworld though. That's the king. Sadly, it always will be by the look of it.

Vue will have these functions since Vue is a landscape app. That would be normal, unlike Terragen.

This site has a lot of really good tutorials about Blender:

http://cgcookie.com/blender/

It's not free but probably worth it and a small amount goes to Blender foundation. This is why Blender is unstoppable. It's open to anyone which means that there is now a massive growing stock of content and tutorials. Almost every other apps is totally lame in this department now.

I'm changing direction in 3D now. I was going to go back to 2D but I see how I can use 3D a lot more now. My skills are actually wasted doing pure landscape. I should be doing charactors and such like.

This stuff is common to almost all apps now. Plugins etc. It's all over the place except Terragen. Look here:

http://www.ylilammi.com/BerconNoise.shtml

And this is what we have in Terragen with the "warper" hard wired as well as everything else. This is simply not good enough by a giant margin:

http://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Power_Fractal_Shader_v3_-_Tweak_Noise_Tab

Thanks for that info Efflux.

That link to Blender voronoi is very interesting, but the one on Bercon especially is.
I wish we could have more extended voronoi flavours.

Quote from: efflux on July 05, 2013, 05:18:00 AM
.... I should be doing charactors and such like.

Yeah, great idea, like the other 99% out there doing 3D ;)

I couldn't resist the sarcastic joke if you don't mind :P

Quote from: Tangled-Universe on July 04, 2013, 10:25:23 AM
A curve graph could perhaps be a nice feature request to add.
I don't know whether procedural will work, but it could already be nice to have it for heightfields only.
World-Machine has a node which does something similar. There you can even draw your curve free-hand.

A curve graph can work with procedurals. There could be problems with it being real time in a vaste landscape but if that's the case you'd create the curve then apply it. A curve graph is essentially the same as using certain blue nodes such as bias and gain etc except the curve can be a complex combination of these that is easily visually editable. You can create a curve graph of sorts with blue nodes but it's way too much hassle to use.

QuoteOne more useful node is a normal direction one. You have this ball and by moving it the normal directions change. For a real world example, say you have nodes that are on a particular slope, you can use the normal node to change the direction slightly so snow might be more piled on one side of a hill or whatever. It's all very powerful.

This sounds good.

Quote from: TheBadger on July 05, 2013, 06:31:29 AM

QuoteOne more useful node is a normal direction one. You have this ball and by moving it the normal directions change. For a real world example, say you have nodes that are on a particular slope, you can use the normal node to change the direction slightly so snow might be more piled on one side of a hill or whatever. It's all very powerful.

This sounds good.

They have thrown in a stack of stuff that you think how could this be useful but sure enough somebody finds a use. This video here demonstrates the light path node. You might think what on earth do you need all this for but you do find uses for these things. It's important for an app to be open and let the users find uses. This is the main problem with Terragen and it drives creative people away.

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/02/26/blender-cycles-light-path-node/

Quote from: Tangled-Universe on July 05, 2013, 06:01:12 AM
Thanks for that info Efflux.

That link to Blender voronoi is very interesting, but the one on Bercon especially is.
I wish we could have more extended voronoi flavours.

Quote from: efflux on July 05, 2013, 05:18:00 AM
.... I should be doing charactors and such like.

Yeah, great idea, like the other 99% out there doing 3D ;)

I couldn't resist the sarcastic joke if you don't mind :P

Yes lots of people are doing that but lately I've been looking on the Zbrush gallery and I'm noticing it's a bit uninventive. There is a a lot of concentration on creating realistic characters or zombie apocalypse type characters (this angle has definitely been done to death). All I'm saying is that my skills are actually in traditional media and that isn't being used in landscape except for the fact that any knowledge of drawing or painting helps in setting up any kind of scene.

For example in the odd time I've played with 3D Coat I've got decent results very fast because I know how to draw.

I'm always interested in things that computers do but only computers can really do. That's why landscaping using procedurals is so interesting. I find just 2D problematic because it's actually not a vast leap from real brushes and pencils. In fact it's not as much fun to be honest despite the editability. A perfect example was I took my TC 1100 with Mypaint to the library and it had a problem. A sketchpad and paper would have been better. However, recently I tried some animation in Blender. That's a magical thing when you see things moving. That is of course something that can only be achieved easily with computers.

There is always a danger of attempting to recreate real world methods in computers. That's  a giant failing in some areas. It's why audio processing has failed. EQ plugins etc. Rubbish compare to the real thing because they tried to copy the real thing instead of going in another direction. I have two Russian made valve pulteq clones. I'm not even going to argue on audio forums about how pulteq style plugins can sound the same.

Procedural texturing is a logical use for computers. It can't always work, say if you're doing protraits or something but it amazes me that we have all this power in Blender and such like but people choose to create bitmaps for rocks textures etc. That's mad.

I've also got thousands of pieces of real world work here. Drawings and painting stemming back decades. None of that angle is being used. I didn't do much in the way of landscapes.

Quote from: efflux on July 05, 2013, 07:11:47 AM
Procedural texturing is a logical use for computers. It can't always work, say if you're doing protraits or something but it amazes me that we have all this power in Blender and such like but people choose to create bitmaps for rocks textures etc. That's mad.

They don't know any better.

Their argument is that procedurals are too difficult to control and that you're handing over your control to the quirks of fractal seeds and such.

Of course they have a point there, but it's mostly that everybody starts doing 3D in this way, because the vast majority who's interesting in learning 3D learn it from the people who swear on bitmaps and they learn it with software which has deep foundations with this workflow.

The fact that they took those extra basis functions out of Cycles sums that up. They are still there but in Blender internal renderer. I expect to those to come back to Cycles and one way of doing that is to show what the procedurals can do. I was on the Blender forum but I've not gone into details just tried to push this a bit with some suggestions and an amazing example was the revalattionary discovery by some people that you could take the position coordinates through some noise function then into the fractal and that would warp the shapes. That's been there for years. I think it's changing now though because of concentration on node networks. This causes people to experiment more.

Another example of the total underuse of procedurals is with clouds in these other apps. Terragen obviously defaults to creating an entire cloud layer limited to certain altitudes but these other apps have volumetric materials. What people often do is meticulously sculpt cloud shapes with mesh and don't bother much with the volumetric content. That's all well and good but within that bounding area you can volumetrically use fractals to control density of the clouds. It's not disimilar to way it works in Terragen. It's just that people haven't experimented with the fractals to get nice forms.

Here's the first test I did trying to create a cloud layer in Blender but I used particles and a fractal. I think this method is a cludge so I'm going to do more tests. The particles way is a method to make sure the bounding box doesn't cut the clouds off but there are there procedures to sort bottoms and tops of clouds. I'm not sure how Cycles will handle this sort of thing though. This test was done with the internal renderer. Basically a fractal can open those clouds out to have spaces. It's simply a matter of density. What people are doing is relying totally on mesh and particles rather than getting a fractal to do the work.

I think one problem is that people using these more standard apps want instant render results and if you have a bunch of volumetrics it slows things down but these slow speeds are perfectly normal. Terragen is slow with clouds as well.

(http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/1372/r054.jpg)

Here's some tests while working that I've kept. I'm not getting too into trying to make them really good but just testing how to go about this. Once I find the best way to deal with getting the terrains out of Blender then I'll be able to explain that then I'll go back to utilise more power from the nodes to do more obvious stuff that Terragen can't do and blow the size up to the maximum I can get away with. Click on these to get bigger size.

(http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/6563/h185.jpg)

(http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/2753/yclg.jpg)

This one doesn't relate to Terragen use but it's my biggest breakthrough in Blender. It's simple and small but this one is where I've been trying to go. This terrain is mesh and displacment so it can have bridges etc and the mesh can be procedurally moved horizontally to any degree. I chose a bad terrain shape for testing that angle though. Imagine those last terrains but without the vertical displacement limits. The terrain can become any form in any direction.

(http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/3761/r5se.jpg)

OK. At last I've finally got there. This terrain is exportable from Blender to Terragen. This method is a bit convoluted but easy when you know how. Yes there are some glitches like the edge but that's just minor details to tidy. It needs fall off towards the edge and I didn't go masssive res because this was a test. Basically I'm rendering out the displacement map from Cycles displacement by utilising a camera method. There is no "bake" as such. This means the full detail of the fractal is only handled at render time. What that means is I can render to giant res. This is actually unchartered Blender Territory now. The displacement map can be used in Blender as well in a completely unique to Blender way.

(http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/763/nhi4.jpg)

It should also be possible to export exr from Terragen to Blender but Cycles displacement seems to have a problem with exr. Exporting the exr from Blender at massive res will be no problem though.

This is the last Blender render on this thread. Click to view full size. I have this angle sorted. I'll need to now drop back and design better terrains for export to Terragen. The main thrust of this Blender render was to pack in massive small displacement detail. It's real displacement not bump map but bump map is still useful. I didn't even try to optimise this scene so this is really successful. I can now bring in slope distributions and such like and have proper control of blend region curves unlike Terragen. You ain't seen anything yet. Although these hills are smooth I could have sculpted in a lot of larger detail because there is a mass of geometry to take that.

(http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/1376/bp7y.jpg)

You are making tremendous progress, and I'm looking forward to what you will do in TG with this!

I'm going to do the Terragen bit eventually but what I'll probably do is post on Blender forum to clear up all possibilities so the process is smooth. I nearly abandoned this due to some Blender regressions but I'm glad I kept going. The secret to the success is going to be Blender's new displacement. It means giant maps can be made and I know those fractals in Blender have masses of nice detail. It just needs capturing. I can kind of work blind on this because I'm used to using fractals and I think that's problematic for Blender users so you don't see too many scenes with very rich fractal detail. However, the Blender users will be able to help me use nodes.

The basic method is that you use Cycles to render the terrain displacement at final render time in full detail. Cycles does not have baking to UV. However, the workaround is in fact better than baking to UV because you've got more control of render features. What you do is set up a camera as ortho and position that to look at the terrain. That can be perfectly matched. You turn off the texture colour and replace with emission shader. You then render only the emission. you get a perfect rendering of the displacement forms. It's maybe not exact (height might be slightly different) but it's so close as to not matter.

This isn't without a few hitches. It's a cutting edge experimental feature of Cycles. The preview render looks different from the final. You have do a few low quality final renders just to check things are looking OK.

Also, I have to work out how to create nice fall off so the terrain edge is flat. Blender users may have some ideas on the best way to do that. I'd rather do it procedurally than paint in a fall off.

I honestly think that Blender is almost up with World Machine in usefulness for terrain. They would both work well together. They are different though. World machine is terrain specific so has fancy erosions and such like and it's easier to use for terrain generation since that's basically what it's for but because Blender has a really good node network and really good fractals, that opens up a lot of things.

Just some more info. All those voronoi that Blender has can be used as well in the final terrain. The reason for this is that although they aren't in Cycles you can use them as displacement modifier for mesh and since this Cycles method simply makes a map of the whole end displacement then all Blenders procedurals are usable. It's just that the displacement modifier can't used nodes but you can add in one fancy voronoi texture.

What should be cool in Terragen is the variety. I haven't seen to much of this but why don't people really blend up different stuff with multiple totally different heightfields? I assume you can have a bunch of heightfields? I've never really used them much but I'm a bit sick of this vast expanse world scale thing now. It's too much to deal with.

Here's another thing in Blender. You can take any models at all. Lots of them, dump them on the ground then create a plane and get Blender to render all that stuff into a UV on that plane suitable for heightfield. Obviously it's 2D but that could be useful since that's what we bring into Terragen. So you can scatter real geometry around like rocks and Blender can make a heightfield. Obviously overhangs might be a problem because you'll get an absolute vertical but it could be useful.

The other great terrain generator is Mojoworld but that's a tragic disaster area. I'm not sure I can handle using it although I have installed it on Linux wine. I don't think you can even buy it anymore. Really pathetic situation for such a great app. You could take the guts of Mojoworld and make it into an awesome Photoshop texture generator or something. Tragic waste. It should be open sourced if it's not going anywhere.

I played with MojoWorld for a short time but i never could get used to the workflow. The last i heard Doc Mojo posted a reply at the Renderosity forums quite a while back. What is silly to me is, if you are the creator and owner of a software company who suddenly disappears for months, years then in very rare instances shows up briefly at some forums to then stay silent again is shear negligence. What is even worse is the user base had questions that were never answered. To act like everything is a secret and deny your users who payed for your good does not make any sense to me. Why continue with the product then? Why not just shut your operation down, give your user base some answers and do something else with your product rather then leave those users high and dry to hang.

Yes, it's ridiculous. I understand if there are financial problems. I think there were financial backers for Mojoworld and that may effect what can be done but what greatly annoys me is that the Mojoworld community was filled with a lot of talented people that put a lot of time in. It's not the cost of the app, eveyone got good use out of it while it was good, it's the time spent. Ken Musgrave doesn't communicate what is happening at all. He also kept selling the app at the same price. He could have at least reduced the price in respect of it's dropping usefulness. It stil is an awesome texture generator but it's obviously not streamlined for that in it's UI so most people will not learn how to set it up just for textures, terrains etc. If you want to create brushes for say ZBrush of 3D Coat or simply texture stamps for use in any 3D model, I don't know of any other other app that can create such beautiful textures. You can create awesome terrains in Mojoworld but very rarely do you see that being used in other apps. Then Dmytry Lavrov made that awesome volumetrics plugin. More waste of time because that was never integrated as well as it should have been. In an ideal world he'd have handed Mojoworld over to Dmytry to continue the voumtetric rendering work.

The lesson to be learnt is never spend a whole bunch of time in apps that don't have alternatives so you are utterly reliant on them. This is true of Terragen as well but hopefully Planetside's business model won't be like Pandromeda's. This is one reason why Learning Blender is a no brainer. Blender is not going anywhere. It will always be around and always useful. It's ever increasing in power and user base. No take overs, bankruptcies etc. The worst that could happen is that Ton Rosendaal gets run over by a bus or something but I don't think that would even stop it.

I'm actually changing direction. It's not because of the above reason but I'm moving more into animation. I need to bring in all the other angles of my artwork. I even do music so it's logical to move to time based stuff. This doesn't mean I'm ditching using Terragen. Terragen does integrate better with other apps compared to say Mojoworld that's for sure and version 3 it seems will improve that. The point is that now things are much easier for more standard modelling, animation and rendering. I tried ZBrush recently and I was very disappointed. It seemed like the same app it was years ago. I think 3D Coat is better. ZBrush's UI is shockingly confused. In 3D coat it is incredibly fast to design a character, retopologise it and texture it. I'm not in Weta style super realistic stuff which 3D coat might not be powerful enough for but I think nothing tops 3D Coat if your'e designing simpler more cartoon like characters. All we need now it for Ptex to take over. 3D Coat does that but the apps you would import into are few and far between as far as Ptex support. I think it's being worked on for Blender. Modo needs it badly. Modo has FBX though. Modo actually plays extremely nicely with Terragen. It can handle huge scenes so that's a boost over Blender. I'm not going into any other apps now though. I have everything I need and on Linux which is the dream come true now with Modo. Modo is now a great app to bring everything together.

I'm back in Blender yet again. I tried doing terrain in 3D Coat but it wasn't in the same league even although I have massive extra res. I've made some new discoveries. I'm posting another Blender terrain to show this. This is completely hand sculpted in dynamic topology. I'm finding that the facets created aren't necessaily a problem. You'd just artfully reduce them wherever you wanted. The small scale noise is in fact extra displacement detail done in Cycles displacment. This part is fully controllable via slope and altitude etc. However the main breaklthrough here is that you don't have to create bitmap brushes or even 3D brushes the way you might do in 3D Coat or Zbrush. Blender paints direct with the procedural fractal with a brush. This is awesome because you can change fractal parameters as you paint. It's not restricted to whatever form you created with a bitmap brush and thus repititous. You can see a little variety here like at the bottom right but it's just a test and I didn't work further. The possibilities here are enormous. It's just a pity the dynamic topology part can only go so high in res. You have to add extra details with Cycles.

(http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/5332/9ukj.jpg)

The point about the smoothing is you don't use it not even at final render time. The facted faces of Blenders unsmoothed dynamic topology are brilliant because you create really geometric poly shapes. These are rock like but when you up the dynamic toplogy detail level you don't lose that rocky sharpness it just paints detail over it. 3D Coat now has this dynamic topology but it doesn't have the fractals that's why Blender wins every time. It will beat out Mudbox and ZBrush as well because as far as I know you don't have a bunch of high powered fractals to use a brushes.

This is all exportable to TG2 now but TG2 heightfield won't match Blender or imports of pure mesh to Modo. I've completely eradicated the vertical limits. Maybe TG2 can do vector displacement maps? I saw a thread on that but it seemed there may be issues. Is this just with objects?

One more. This will definitely be the last but you can see why I'm going this direction. No heightfield suitable stuff here so this totally departs from Terragen now. I will be able to create hundreds of these especially If I go to Modo. I just need to work on shapes and textures to get better realism.

(http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/7697/6z8q.jpg)

If you watch this video you'll see why I want to use Blender and eventually Modo. I find Modo not great at creating the content. Wings3D, Blender and 3D Coat are good but Modo is very good to render in and this video was made several years ago. Modo is now really good for this sort of thing. I can't sculpt things totally in TG2. It's impossible and I can't use texture the way I can in 3D Coat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVU9BVoOhqg

It's awesome what you accomplish here, really tempting to have a go. But I will stick to TG for the time being. Maybe if you'd do a complete tutorial one day, you can get more users into Blender.

I'm back thinking about Terragen heightfields again because I now have an awesome workflow for that. This is it:

In Blender you create a flat plane and subdivide it up. Not massively but enough to get a generalised rock or hill formation. You actually want flat polys to begin with. You add a displacment modifier. This utilises all of Blenders old noise basis so any shape is possible. This displaces the mesh out in a rough rocky form. There is one thing I have to sort here though. We need something to cause a fall off o the edges but that's not critical. That can actually be achieved somewhere else along the line. You can just apply this first rock modifier but it may be worth experimenting changing this modifier after you've sculpted - could be very interesting.

Next step is that you go into Blender's dynamic sculpt mode. Then you can sculpt more detail in with fractal brushes. It can dynamically divide the polys where more detail is going. This is the magic bit because it looks like rocks even if polys are'nt super detailed. It's hands down the best method I've seen for creating rock structures. You still don't go massive poly though. Once you've got something you like i.e. a nice mixture of detail and flat faces you add another modifier for subdivision but not Catmull-Clark because that smoothes the sharp rocks. We don't want that we want Simple subdivision. You apply that then apply another level of Catmull clarke. This does smooth the rocks but not totally. It just gets rid of the sharp edges.

Bear in mind with the sculpting that overhangs aren't wanted for Terragen. It shouldn't be too difficult to avoid that.

There are a few next options. Blender can't do massive poly count for sculpting so we have to do something else for more detail. If we want that. Who's to say loading a simple heightfield into Terragen isn't good. As long as the shape is nice then Terragen can add detail. If you want further detail you can add that with Blender Cycles displacement before baking or just bake it as is or just take the whole model out of Blender and into a sculpting app. There are obviously a few options with where we take the mesh to displacement maps but sculpting apps such as 3D Coat can get into very small detail over the top on the these intial rocks. Whatever way, you can end up with a high bit depth heightfield. It's just a question of making sure a flat map can be made with no overlaps.

It gets truly awesome though if you can just forget about heightfield because you have no limits to the forms.

Very nice experimentations efflux !!! I like terrains on reply 65 to 67 !!!

Watch this video because we can do this after Blender has created the rocky structure but of course an app like 3D Coat can go into tiny detail. You could do similar is Mudbox or ZBrush. It also does have some precedural brushes in this new clay sculpt mode. It's a question of deciding the best route to get the displacement map. This 3D Coat dynamic mesh mode is like Blender's but it doesn't create the nice rock like structures. I've tried. It's no match for Blender but you can then go in to add tiny details to the rocks. Much more detail than you see in this video but we need to avoid overhangs. How that gets displacement mapped I'm not sure. It could be done back in Blender if we can get Cycles to accept this second layer of detail for it's displacment. I've had problems with that. Possibly it simply doesn't work but Cycles workaround baking method turns out to be better than most proper baking methods so that would in fact be the desired method although complicated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEVIK2d9a2E

The guy who did that Modo video just creates block like rocks out of very simply poly forms. He then applies textures in Modo for colour and displacment. That's pretty successful as you can from that video but it's a lot of work and you don't get those natural quirks that fractals create even for displacing simply geometry at the start as you do in the Blender modifier. I'm trying to take this so that it's multi use. You can create heightfields or go full geometry and the complexity is only limited by computer power. That's where the Modo video has a weakness. It's all modelled totally by hand.

Also, I think that some minblowing results could be had by using Blender and World Machine. There is Vue as well but Vue is too expensive. I don't like E-ons bait and switch type marketing tactics.

I've just made another advance. If you Simple subdivide then sculpt again but then apply Catmull Clark this allows jagged rocks then smooth rocks. You can't do this in other apps. Only Blender.

Here's the process and at last a Terragen import. This was a pure fractal sculpt. I didn't use a fractal to form the whole terrain shape before sculpting but that can be done. Yes, there was a screw up. It's due to an odd baking process I used so the terrain is buried but the whole method works. There were also some verticals and I knew that before I did it but it seems they aren't necessarily a major problem. It's always obvious when you view the exr as well. Also sometimes the Bake has small speckles. These can cleaned up with despeckle without harming the exr form. The sculpting in Blender is really fast and as you can see nice rough rock detail is created. This isn't even a large map. It's just a test. All those previous terrains on this thread are usable in Terragen but thos are all just tests. New stuff needs to be done.

(http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/8417/vl1j.jpg)
(http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/6884/m9yq.jpg)
(http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/5742/0d49.jpg)
(http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/3480/a0ot.jpg)
(http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/9995/y17j.jpg)

I went in close to see how it is. Now you'll see why I'm doing this and I'm only starting. The small glitches are some odd speckles in the bake. That can removed and obviously ignore the fact that we are in a hole. I'll fix that. I might bring in some of those other terrains for a test. There is some extra fractal detail supplied by Terragen but you can't get rocks that look like that in Terragen never mind all the larger scale fractal manipulations. Now I can sculpt the whole terrain shapes in Blender using proper curve graphs etc. Easy.

Here's another test render. Nothing really special from the terrain but it was made a different way. This time the exr causes it to be a bit high hence the terrain is marginally ove where it should be in terms of atmosphere because this environment actually has carefully tweaked volumetrics at low level. There are three different methods of baking these textures. Strangely I've not done it the standard way in Blender Internal renderer. I've read the results aren't as good because no anti-aliasing but I did once bake without using the resulting image and it looked ok. This standard method wouldn't result in the height problems but both other methods require tweaks to get the zero level correct. One involves some maths node calculations.

Really impressed with these.  Some more detailed guidance on how to achieve them would be valued.

"how to create stunning trees in blender"
http://vimeo.com/5375898#

I don't think that Blender script is available for latest Blender. It actually looks quite good. I think leaves aren't such an issue because there are ways of generating mesh instances with particles from another mesh so you'd grow leaves out of the twigs. The main problem is the smaller branches. Bigger branches can just be sculpted into form. 3D Coat is good at that. I'm not actually that into trees at the moment but probably in the future I'm going to need to do it.

As for explaining this Blender terrain thing. That's complex. Firstly there are several completely separate ways. The next problem is that I have to resolve how to make sure that the bake is zero value where it should be so that the terrain in Terragen sits at the proper level. If the terrain is created all the way while using Blender Render internal type nodes then Blenders bake function should solve that but it's not necessarily the best way to create the bake.

The best way at this time is to go 100% Cycles in the whole process then bake out the Cycles result. The baking nodes need fixing so we don't have high zero level like that last terrain you see. Cycles method has some flaws though. Real time render is different from final render in displacment amplitude. However, doing it all in Cycles greatly eases the UI flow for non Blender experts.

The other point is that to decribe this to somebody who hasn't used Blender before requires a lot of info on all the steps.

I've yet to perfect it anyway so no full desciptions yet. Blender files would be the best way to demo these things.

I'm working in several other apps and it all ties in. When I get results that I know are useful for Terragen and don't need workarounds then I'll definitely explain what I'm doing. It's going to take me ages to get my head around 3D Coat but that also completely ties in with Blender.

You have to use several apps and find the right workflow. Obviously 3D Coat isn't free so it would be best for everybody if it's pure Blender.

Here's a start just to test Blender's fractals. I'm building methods into this which won't screw you up later.

Open Blender. Hover mouse over cube and hit delete. It will give you a OK box to delete so click on that. The little grid at the bottom of the 3d window is layers. Click on the second one. Click on menu add mesh UV Sphere. We are doing this as a place holder for a texture. We don't need the sphere in the end for terrains but this method will keep things tidy from my experience. Other people don't do this angle. They have textures in other object's materials that are simply de-selected but used for modifier and brushes. This is messy and will get you in trouble. Also, Blender can append this collection of textures from another blend file.

While that sphere is still selected go on Materials (icon on properties to the right). Add a new material. Then go to texture and add a new texture. Scroll down to under rgb intensity and change that colour to black. On visible layers (the little grid at bottom of 3D view) choose the first one (our light is in the first) as well as second one. If you then select rendered in the viewport shading you will see the texture on the sphere. If you go back into textures you can play around with fractals etc. You will see how nice some of these textures are without any serious tweaking. You can add extra texture layers but treat each layer as a seperate texture so disable ones you aren't testing. This is the downside of what we are going to do at first which is use displacment modifier which can only use one texture since it can't use the nodes but you can create several to test and contain them all in our material's texture layers. Another future convenience of this is that the sculpting brushes can use these textures. The sphere is a place to keep them all and quickly view them, as I've explained. It's not needed to do this testing but if you save this .blend file you can bring the sphere into any other blender scene. Once you have some textures you like, go to object modifiers and add Subdivision Surface. Crank up the view and render values to about 5 or even 6 but all we need is enough to see what we are doing. Then add another modifier called displace. Under it's texture drop down choose one of your textures. You'll see your sphere displace. This method is creating real mesh displacement. It's not super efficient but we can quickly see what we are doing. There are numerous other ways to tweak around for maximum efficiency to render the bake at higher res.

Now what you want to do is go to the first layer and add a plane. Where it says Object Mode (object interaction mode) at the bottom of the 3d view change that to edit mode and subdivide this about four or five times or lots - eventually the more the better but keep things efficient at first. Blender can't deal with massive polys via this initial method. Subdivide is on the left under Object Tools. Change back to Object Mode. Now you can do the modifier subdivide and displace method to this plane same as the sphere. You can use Simple subdivision or Catmull Clark. This is just a play between whether you've first subdivided the plane a lot and you can also select Smooth under Object Tools etc etc. All these tweaks need to be just played with.

You can now add materials to this and give it textures of it's own. We can actually just displace everything from material textures but the displacment modifier is more convenient to mess with. Another point is, as we go further and use Cycles then the old Blender Internal textures are gone except in the displacment modifier so we can keep that if we want. Also, having lots of textures held on the sphere material's texture list gives us an editing place to go to for brushes in sculpting. As I've said, the sphere can be our library of textures. Try going into sculpting in the object interaction mode menu. You'll be able to use your created texture as brushes.

If you want to change the renderer to Cycles you will lose any materials you created. You will have to recreate them but you won't lose the basic terrain modifier. That still uses the old style textures as I've explained. Only one unfortunately. This leads onto the fact that you can actually do it all in Cycles with nodes be it losing some of the Blender Internal basis functions for render time displacments. However, displacing the whole thing at render time in Cycles gets more complex as it's an experimental feature. This next stage would require huge further explanations. We haven't even touched on nodes. Then massive power comes in.

This may all seem complex but the fact is we can do masses with it. Blender tends towards get things done the quick and dirty way but it means it isn't bloated out with massive UI and menus for all sorts. Once learnt, you can work quickly.

Those are the basics on how to quickly see displacements but it's a whole lot more complex than this and will require pages and pages of info. I haven't resolved the best baking methods yet.

The problem is that there is a disjoint between people using Terragen or even other apps like Mojoworld and these other 3D apps. I think Vue is less so this way. Maybe more like a standard 3D app. What happens is people coming from these 3D apps don't get what we do in Terragen and we don't use these other apps which takes time to learn but if you do learn them then the rest of those communities don't get what you are trying to do as in what I'm trying to do with Blender on this thread. The two world seem very far apart. They shouldn't be though.

This is what you should be able to see in Blender via that above method with some tweaking. You can drop back to solid rather than rendered in the view mode since that will be faster. With rendered you can see colour coming from the texture as well as displacement but we don't really need that. You may find this slow. It depends on your system. Obviously Blender is not Mudbox or such like but there are ways to get massive res with Cycles. Mudbox, ZBrush and 3D Coat do not have these beautiful fractals though.

(http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/64/kpxh.jpg)

Cheers for that will play tomorrow.

OK. Here is a screenshot of something I just did. I think people here should be able to get this if I carry on with the Blender angle.

First, some changes were made. Instead of using the displace modifier, I deleted that. Then I opened a pane for nodes That's found on the menu at the bottom left of the windows. I clicked on the texture button then ticked Use Nodes. That actually dislocates our original texture from the material. It's still there in Blender but I built a new one using these nodes. In this case we lose the ability to see our terrain under Solid render mode. We have to choose rendered. However, you can see we have some pretty good visual feedback in the nodes if we don't want to keep realtime rendering. The nodes are supplying colour as well as displacement. This is where I'm going to next test the baking options in Blender Internal. I'm not sure these people are right about it being crap due to lack of anti-aliasing. If so, it could be post processed.

The nodes are two Musgrave mulifractals, one voronoi basis and one Blender original as you can see. Then one Cloud fractal voronoi crackle basis  is added to one Musgrave after being divided to reduce the gain. This is then put through the curve graph to shape the gain. It's then mixed with the other gentler Musgrave using it's untreated original form to blend the two.

These are Blender Internal nodes. Cycles has a completely different set of nodes. there are some limits but I'm finding also some advantages with Cycles. The positioning is more powerful.

This terrain can be now be baked out at huge res. Fractal detail that you can't see will get baked. That's just a case of tweaking the fractal to get the detail and zooming into the realtime preview to see it, just as you'd do in Terragen.

(http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/3103/7jn2.jpg)

Also, You don't totally need to use the sphere but it's a good first test to use for seeing the textures anyway. That's just my method to have the textures on the sphere because I can bring that back into another Blender scene which might not be landscape. It's my library of textures and I use the sphere to test them. It can also get in a mess with the displacement modifier. It's just my working practise because I use the textures for all sorts including sculpting. Less so with materials and colours. It's the textures that can be multitudes of variations. Blender has no library. You can append things from one .blend file to another. It's important to know that.

Maybe I complicated in with that but you'll learn a few more things anyway.

The thing is, there are so many ways to do things in Blender, it's just insane and I can't quickly explain it all. If you do the initial displacement modifier method you can sculpt the base terrain under the displacement. This is a method to get overhangs of course but then we need to export that mesh and somehow build a vector displacement map that works in Terragen as was being duscussed in another thread.

This is completely unchartered territory as well. No Blender users are doing this. They justy fire up the ANT terrain script and go for some undetailed low poly island type terrains.

This is never ending is power. I was thinking that maybe the bake doesn't anti-alias for a reason. That's something that probably would be better post processed. A side benefit of this is that tiled terrains could be created. Anti-aliasing can screw up the edges of bakes. Lets say you want that terrain in the previous shot but way more of it in other maps. Well tiles of absolutely any region in that terrain (off the edge from what we can see) can be created. You just move the mesh over to be lined up against the first one then bake again and those bakes will slot together perfectly.

I just found out that someone is using tiled terrains in the Blender games engine. That has to be low detail but the way it works is that when you move around the scene, Blender gets the next tile ready depending on where you are. Maybe you can set this up in standard Blender. You move around the scene to find shots and Blender loads the next terrain tile depending on where you are. Getting a bit ahead of myself here though.

This is awesome. Don't judge it on artfulness. For example, that cracked texture isn't too good. I didn't use a decent fractal. The texturing possibilities in Blender are vast for this. I'll get more into that after but this is a 4096 terrain. The terrain you saw in the previous Blender screenshot. You can get as big a terrain out of Blender as you want with as much detail as you want. Basically whatever vast size Terragen can handle. I don't know what that is yet. I baked the texture rather than the displacement. It seems baking displacements doesn't work with the method I've described here. I actually hadn't done it with Blender's Internal renderer before today. Nothing wrong with the Internal baking either as far as I can see. I'm not sure what the Blender users are complaining about. I still need to work on getting the terrain heights into some kind of usefulness and more artfully height sculpted. That's also about how the procedure in Blender is lifting the terrain. If I chop out a section that is high then it will end up high in Terragen.

This is what you should see when UVing.

The top window is the 3D view. Hit 7 on the numeric keyboard to get top down view and make sure it's Edit Mode. Keyboard command A will select or deselect all polys. You want them selected. The poly arrangment here is immaterial. You might have more polys or less. It depends on how you're subdividing to see the terrain. None of that is important here. It could be one poly at this stage. The bottom window is the UV/Image Editor. Where it says Image on the bar at the bottom, click to create a new image. You'll see various options. You want it 32 bit. Width and Height is up to you except the terrain is obviously a square so make it so in here as well. 2048 is a decent size. After you've done this, move the mouse to the 3d view and key command U. You'll get that menu and select  Project from View (Bounds). That will set up the UV to be filling your Square texture.

Next you need to go to the render properties on the right. Near the bottom you will see Bake. Bake Mode has lots of options. You can choose texture although there are in fact a few ways to do this. Displacement didn't seem to work for me. I'll look into why but I think maybe it has to be projected in a certain way from real displacement. That's OK for Cycles but not for Internal. Hit bake and it will render the texture to UV.

Then back in the UV/Image window under Image menu you can save the image to a file. Once you open the next window you'll see options on the left to save as exr which is what we want. That's it.

Some of this stuff I'm new to because I was using a much more complex baking technique with Cycles. You have to do it a different way with Cycles.

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/8149/i099.jpg (http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/8149/i099.jpg)

Here's the sculpting mode. Don't expect ZBrush or 3D Coat. Speed problems could largely depend on your graphics card. Blender doesn't handle huge poly counts but there are ways. It's dynamic and you can decimate the mesh. The point is, no other sculpting app allows you to paint with procedures as awesome as this. Also, this shows why I tend to keep my basic textures in collections on the sphere. I can open Blender, bring in the sphere to test textures then create a plane (or whatever else I'm doing) and bring the textures into say sculpt. They also benefit from being tidied into a non used object when you use the displacement modifier. So basically here, you can actually build node graphs to create your brush!

Bear in mind that you can rough out basic shapes or make small things then bring into a proper sculpting app for mega detailing or expanding out the terrain. Also, you could simply paint flat textures or bake stuff out for brushes.

If Blender ever gets enough power to handle huge poly counts for sculpting it will be absolutely awesome.

(http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/1853/2lup.jpg)

I've just come up with another way. You can paint into a vaste res UV. Sure, you can't totally see what you're doing but you can hit real time render view every so often to see how it looks. You can bake out a general terrain then work in the detail with paint on UV. So this way you can paint on huge res with procedural node brushes.

However, the real clicher will be when I get 3D Coat into this workflow.

Dune was looking for a free sculptor that can export vectors. I couldn't find one. Sculptris would be perfect, but no vectors. I thought you said blender cant do vectors. Is that still the case? If it can't, thats a little sad. There should be one free or cheap option someplace.

You asked what I was just about to ask. Can you make Vector Displacement maps from this? It would only need quite simple shapes, the rest can be done in TG.

Quote from: Dune on July 13, 2013, 03:29:37 AM
You asked what I was just about to ask. Can you make Vector Displacement maps from this? It would only need quite simple shapes, the rest can be done in TG.

No. Blender can't do vector displacement. I know this was being discussed in the other thread and I mentioned this there. I haven't visited that thread since last posting because I'm working in Blender at the moment. It's logical that Blender isn't going to get this soon because displacement has always been weak in Blender. They have to improve standard displacment first. Micro shader displacement at render time has only just been experimentally added with Cycles.

The Blender terrains could be moved as mesh to another app and vector displacement maps made there. Vector displacement is failry new so i'ts understandable that not all apps have it.

I found this. Blender can use vector displacment pretty much the same way as Terragen can but I don't see how it can bake them. Maybe there is a way.

http://outdated-hardware.deviantart.com/art/rgb-displacement-test-124574109

I wouldn't go by that comment in that image about Blender not being able to bake out vector displacements. There might be way. Especially in Cycles nodes. You do have full node network control of vectors. I was told Cycles couldn't bake out anything. That's BS. It's just there isn't a button that says bake.

The problem in Blender is that it might be possible to bake out something that is vector from Cycles but I don't think there will be an easy way to really see what you are doing. I'm going to see if Cycles can do vector displacement but that's really pushing it. It's only just got standard displacement. The displacement modifier for mesh does vectors as that that image shows but you can't properly create vector displacment that way. You can't access nodes. You can simply import a vector displacement.

Just another point here. All the physics side of Blender can come into play. You can bake anything out even if it's a bunch of separate objects. This leads to another thing. You can drape planes over things for cloth simulation. Could that be like eroded terrain? Bear in mind that this "plane" can be any form. It can already be rock shaped. I think you come up with some very interesting stuff by all sorts of means.

Quote
You can drape planes over things for cloth simulation

That's how I made the tablecloth in this image:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=16324.0;attach=44031;image

I'm just wondering if anybody has tried that to create terrains. I can't see any evidence of it on the net but it might work quite well.

There's got to be some use of this for terrain.

http://vankata.deviantart.com/art/Cloth-Simulation-107671386

I've posted a decent Blender terrain render in the image sharing. I've got the levels right now so hat it sits nicely on the planet surface. You just have to play around with values in Blender to get that right.

Here's that Blender terrain that I used in the image sharing post but in Modo. This is the real time view in the modeller. As you can see I can add models on the foreground and see exactly what I'm doing. Modo can handle terrains as big a Terragen in terms of heightfields. I've tested it. I can use four of those Blender terrains just as I did in the image sharing picture and I can see it faster in real time than Terragen even although Modo doesn't even use the GPU. Then Modo has a mass of procedurals. A fantastic curve graph. It has some limits because the shader tree isn't nodal but large landscapes aren't limited to Terragen anymore.

(http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/8282/dc4x.jpg)

Here's that Blender terrain with a Modo material applied. Took about 30 seconds to create it. Render time under a minute. Awesome curve graph to control colour gradients via slope. This is not some small scale stage set. It can be vaste and I wouldn't even use this all over displacement. The terrain needs to be mesh which can be sculpted in 3D Coat. Vector displacements not a problem. I can even do tiled modelling in 3D Coat. Stones can all be real geometry into the billions. Trees populations easy as pie and I'm in a full animation and modelling program. Only main trouble is clouds but than can be done. Procedurals are way beyond Terragen despite the non nodal limits of the shader treee but the shader tree is very powerful. Nodes will come because the users want it.

(http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/5565/amqa.jpg)

So the point is, I've now learnt to get what I need out of Blender because Blender can do stuff in terms of terrains and rocks etc via fractals that other apps can't do. Now it's over to Modo because Modo can handle the vast data and has a ton of surfacing procedurals and very fast renderer.

Her'es my last post on this thread. Modo test with Blender terrain, trees and some spheres scattered around. I forgot to change the coordinates of the texture so the spheres all have the same texture. I pushed Modo here to see what could be done in terms of scale. Massive terrain. You are only seeing a quarter of it. All over dense displacement including on the spheres. Millions more spheres could be added. Of course you'd make those rocks. Then a test with an extremely complex tree replicated into thousands. 500 million polys and not pushing my system much at all. 5 billion should be easily possible. The scene is not that cool because I didn't try to do that. Terrain is quite nice though. Just a technical test. I also discovered that you can domain distort textures. This was a big find. I don't need Blender to create terrains. It can be done in Modo. In fact everything can be done in Modo. the Linux version is a masterpiece. The Windows version suffers from crashes. That's what spoils it. Is it as good as Terragen for pure landscape? Not really. Terragen has the best displacements of any app and easy ways to create clouds but some aspects of Modo are actually better for landscaping. Much better surfacing control for example although I know improvements are coming in Terragen 3 (voronoi). Add in the fact that it's a full animation and modelling app. It does FBX and in general does play well with most other apps including Terragen.

(http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/5034/2lka.jpg)

Everything I'm doing now revolves around Modo. Luxology have pulled off a masterstroke with Modo 701 Linux. Maybe it's the Foundry guys since their other software such as Nuke runs on Linux but this is the best 3D app I've ever used. It's rock solid reliable. I've used Modo on and off for ages. I lost hope around 301 but finally they've pulled it off. It's awesome. I've upgraded my licence.

Nice to hear, Efflux.  701 was a step in the right direction.

Have you tried moving stuff from Modo into TG?

I'll do that whenever I come up with things that are Terragen Modo compliant. That's a lot though. Terragen HDRIs would be very useful in Modo for example and any content in Modo could be used in Terragen. Modo also has FBX. I have to reboot into Windows to use Terrragen because everything else I do is on Linux and Modo Linux is the best version. Next to that the OSX version seems OK but I find the Windows Modo is quite poor. Very crashy. So I don't mess around with Terragen until I definitely have something of use then I reboot in. That's why lots of renders on this thread are Blender rather than going straight to Terragen because rebooting isn't worth it just for test renders. If it looks OK in Blender or Modo it will look OK in Terragen.

I've seen you sometimes comment on the Modo forum.

Probably I'll be working in Modo a lot now. It will take me a long time to get around it but every app you move to it gets easier because they all do similar things. The real magic in Modo comes in the animation. It looks like this is much easier in Modo than most apps. It's fast turning into the app I always dreamed of. It's expensive but still cheap compared to competitors. A key thing is the ease of workflow from modeling to animation to rendering.

I don't want to plough all my time into Landscape apps. I stopped doing that a while ago. The main reason is that I have other work that can't be brought to life with just landscapes and I have a lot of gripes about the situation with landscape apps. Terragen is still almost there in my opinion. I think Modo 701 is now really there as a totally complete app.

I would also encourage anyone here to spend more time in other apps if they have the time because, especially with Terragen 3, it is really important that Terragen becomes an adjunct to these other apps. That really should be it's job. To handle large landscapes that can't be done in these other apps.

Terragen 3 should in theory be able to create much better terrains as well with the voronoi basis and there is the alpine fractal. That stuff is completely movable between Modo and Terragen along with other data via FBX. Content feeding back into Terragen would greatly enhance the Terragen work as well. It's no good if Terragen is too isolated.

I enjoy modeling and such in Modo, but find Blender is just so fun.  Modo's rendering is nice, too.  Terragen has been sorta the way "in" for me, where I've learned 3D and graphics.  But, it's still an adventure just getting in it and doodling around.  I remember fondly the times of a few years ago where a few of you all were working with all sorts of mathematical formulas and terrains and lighting.  Volker...someone whose name began with M...you, TU, Franck...it was so much fun and learning! 

So I'm looking forward to more of the same, but only more in TG3.  :)

What you know in Terragen is not wasted for other apps that's for sure. The minute I found you could texture distort one texture with another in Modo that opened up doors because I realised the forms it could take. Modo users don't think of those things. They will use that to say make a brick texture uneven or something but as we know here those sorts of distortions are crucial for creating beautiful textures. I'd rather have nodes in Modo for shader manipulation but the shader tree is surprisingly powerful and easy to use.

Going completely off topic but I'll add some more images here because this is the ultimate example of what is completely lacking in Terragen. Modo has a massively powerful gradient editor. It's all one thing. Gradients, curves and this hooks into anything in Modo. Animation, whatever. Just look at the possibilities on the left. It's insanely powerful. Terragen has two colours in the power fractal and not even curves. Imagine those colour textures on rocks or just as an altitude change. This displacement can be frozen to mesh in Modo. So this could be terrain. The example is a bit spikey but you get the idea. It can be as detailed as needed. Fractals can go down to very high detail.

This is all heaven to work with. Modo Linux is my favourite app now. Just totally awesome.

(http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/6694/frwk.jpg)

(http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/9264/3e35.jpg)

(http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/7064/9b2q.jpg)

It's also over now for Windows and OSX. This Modo version is the final icing on the cake. There is absolutely no way I'd consider using those operating systems if I had any kind of professional studio. I've been in Windows a few times recently and it's terrible. The higher you go with the needed memory the worse it gets. Most of these apps perform terribly on Windows compared to Linux.

I really dislike these gradient editors. Especially with animation editors.
All the apps have them or will have them. But I think there terrible from a creative perspective. Though I do understand the need for them. Its just that like everything else, they reduce what should be a visual hands on way of working to a less intuitive detached way of working.

An example of something I think works a little better is the way you use key frames in After effects. There you can move objects in 3D space visually. Same with colors and channels and everything else. But it also has a gradient editor for animation and everything else too. At least I have a choice. I dont think its perfect or anything, I just think its more of a visual way to work.

The thing is, the people who make all these softwares are so very smart. I don't understand why they make things so difficult to use for the people who want to use them the most.

So with Terragen Im not saying we should not have the editors your asking for. I'm asking why in the heck you think that the way the editor works needs to be like these gradient editors? There must be a better way in terms of UI and user connection?

I want to make art, not pilot a space ship, do you know what I mean?

@Efflux - Your style surfaces in Modo.  :)

Not to take this conversation off kilter, but hey, look at this! http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-268/  OMG!!  This is the best program!!

Blender is great. It's a triumph of open source. I intend to use it for some things. It needs a few more features for landscape type stuff. Cycles doesn't have volumetric support yet and the displacements are experimental. The biggest issue I found though was that Blender can handle big scenes if your system is decent but it can't handle scenes of the size that Modo can. I read that they are intending to basically rebuild Blender eventually to improve performance. That will be around version 3 so a long way off. I think by version 3 they can be seriously taking on the big apps. They are already doing this if you are just working on smaller scale projects. Advertising, Archviz, character design etc. You can do that in Blender. It's mainly due to Cycles which is a really great renderer.

I've got that version on my Linux system. Cycles in much faster now.

Another point is that Blender won't be nearly as good a partner for Terragen as Modo but Blender is free and Modo is $1,495.00 if you're starting from scratch. There was a sale on a for a few days so I got the upgrade from 201 cheap.

Quote from: TheBadger on July 18, 2013, 11:45:03 PM
I really dislike these gradient editors. Especially with animation editors.
All the apps have them or will have them. But I think there terrible from a creative perspective. Though I do understand the need for them. Its just that like everything else, they reduce what should be a visual hands on way of working to a less intuitive detached way of working.

An example of something I think works a little better is the way you use key frames in After effects. There you can move objects in 3D space visually. Same with colors and channels and everything else. But it also has a gradient editor for animation and everything else too. At least I have a choice. I dont think its perfect or anything, I just think its more of a visual way to work.

The thing is, the people who make all these softwares are so very smart. I don't understand why they make things so difficult to use for the people who want to use them the most.

So with Terragen Im not saying we should not have the editors your asking for. I'm asking why in the heck you think that the way the editor works needs to be like these gradient editors? There must be a better way in terms of UI and user connection?

I want to make art, not pilot a space ship, do you know what I mean?

Hi Michael. I actually missed your comment before. The gradient editor is immensely powerful because it can be linked to a noise function. It doesn't have to be insanely complex like the Modo one but lets say in Terragen instead of the two colours for the fractal you had a bar of colour the same as you see in the Modo gradient. You could add points to that and have lots of colour changes. You can also output colour to drive other functions in Terragen. It's also crucial to have some kind of easily editable curve to shape the noises. This becomes most obvious when trying to create profiles for terrain. Essentially that's what I was doing in the stepped terrain thread but I'm sick of all that blue node stuff. That doesn't replace having a graph that you simply add points to like in every single other graphics app whether it's Photoshop or Blender.

Modo doesn't even have  node graph yet it's still fun and powerful to work with.

I could actually give you dozens and dozens of example uses of that Modo gradient editor in terms of just landscape use. In fact there are endless uses. One thing you can do in Modo is use the gradient for displacement height colour so that in the low cracks of the displacement it's one colour then as many colours as you want gradient out until you reach the other end of the gradient where the displacement sticks out most.

If you want to see some of the effects just for surface shading look here. It's actually so endless you couldn't even provide all the example uses of that gradiet editor. This is just surface shading stuff. You can plug any data in and have any data coming out. You can't tell me some of this stuff isn't useful for landscapes.

http://docs.luxology.com/modo/701/help/pages/shaderendering/ShaderItems/Gradient.html#page=page-1

You can get the gradient to repeat or mirror itself over any value range. One example is that you can do something similar to the strata and outcrops but no need for these oblique shaders. It's all done in the gradient editor in Modo.

Check through all these tabs for Modo's procedural textures:

http://docs.luxology.com/modo/701/help/pages/shaderendering/EmodoTextures.html#page=page-2

It also has a surface generator shader. This applies objects to the surface.

There is no contest now. Modo is awesome and particularly the Linux version.

The bottom line is that The Foundry who own Modo, Mari and Nuke are going to utterly clean up. These are three of the best apps in their class.

Heading towards trillions of poly's at render time now in Modo. I really don't think there is any serious limit to the scale of your scene with careful use of replicators.

(http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/4249/7hcc.jpg)

This is awesome!

Dune. You haven't seen anything yet. Modo is awesome!

I've got some fantastic terrains and I haven't even turned them to mesh yet which will fascilitate proper overhangs. The shader tree is incredibly powerful and it seems we are finally there in terms of a standard 3D app being able to handle immense scenes. We are talking trillions of polys at render time. It blows Blender away in sheer scene size.

I'll post another picture soon but I'll have to stop because this is eventually going to put Terragen to complete shame.

Have you guys seen the Modo plugin from Allegorithmic?

I wonder...how is Blender.org handling this sort of thing.  A plugin for modo for Substances would be interesting as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1-iPexmJ1g

That's not something I've looked into since primarily I'm focusing on procedurals. Eventually I will probably utilise other textures. Modo has one really cool way to use texture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQUNpD9K2GM

In Modo, currently I've been working on how to deal with distance i.e. you have physically based daylight with bakground that create an horizon except your ground mesh won't meet it. You can obviously see this as you gain altitude. What you do is add a volumetric ground plane. This isn't a polygon but you can stretch it thousands of km into the distance if you want and it's never mesh - which could create some problems. You can colour texture it. I'm working on various cloud methods including flat planes. I think Blender is actually slightly better at creating 3D clouds. Modo has volumetrics but to use this for big clouds it needs extra features added in connection with lighting.

One thing you can do in Modo which is awesome is sculpt particles. You can sculpt directly on clouds. these clouds are not good for actual sky clouds but currently have correct features for smoke and such like. This sculpting also means you can sculpt rock arrangements. You have your rocks on the ground and the brush reacts with them the same as if paint i.e. you can swirl the stones around, increase/decrease size etc with a wacom! This is incredible.

Another test I'll be doing is replicating entire terrains. Modo could definitely handle this and you only need a few replications. I've done this in Terragen with Heightfields. You can just use the same terrain a few times but rotate it around. You can't rell it's the same terrain unless you get really high. In Modo it's definitely possible to create a great look of distance. That part is solved. The only thing areas where Terragen beats Modo is really vaste scenes where you are very high or into space and clouds. In my opinion most of the rest is better in Modo.

Modo is mindblowing. There is a shader to apply variations to textures created from particles, polys or objects so you can have stones all different or each leaf on a tree a slightly different colour etc. Lots of people complain about the lack of shader nodes but when you get into this shader tree it makes you wonder. It's more powerful than most node networks.

And here is a particle tree. It could be made more like a real tree but the beauty is the way you can do anything.

http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=9&t=76202

Here's the last two images. Gone way off track but the thread was my attempt to see what could be done in other apps and where Terragen has major weakness. It's turned out Modo has gone way beyond my expectation. Tested clouds again and I've sussed it out. Modo can do reasonable clouds no problem. It can be better than this which is my first success at getting them generally right. Render time a few minutes. Then a Modo terrain. render time 48 seconds. The Modo renderer is lightening fast. Click on the images to see full size.

Modo can do the volumetric atmo stuff. Light rays through clouds etc.

Does this mean I'm ditching Terragen? No but Modo is definitely my main app now. It may be a long time before I use Terragen again. It's lacking features that I need and Modo doesn't lack those things.

(http://imageshack.us/a/img594/7213/7ks6.jpg)

(http://imageshack.us/a/img835/4800/9m2y.jpg)