Hi,
I'm trying to layer elevations of color on my terrain. I'm not clear on how to setup the shader to do this. I could not find documentation to help accomplish this.
I thought I could stack Surface shaders with different min and max altitudes to get the look I want but, no luck. Can't get past two colors and the colors are not blended.
The image gives you an idea of what I want to do.
Thank you,
Marc
you would need to limit the min AND max of each layer, except the top/bottom layer which top would only limit min, and bottom would limit only max. Also might want to check the "use y for altitude" to make your life easier there. Or youd need to be super careful and just set the min height and slowly go through each layer in proper order.
Theres other ways to do this, easiest is with using images. I'm sure theres other methods too.
As neuspadrin says images may be the best way. You could make a banded layer in photoshop or use the free program Stratagen 2 (http://sg2.jens-bringewatt.de/index.php). You'll need to use an image shader in plan z or plan x projection and set the scale to the relative height of your terrain (the diff between your min altitude and your max altitude)
:)
Richard
Here is a link to my towers landscape. It uses procedurals for strata and strata coloring. There is a tgd file you can download and use if you like it. I made it as a rough landscape which can be reseeded to make many more.
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7145.0
Thank you all for your input.
When I get some time tomorrow I'll work on it.
Thanks again,
Marc
Here is an image with the strata.
Thanks again for your help.
Marc
It looks like your image with strata is projected through the camera as the strata in the distant cliffs is perfectly aligned (and is the same scale) with the strata in the nearby cliffs. That can seem unnatural. Using an Imagemap for coloured strata layers is probably better implemented using X or Cylindrical projections. I've put this one together to illustrate how the Cylindrical projection looks. You'll find the tgd below. I've also provided you with a low resolution version (the original is more than 3 Mb) of the image I used in the Imagemap shader. When you first open the tgd file you'll get an error message cos it won't be able to find the image. Either insert this low res image into the Imagemap shader, or one of your own. You can see that the image itself isn't a strat image, just some coloured noise. So you can see how cool the Cylindrical projection can be in converting it to strata. When you've got the tgd loaded you'll see that the Imagemap is filtered through a Warp shader. To see what the strata looks like without the warping, just unhook the Warp shader from the Surface layer Colour input, and hook the output from the Imageshader straight into that Colour input.
John
John,
Excellent.
I appreciate your involvement in this topic. This is very helpful and will give users with less knowledge a solid leg-up on creating believable strata. You have gone that extra mile and I am grateful.
Thank you,
Marc
Here is a quick render of image driven strata.
Again, I would like to give credit to John for his involvement in this Topic and providing the necessary Terragen settings to create this image.
Please note that this image was rendered 320x240 and sharpened in Photoshop. The final render will be larger with populations.
Marc
Quote from: MGebhart on November 05, 2009, 12:27:56 PM
Here is a quick render of image driven strata.
Again, I would like to give credit to John for his involvement in this Topic and providing the necessary Terragen settings to create this image.
Please note that this image was rendered 320x240 and sharpened in Photoshop. The final render will be larger with populations.
Marc
You might also want to play around with the Paint shader as a way of restricting all strata info: maps, strata shader, etc. to a specified area.. ...
The first one is the best (other than the weird strata). Is that a TG2 render or a photo showing what you wanted?
Yes, the sample.jpg is a photograph.
It does kind of look like a render. I suppose that's a good observation of how TG2 renders photo-real stuff so well.
Marc
This has been a very useful thread for me. John, I messed with your tgd also to see how you get this great terrain - I couldn't get the strata or the twist and shear to do anything though until I put a compute terrain node in front of the twist and shear (I might be wrong about this). Anyway, thanks guys!
Here is jpg and tgd with couple of minor tweaks.
Quote from: MGebhart on November 07, 2009, 09:20:31 PM
Yes, the sample.jpg is a photograph.
It does kind of look like a render. I suppose that's a good observation of how TG2 renders photo-real stuff so well.
Marc
I was talkng about how the strata colors are so weird.
The displacements are wild, and I like the coloring. If you used lateral displacement, this is how I can usually get away from the dark render spots. I use a Compute Normal input to the lateral displacement. The Compute Normal's setting is changed to the smallest scale size. This helps keep the displacement from wrapping into itself, causing render errors.
This thread has opened a world for me. In the attached image I simply had two imagemaps - a whitish one and the one provided above - on the terrain and each imagemap was blended with multiple powerfractals (with tweaks in different directions).
I think I might look into this method. It's very impressive.
WOW! This is terrific. Perhaps a little more detail for us new users.
Marc
:-[ Believe me, I consider myself perhaps not a new user, but certainly a less than clever one. I'm attaching the essence of the tgd file that created the image. Just find image textures to plug in. I stumbled on this technique because of this thread, and I don't know how much is luck or how much is value, but my thinking was that if I pumped random numbers into the blending node of the image map, then the image wouldn't cover all the background. Or perhaps I could have multiple images... Anyway, please forgive the shameful tgd - have fun with it!!!