Some pics of rivers going into a WIP image of Monkschain's Mindol terrain from the ME-DEM Project, still alot of work to do, like surfacing and mask tweaking. The masks for all the watercourses were generated with Saga Gis.
Now if I could just figure out how to selectively lower and modify the heightfield via the watercourse masks, so the "water" will have a different structure than the adjoing terrain, I would be very happy.
Works best for high shots, get down to close and it is apperent that it is a water shader on the heightfield, that is why I would like to be able to modify just the watercourses beneath the shader....my attempts to do so have been less than good. Otherwise I guess it comes down to modifying the watercourses in Levelleler or Wilbur via masks.
Any suggestions, oh I would post the tgd and files for sharing, but it is a big zip, perhaps I will put it up at http://www.me-dem.org/ once the ftp is changed over.
mmm, this looks very very interesting. And it promises a lot! I'll be keeping an eye in this post!
Keep on working!
Nice job with the masking. I can't wait to see what the final product of this is.
That masking is a very clever idea to make rivers, and it looks very convincing...
I was playing with a similar idea, but yours looks better
There is a tutorial on the ME-DEM Project site, http://www.me-dem.org/content/view/53/33/, which details how to use Saga Gis to extract a whole range of images which can be used to mask the terrain for rivers. The tutorial is about 90 pages long and explains everything needed to get a .ter file into Saga Gis and how to manipulate the output for use in various terrain programs. (Terragen, Wilbur, Leveller)
It does not have anything about TGTP, as I have not worked out the best way yet, and so have not updated it.
Nearly all the programs used in the tutorial are free.
SeerBlue
Hey! i've been playing around a bit because of your inspiring pics and tried a river myself. Mine are more of fast raging rivers. Not so calm.
Take into account they are just WIPS ;D
Now that looks good, how about a look at your tgd, I have not been able to get that water within river banks look, great work SeerBlue
Especially river2. Now that looks very realistic, Oh for some white caps and foam. ;D
Those rivers look amazing. Please share...
Nice work Seer!
I like those rapids fmt- the second one looks impossible but with a higher river behind it, it would look swell.
monks
You could try connecting your river mask to a displacement shader on the terrain and using a negative offset to get your rivers "sunk" into the terrain a bit...
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan, I had an IMS and Displacement Shader in there, but your post made me go back and look at it, I missed setting it to plan y, so it was still on thru camera, which expalins why I got really wierd displacement every time I moved the camera to different viewpoints. here is a hi view of several of the rivers in the terrain. Now I have to work at blending the mask better so some of the smaller streams don't dead end and just show as the light tan lines SeerBlue
Darkfire, here is a cap of the set up I am using, I pretty much have 2 Image Map Shaders (labelled IMS, and then whatever masks it uses, as I switch back and forth to see what works best). All the masks are generated in Saga Gis from the heightfield/ter, and then tweaked in PS (all those steps are in the tutorial linked above at ME-DEM Project).
The river mask is simply a greyscale image with the river channels towards white, terrain black, this is what the watershader goes into, and is the same mask used to apply the displacement shader to the ter.
The Image map shader (IMS stream power channels 3) runs to both a merge shader and a color adjust shader.
I use a inverted version of the channel mask to control the rest of the surfacing, I think I also gave it a little gaussian blur to soften it..It runs into a color adjust shader and then into the base color shader.
Then the output from the last surface shader is run into the input on the merge shader which has the water shader, IMS stream power channels 3 (connected to the merge shaders A input), and color adjust ( connected to the mix controller) flow going into it.
The color adjust shader is used to tweak the mask and the settings in the merge shader are used to set the color and displacement merge type.
I will try to post the tgd tommorw, once I give the different nodes sensible names.
One thing I have noticed with the image shader is that in order to get it to overlay on the terrain right, so the small thin channels get water in the bottom and not the sides, is that I have to offset the x and y placement by the meter spacing of my terrain. For example this terrain uses 12.5 meters per pixel so the lower left corner had to be set at 12.5 0 12.5 in the Imae map shader setup to match the terrain
SeerBlue
Something I have noticed is that when applying the watershader is that in areas of the channel where the height is different to a large degree from one "bank" to the other is that it is difficult to apply smooth water that does not slant to the low side,,, such as in bends where the channel is more eroded in the outer radius of the bends. In nature the waterplane would be level, pretty much, across the width.
It would be nice if there was some way to read the x,y, and z coordinates all along the edges of the mask and then set the height of the channel to the mid point between the high and low (if the was a large difference) of the mask/channel sides so that there was a level waterplane to apply the shader to. Then one would end up with a surface that is level from bank to bank but rises/drops along the channels run.
Now, I think in order to do this, one would have to be able to determine where the edges of the mask where from any given point within it, (as in smallest distance from position x,y to edges is width of channel, longest distance is along the lenght of channel) so that the function could determine where the banks were. Otherwise one could end up creating a canyon along the length of the river, instead of leveling bank to bank.
Probably not possible, but it would be nice if it was. SeerBlue
Thanks SeerBlue! That's enough to get me experimenting...
An update to my rivers work, just a small low res image as I work on the surfacing and object scale, the tower is to tall to fit the meter point spacing of the terrain, the poor lookout would be a good 100 ft of the ground at this size. The image is dark, I know, but even at this size it was a long render for my old computer.
Sky color, cloud color, and lighting really effect the appearence of the water, as they should, so overall I am quite impressed with how it works.
I have been thinking about posting the whole zip file online if there is interest, it would contain the terrain, 2 pngs for the mask (all 4097x4097) the tgd, and even the watch tower and cattail models in tgo.
The surfacing on the terrain is pretty basic, as I was more interested in the water. There is alot of terrain there, behind Minas Tirith on the flanks of Mindol, if you want to render away....I even have a tgo of Minas Tirith made from a max file, if it is wanted. SeerBlue
All of those files look like they would be great to have :). I love the image you're working on, too. It's dark, but it shows up well on my TFT display and looks very calm.
Thanks o_b, here is another with better lighting, I actually meant to attach it last nite, but after mid-nite I am not too sharp. It shows the water better and I think if I had posted it then, my comment about the effects of atmo, lighting and such having great impact on the water would have made more sense. A render is worth a thousand words, even a low res one ;D.
I will try to get the zip up onto bigfile in a bit and post a link then. SeerBlue
credit for the lighting goes to BigBen as it is a clip from one of his tgd's, though this low res render does not do it justice
I prefer the first image - in my opinion the second one it darker as much of it is in shadow. You should not be afraid of producing dark images - I made this very dark one that people like (http://ccgi.emptosoft.plus.com/main_site/e107_plugins/autogallery/autogallery.php?show=Volcano_in_T2TP....png). You can also draw more brighness and colour out of an image by editing it...
I had some small fill lights/lightsources in there at one time, but I can't seem to get it to render without bright red pixels appearing on the ground between the light source and the camera. I f I moved the camera the location of the red pixels change, so I decided to go with tweaking the cloud position (random at best) but it is taking forever to find a good variation of light and dark, the default posisiton the clouds opened at were the closest :D. SeerBlue
I posted a short tutorial on how to make the rivers i posted a few days ago...
Its in my blog at http://terragenfmtoffolo.blogspot.com
The example pics are in page 1 of this post i think...
If you have any doubts about the tutorial just ask...
bye