Are there plans for Boolean operators in the future (for terrains and objects)? This would be very useful for tunnels and caves. But also for cutting out places where buildings can be placed, making stairs in rocky areas and for a lot of things that I can't think of right now.
There are boolean functions in the blue nodes family, though I'm not sure if these can be put to use. 😉
I know they are there, but I don't remember ever seeing them applied like in the attached photos.
Or maybe I did, but I didn't realize they were Booleans. :-[
So my question should have been: Is this currently possible with Booleans, and if not, will it ever?
I don't think it will, as the planet is only a thin skin that can only be displaced and warped. No solid holes put through.
The only way you could do stuff like the China road is add some displaceable cubes along a rockface.
And for tunnels you can use a simple shape or painted shader and redirect/vdisp, if you also add a default shader with opacity mask you can cut a hole, but it's not a 'real hole' (though you can see the other side through it).
Then it would be inherently impossible. Although you can tell the Glass shader if something is one-sided or two-sided. I remember Bryce being able to do Booleans. But the way these things work is all beyond my knowledge.
I've already tried a lateral displacement with the painted shader, but it looks ugly. So for now, I'll have to come up with something else, I guess.
You're right that it's not without glitches, so some obscuring by shrub or so may be necessary.
No the blue Boolean nodes in TG are logic gates, they don't detect intersecting geometry and then re-connect what's added or subtracted, as in a Boolean function in a 3D app.
Some form of voxel geometry modelling would create those structures though. I think it would also help out with mapping vertical surfaces and removing unwanted reversed displacements giving horrible black triangles in renders when displacements overlap on an inner curve.
You could try to use a restricted cloud too for this. It works but i don't know if it will get the look you want.
You can do things like this for example:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18917.msg205058.html#msg205058
I wonder if turning off fully adaptive would help with the tear lines similar to my mud.