Hi there, i can't find my answer anywhere on this forum so if i double, please redirect me to the post.
I have an OBJ mesh that i have created in blender that is a huge range of mountains. It is the mesh only, not .mat files attached. I would like to apply shaders like we can do to the terrains, but on this object, and use the altitude constraits. Is it something possible. I tried adding it the the object shader but can't make it work.
Any tuto somewhere on how to do that? Or any idea how to start? Thanks a lot for your help
Sebastien
Hi Westergard,
You'll want to open the OBJ mesh's "internal node network" by clicking on the "+" sign on the node in the Node Editor pane. That may show you the "Parts Shader" node, so click on its "+" sign which will bring you to the internal node network, which by default will have a Default shader for each surface in your OBJ.
From there you can apply shaders just like on the terrain.
Any shader used in an object should be UV-based (if image file), or, if procedural, taken through a transform shader set to world scale. Furthermore, when using altitudes, you have to check 'use Y'. For angle/slope restictions you should use a compute terrain or compute normal like you would in the 'normal' line of shaders.
I hope this helps you on your way.
By the way, you wrote, you have an OBJ, which is a huge mountain range. Since Terragen's strength is to create realistic landscapes, I guess, you'd get the most of your scene, if you'd convert your OBJ into a height map and use it for TG's internal terrain generation or create your terrain from scratch within Terragen.
But maybe it has all sorts of nice overhangs, and that can't be translated into a TG terrain. Otherwise, yes!
Quote from: Dune on February 16, 2023, 03:43:53 AMBut maybe it has all sorts of nice overhangs, and that can't be translated into a TG terrain
That would indeed be an argument for an imported object.
Quote from: Dune on February 16, 2023, 03:43:53 AMBut maybe it has all sorts of nice overhangs, and that can't be translated into a TG terrain. Otherwise, yes!
There used to be a good tutorial for baking an object to a vector map for blender, but for the life of me, can't find it these days. It was even featured on here years ago. Someone made out a bunny, overhangs and all out of terrain via vector map from a object. With 32bit maps, and todays rendering power, this could be a powerful approach for importing complex geo that is terrain based.
Indeed so, now that you mention it. I also used vdip maps for weird terrains, but never extracted one from a TG terrain. From an obj that would be a different story. In other software you need to have 2 versions of the terrain; one flat, one complete, but - importantly - with the same amount of vertices. Then you bake the difference to an exr.
Something like that, extracting a difference, could also work in TG (from internal terrain, not object). But extracting a vdisp map from TG to use in TG would be quite useless.
Wow! Thanks so much for your help!!! I will try all this.