Something else again, trying out different settings for a procedural river. The mountains and terrain in a lesser degree are awful, so it needs work.
Really like the foreground earth! SSS rivers are the way to go but hard to mask (for me at least)and hard to control the shape. Look forward to seeing this one developed.
When I read SSS I always read Sub Surface Scattering. :)
very nice and actually I like the hills/mountains in the back. Some SSSSV in the foreground would be the icing on the cake I think.
Walli
supersmallscalestuffvariation
Looks effective Ulco, the river looks flat and follows the land contours. I like the rough water you have in and around the rocks.
Quote from: Seth on April 18, 2012, 02:21:48 PM
When I read SSS I always read Sub Surface Scattering. :)
Me too. It'll be really confusing when we have a sub-surface scattering shader in Terragen some day!
Matt
Looking really good!
Thanks guys. Here's another one with a flattened terrain. I wanted to make some dark granite like 'kopjes' and used giant fake stones. Next will be a version where this river is going downhill (rapids), which wouldn't be too hard, but for the (indeed) uncontrollability of the flow. When I made a small fall/rapid yesterday the foam wasn't all where it was supposed to be due to the extra small scale redirect. It can be controlled of course with a painted shader (and some big stones perhaps), but I didn't want to use that (yet).
Very convincing apart from the one smooth egg shaped rock! I like the rest of the terrain too.
The river looks especially very nice in the last image Ulco !
Great feat! Coming along nicely. I'd say the water is realistic enough already from this distance. If you can combine this with some rapids/falls and keep it procedural at the same time that would be the ultimate accomplishment. But seeing your work, it's only a matter of time :)
Hi Dune, Following this pretty close :)
I'm curious, but is it possible to export the terrain following the river only, maybe three feet of each bank with all rocks no water? From the foreground to at least the mid-ground?
I can only export what my camera sees, and I have to export everything the camera sees (up to a certain distance). It be great if you could draw in what you want to export. I have no idea why the camera has anything to do with it...
Just thinking about animating the water over a terrain.
Looking great Ulco. Seeing your stuff always delivers inspirations; and, looking forward to the next iterations.
It is still completely procedural, but now I need something for better rapids. I may find it by trying out the blue nodes in some educated guesses, but if any of you math wizards can produce something in no time, I'd be much obliged :D
I use a strata and outcrops shader now for rapids, but that is actually too sharp. What would be better is a smooth stepped! grayscale, from black to white (along X or Z axis), which I could combine with a distance shader or other soft ramp to get something like the attachment.
@TheBadger: I might give that a try. Never did exporting before.
Have you tried using a "constant colour" or "constant scalar" node (maybe set between .1 to .5) as a blending shader for the "strata and outcrops"?
James
I can't imagine how that would work, honestly, but I'll give it a try. I have now faked the rapids by a simple stretched perlin fractal, perpendicular to the river, but those are not real steps of course. It is now rendering........
The reason the camera controls the exported geometry area for the micro exporter is that the terrain geometry is created by the rendering process and the rendered area is set by the camera view.
If you want to export a square region of terrain, you can turn it into a heightfield by feeding your shader network into the Shader input of a Heightfield Generate, then use a Heightfield Export LWO to get some geometry out. But the micro exporter is generally superior, being able to output in OBJ format for one thing, and you can achieve a similar effect using a top-down render.
Limiting geometry export by a mask is not currently possible.
- Oshyan
Thanks
The constant scaler works to change the angle, but what I really need is soft edged strata. Or a way to soften the existing strata's edges. I'll scour the forum for nodes...
EDIT: Just found efflux's and mogn's stepped files again, which might be what I need.
I sometimes use a surface layer set to 90 degrees maximum slope and 50 or 60 degrees minimum slope to do this. But this may not be what you need...
Just how do you do that, Henry?
The problem with the soft (blue node) terraces of efflux and mogn is that the nodes respond to the whole range of the terrain. I can get nice ravines, but I need to apply the terraces to a small height range only. Back to work.
Here's another test, but it's not what I'm after yet. Hard to get the fall exactly straight down.
the river bed is really nice
Agreed. That is one fine looking stream, this is going to look fantastic when it all comes together.
Here is an example. The crop is taken from the Terrain node group.
Thanks Henry, I'll check that out. In the meantime I got the idea to first make the basics of terrain steps and river, then warp all together. Hopefully, the river will stay perpendicular to the soft rises. Then raise certain areas and define details.
Ulco , The "Smooth surface" check box in compute normal and compute terrain does help in some situations.
I use a displacement map projected from x or z with after above nodes and it does kinda help.
But you know you get many different kind of looks in TG2 and i am not sure if this is what you are after.
I use these approach on an image i make now.
Edit: And when you use very low or very high "patch size" in "compute normal" you can get many more different results too as you know!
Thanks, Kadri. I now about the smooth function and small patch size. I used that to make my walls a good while back. You can indeed get some interesting results by using that. Pity is then that smooth surface in surface layers in combination with displacement intersection is not as interesting anymore ;) I also tried restricting the calculation of the small patch size to only the area where it was needed, the rest was calculated as normal.
But, I think I got something interesting now. Rendering at this moment. Winding river, but a straight waterfall.
I still don't know what you mean with SSS.
Perhaps we (not just you alone) should try to explain abbreviations, at least the not so common ones.
Sss is kinda reserved for sub surface scattering I think.
Frank
Frank, I believe SSS is the simple shape shader.
Quote from: darthvader1 on April 22, 2012, 03:54:16 PM
Frank, I believe SSS is the simple shape shader.
Ah right, that would make sense. thanks!
Very nice work.
I am always impressed by how much you can achieve with very few blue nodes. An inspiration to all us to use our brains and think things through!
Sorry about the abbr. SSS, but as we don't have SSS, I might as well use it for the SSS ;) Maybe I'll call it the SimpleSS (rather than the SS).
Anyway; some progress in a completely different setup, but the terrain lacks quality, and the river is not ready either. I'm slowly getting to where I want this to go.
You can get a softer stepping using the Strata shader but controlling the hard layer steepness. playing with the other settings also produces some interesting effects
They're still sharp edges, and the top of the fall at least should be smooth and rounded. I've used a stretched perlin perpendicular to the river now, which is going slowly uphill. But then you get some dips.
Best would be if I could blend these perlin heights into the gradient only when they rise above it, then go horizontal until the next soft rise. I tried the conditional shader, but I haven't managed it yet. The interesting part of this would be that the perlin provides some irregularity. I need blue men ::)
Two more versions, but I just got some other ideas again.....
Looking good :)
I tried something else again and made a sinus-based ramp in the valley. Only forgot to blend the vertical foam by a foam shader, but it's getting kind of nice now.
EDIT: And I need to change the straight river SimpleSS into a triangle :P
This is looking great! Whatever the final looks like, it's going to be fantastic!
This is looking pretty good. It will look better when you get the foam turned back on.
It does. I also changed the ramp's extent a bit to a more rapid like situation.
You're definitely getting there.Especially like the parts on the banks where
the ground has been kind of washed away.
Keep going,J.
Quote from: j meyer on April 26, 2012, 10:39:21 AM
You're definitely getting there.Especially like the parts on the banks where
the ground has been kind of washed away.
Keep going,J.
I agree. The water turbidity is very good also.
Thanks guys. Here's another one, with a different seed for the mountains close by and a triangle as river instead of rectangular. And some huge stones (a bit too much/big). I may put some more grass in, but I doubt about the yellow flowers.
The last one looks good.
The river looks to me better when we can not see it on the far side.
These are all looking great.
When you say a triangle river are you talking about the river bed (like a V)? or something else?
James
Last one is the best in my view, smaller stream, disappears in the distance, foam in appropriate areas, decent downslope/waterfall. I say keep the yellow flowers. The whole thing looks noisy or perhaps oversharpened though. To my eye it'd be better with either higher AA, higher detail, a smoother AA filter, or just not doing post work sharpening, depending on which of those apply. If post sharpening is being applied in any way, that's almost certainly the culprit. But as usual with these things, individual taste varies...
- Oshyan
The water in the last two looks great, your terrain work is also something. As for the river bed, that's going to take a bit more work, IHMO. Wild rivers seldom want to be confined to one perfect bed. You got side arms and pools, meander segments and eroded banks, etc. You'll see more of that in slower streams, but even fast flowing creeks are rarely regular in shape. Quite complex to model, no doubt...
The last one is looking good however I agree with Oshyan about the sharpness of the image. Boulders look alright to me and the randomness of the terrain makes it all work. Looking forward to future iterations of this scene.
With triangle I mean the simple shape shader itself that is the basis of the river (actually two, by the way, but that's not important). Take a simple shape, make it polygonal and change 5 into 3... simple as it's name implies. This riverbed was 200x5000m., but at the end it tapers to 0. This is used to displace the ground down into the river bed.
The sharpness is overdone, I know and I agree. It was just quickly done in Irfanview, which I normally do a little more precise in PS.
The riverbed can 'easily' be changed into a set of intermingling streams (and pools as well, just warp a little rougher, and use more SimpleSS's). I might take up that challenge.
But I also thought of making the ground into big smooth and shiny black voronoi rocks.... TG keeps me busy, that's for sure.
Quick straight from TG test with 2 rivers. Problem is to get them off the ramp nicely.
How do you stop the water shader colouring the banks?
Because it's a separate thing (plane, lake, sphere), only surfacing where the river is displaced down. It's easier to fake a river, I admit, by having it follow the terrain. You won't have transparency then (just use a reflective shader, blended by a SimpleSS), but that's not even important at larger distances. You could cover the edges (combination of Simpleshape masks, merges) with stones to stop the reflectiveness.
I took the second stream out again. In this setup I couldn't warp it independently. A simple painted mask with some sidestreams would work better I think, but well, that's not at play here. Working towards a shiny, rainy, smooth rocked valley..... this is a first quick attempt (in B/W :P).
1. An attempt at the smooth voronoi rocks and a PS painted river mask with 'tributaries'. It works, but the problem remains to get the mask over the ramp perpendicularly. For a river with no ramps and just soft rapids it's fine.
2. An experiment using a stretched and warped 3D diff scaler as the basis for an estuary system. Plus some procedurally colored Dutch cattle.
You have some great ideas - love the estuary image but the in the voronoi one I think the rocks extend too far back from the river
I like the image 3Ddiif-rivertest very much.
In fact the estuary image is stunning but I suspect the cows would sink!
Looks fantastic, but I am also not so sure about the Holstein-Friesian at that location.
I have another one with some mammoths, but actually I just threw some things together as it was just about the voronoi. And that could be enhanced a lot; better grasses (this is just an internal grass mat), nicer mud, better background, perhaps trees....
..." and a PS painted river mask with 'tributaries' ".
Did you paint that mask free or did you have an ortho or heightmap on
an other layer so that you could line up your river?
No, I just did some freehand lines and shoved the mask around until it was kind of right, but working from a heightmap would of course yield much more accurate results.
The Last image on page 4 is the one I like best in terms of concept. Its really nice! If asking does anything I would really like to see that one pushed as far as it can go! Also photo realism would be nice (if its possible?)
Ulco, once I finely get back to the waterfall project we talked about, I will animate water for you to use in one of these images if you like. It will be good practice, and I would like to see what it looks like with proper running water.
Also, do you recall the image you made this winter, or last fall, where you had some large ice pushing up through the ground? Can you post a link to that thread please. I was thinking about that image and the one I mentioned at the top of this post. Don't you think they would go good together?
This thread: http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=13357.msg131864#msg131864 is about pingo's. And indeed, they would go well together. I'll keep it in mind, and maybe pursue the voronoi creeks/estuary a bit further.
Running water would be very nice! I think the water in these mountain scenes can be animated in TG to give it a quite realistic feel. Maybe just a slight change in warp and foam distribution might do the trick.
I would like to see what TG2 can do. If you can get the creeks and rivers running I want to see it. But I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that render times will be high, and the process will be complex.
If you look closely at running water, you can't actually see it running as it's transparent. Unless there's dirt coming with it. Or foam. The foam can be moved along the warped river, and by changing the displacement and maybe warp over time I can surely imagine it seeming to flow.
Another version, but not perfect either (too much voronoi). There's also a glitch near the source, which I have to straighten out.
The 3D-diff valley turned out quite nice though. Just some overall color enhancement to make the shadows deeper.
The 3D-diff looks great. :)
Did you not like the surface in "3Ddiff-rivertest-28-04-12-v1.jpg" Ulco ?
I did, Kadri, this one just turned out differently, as I did have the feeling that the surface features where a bit 'grand', not fine enough for the animals and trees, so I lowered the heightened parts. With all the masks it's getting more tricky to get the landscape just right. Before you know there's a glitch somewhere. I got a new setup rendering right now with two snaking rivers, it's good practice setting it all up from scratch every time.
:)
New setup, so it's still ugly. But I found a new glitch. I have a mask which shows nicely purple in the riverbed fading out at the sides, but as soon as I add a surface layer (as a container) as a child with three stones in them, they only stick to the sides and leave the river bottom empty. HUH? No smoothing or any slope height restrictions in the nodes I use to texture the stones, nothing there to cause it. HUH? Two merge shaders (highest raise), but that's normal.
So.... work to do.
And this is the land of turtles or 'egg spraying dino's'.
Quote from: Dune on April 29, 2012, 03:06:00 AM
1. An attempt at the smooth voronoi rocks and a PS painted river mask with 'tributaries'. It works, but the problem remains to get the mask over the ramp perpendicularly. For a river with no ramps and just soft rapids it's fine.
2. An experiment using a stretched and warped 3D diff scaler as the basis for an estuary system. Plus some procedurally colored Dutch cattle.
'2' is the best of all I think.
Thanks, Bob. These are all learning experiences, I probably never finish any one properly, just try out all kinds of methods. But I have the 3D-diff with the 4 mammoths as my desktop as the best of the lot indeed. For the time being.
It is harder than I thought, but at least I got two rivers merging with the foam following the streams. But strange things still happen, such as the bluish line in the mountains, perpendicular to the rivers.
But it seems I'm getting senile :-[, as I never encountered this before; with two sets of stones (highest raise) they won't fill a simple riverbed..... huh?
..... never mind the title...
I seem to be alone from now on, so I'm going to quit this thread... just one more, as I already quite the merging rivers with the merging foam. Maybe later again. This is just one river, but the fall area needs to be picked carefully or adjusted manually by some painted shader or what.
Nice use of the SSS soft triangle - now if we could create a U shaped one?
Here's the beginnings of a SSS u shaped valley with a rounded end
Nice to play with these SimpleSS's.... ;)
Yep! :D It's opened a whole new world. Here's a rounder head of valley.
I would still like to see a few seconds of animation for those rivers. I don't think I have seen an animated river or stream in TG2 before.
Some cool work here.
I'm fairly new to TG2, I'm just wondering if there's any suggested resources on blue nodes? or can it be approached through trial and error? Are they typically only used for specific things like this, rather than in every project?
Though looking at these images I get a very general idea of how it's done by the explanations given, amazing results :)
If you're (fairly) new in TG2, you better stay clear of the blue nodes, and get the hang of the program's 'normal' nodes first. That would help you enormously integrating blue nodes later. A little knowledge of maths is very helpful, although for instance the blue node 'multiply color' and the merge shader set to multiply (color) and level 1 are approximately the same, and are easy to understand.
If you have time on your hand, it's nice experimenting with blues though. Find some clipfiles or descriptions of blue nodes on the forum and explore how they work, change them from there until you understand and have what you need (or might perhaps need some day). That's how I proceeded.
Quote from: Dune on June 26, 2012, 11:44:42 AM
If you're (fairly) new in TG2, you better stay clear of the blue nodes, and get the hang of the program's 'normal' nodes first. That would help you enormously integrating blue nodes later.
Thanks for the suggestions, I've not long finished the Ben McDuff tutorial, that seems an excellent way to start in general. At the moment I'm dissecting other peoples files on the forums which is overwhelming but eye opening. There seems to be quite a big gap between that tutorial and the more advanced stuff like this though, that's why I asked originally.