I'm trying to create a coastline by combining a negative heightfield with an alpine shader, but this doesn't seem to work, no matter where I put the heightfield in the Terrain node - the alpine remains unchanged, even though I can see in the preview that the heightfield is in place, and when I switch off the alpine, I can see the big hole created by the heightfield. I'm sure it's "easy if you know how" - could someone who does give me some pointers? Thanks!
Is there a reason why you want to use the alping to get your coastline? If not take a look at how the continents are made in the fully procedural planet. You can get tight contorted and smooth coastlines by warping a very big, very simple power fractal and plugging the result into two displacement shaders, one for the land (+1) and one inverted for the sea bed (-500+/-)
richard
There is a reason - I have a particular peak in the alpine shader I want to use :(
Solved. The heightfield has to be first, before the Alpine. Tried a crater shader as a workaround, but this did terrible things to render time, so not workable.
OK, another question - I have a very steep heightfield that I want to blend with a flattish heightfield to produce a flatter coastline. I'm having trouble identifying what it is that controls the vertical size (z) of a heightfield generated by a heightfield generate operator, which would allow me to flatten it. Can someone point me to the right field? Thanks!
there is a displacement multiplier in the heightfield node. Is that what you mean?
No, I know about that one. But I realised that my question doesn't really make very much sense - sorry to waste your time. Will see what I can do with what I've got.
Why don't you feed a second, softer 'landmass' into a lake. Raise it until you have a decent caostline somewhere... And then make a real lake. Or perhaps I got you wrong.
---Dune