This weekend I thought of trying to use TG together with World Machine to get some realistic and interesting results.
If used properly these 2 products are destined/made for each other, but not many people have seem to been able to get very good results with it.
I had some ideas and I'll show you bits of the progress.
Starting off in World-Machine I created a semi real scale 2x2km terrain with a river running through.
The layout generator with its spline tools are very useful to create a river mask.
Subsequent combination of a slightly elevated ridged fractal and a normal ridged fractal gives the basic terrain with a river cut out.
2 erosion devices, one thermal and one fluvial, creates nice details and channels in the terrain.
Consequently the river gets filled with deposition, so I subtracted a bit of the terrain by using a another blurred version of the layout generators mask.
The outputs of the erosion masked are stored in one single .BMP file. Since the masks are greyscale you can put them separately in one of the RGB channels of your BMP.
Later in TG2 you can split these channels using the "Red/Green/Blue to scalar" function nodes. Very useful.
See the attached .tmd file for the World Machine project file.
In TG2 I rescaled the terrain to 1x1km and adjusted the altitude span to make the slopes less steep.
Essential in detailing the terrain is using the fluvial erosion flow mask from World Machine as an inverted blendshader for adding rock structures like strata and stretched/warped voronoi based cracks.
Sedimentary rocks were placed by using the same erosion flow mask as blendshader for the stones base surface layer.
Positioning of the vegetation is done in the same way. I didn't want too many plants grow in the erosion channels, so I also used the fluvial erosion flow mask as inverted blendshader there.
This is still a WIP.
I need to replace the tree model with the facetted trunk for better ones and need to think about distributing them in an interested way.
So far I'm happy with the grasses, weeds and flowers. I think.
Furthermore I need to change some aspects to sun elevation and lighting conditions.
It's very hard to get proper GI detail into the larger shadowed area and beneath/between the vegetation. I suppose it will be a long final render.
All the grasses, weeds and flowers are from Silva3D / Walli.
Trees are from XFrog.
Cheers,
Martin
That's an interesting setup in World Machine. The bit maps are used to mask various parts of the slopes?
There's basically 1 mask in this setup, the one which creates the river, where the river is white and surroundings is black.
The top "advanced perlin" creates the basic flat terrain with very few features.
The layout generator, which creates the river mask, tells this device to generate the terrain anywhere except the inverted blurred mask.
The bottom "advanced perlin" adds terrain anywhere there's no river, using the same principle, except that mask is wider and brightened to ensure the hills aren't going in to the river that much.
To the right are 5 outputs. The top 3 are the terrain outputs, 2 in .ter format and one in .TIFF.
The bottom 2 are just the erosion masks combined and saved into a single .BMP file.
If you have WM2 you can open the file and see how every device affects the terrain using the 'f' key.
Looks nice Martin.
Thanks mate.
Here's how it looked before I added any vegetation.
Actually this looks good too Martin.
I would be tempted to use this in a kinda as it is way probably :)
Great looking results, Martin!
Pity WM is pc only... :(
Looks very nice Martin. The underlying terrain and surfacing is almost too pretty to cover up so much! I think the only slight negative at this point to my eyes is that one of the smaller tree/bush species seems a bit too bright/neon green. Otherwise all looks quite good.
- Oshyan
Its got a lot of great looking elements to it T-U! :o
But since you are using methods that would require me to buy Windows©, ( ;)) I'll just ask one question.
How did you do the rock slides?!
I wanted to do a terragen of a place near where I live. But without slides like that, it would not be worth trying.
Quote from: Kadri on November 11, 2012, 02:14:34 PM
Actually this looks good too Martin.
I would be tempted to use this in a kinda as it is way probably :)
Yes, you may be right, actually. I'm rendering one without the trees. See how that looks. Thanks for suggesting :)
Quote from: Oshyan on November 11, 2012, 06:35:04 PM
Looks very nice Martin. The underlying terrain and surfacing is almost too pretty to cover up so much! I think the only slight negative at this point to my eyes is that one of the smaller tree/bush species seems a bit too bright/neon green. Otherwise all looks quite good.
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan! You're right about the neon green bushes. As you can read above I'm rendering a new one, but I missed fixing those neon green bushes in that one.
It's added to my list.
Quote from: inkydigit on November 11, 2012, 04:09:06 PM
Great looking results, Martin!
Pity WM is pc only... :(
Quote from: TheBadger on November 12, 2012, 01:24:00 AM
Its got a lot of great looking elements to it T-U! :o
But since you are using methods that would require me to buy Windows©, ( ;)) I'll just ask one question.
Thanks Jason and Michael, glad you like it!
I wasn't aware WM is PC-only. That's a pity!
I don't know how hard it is to transfer the code to Mac platform, but I suppose Stephen (developer of WM2) would like to do that if there's enough interest from others.
So why don't you both drop him a line?
Quote from: TheBadger on November 12, 2012, 01:24:00 AM
How did you do the rock slides?!
I wanted to do a terragen of a place near where I live. But without slides like that, it would not be worth trying.
You mean the rock slide "volume" or just the stones?
The "volume" is created by WM2. The way WM2 does erosion is very realistic in terms that eroded terrain will form sedimentary deposition which piles up.
Geocontrol, another terrain builder, has nicer erosion flow and shapes, but does not offer the formation of sediment.
Great results there Martin. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Thanks Saurav.
How's life? We don't see you often here, not to speak about image posts!
Hope all is well and also hope you'll get back to TG some time ;)
Cheers,
Martin
Great scene! Looking forward to a new render :)
Great work, my only crit is that the transition between grass and stones is very hard edged. Must re install WM and try to get something good out of it!
Thanks Mick, I think you have a good point there. If I slightly blur the mask the transition may become a bit smoother. It's also emphasized by the fact that I restricted all 4 stone layers. It might be better if I only restrict the 2 biggest stone layers and have the other 2 appear everywhere between the grasses. Maybe that's even more realistic.
Yeah re-install WM and give it a go!
That is looking great Martin. I have some old WM terrains as .ter files which I'll have to import into TG2 for some new projects. Looking forward to your updates on this project.
really like the lighting in these renders they could almost be photos :)
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on November 12, 2012, 09:00:31 AM
Thanks Saurav.
How's life? We don't see you often here, not to speak about image posts!
Hope all is well and also hope you'll get back to TG some time ;)
Cheers,
Martin
I'm going good Martin, just very busy over this past year and half with work. My old machine was playing havoc recently so I've ended up putting a new one together. I have my weekends free now so will be getting back to TG. Comments at first and then I will be rendering again. ;D
Thanks for the heads up Saurav :)
Looking forward to your "come-back" here ;)
A little work on the scene. Slowly getting there, I think.
Much better! Is it me or is there something odd about the waters edge?
Thanks Mick :)
Yes, the water's edge (sigh), it's a pain! Technically it's correct. In other words; the water meets the terrain everywhere in this image, so the plane isn't being cut off somewhere.
The straight look is just because the slope isn't very steep.
The transparency is something I can't get right somehow.
At the moment I'm working on improving it, but the refractions look so fake. I wonder if they actually are really volumetric. At these angles it looks like a fake volumetric effect, just as the volume density shader (which as a matter of fact IS a fake volumetric effect).
Another problem is having the water perfectly transparent at the edges, despite having transparency @ 1 and transparency color pure white (no density used).
Another problem is that under water shadows have no GI.
There's a lot to improve to make this one really work.
Looks really great Martin...
How do you align/size the masks with terrain?
cheers
Jason
:)
Hi Jason,
That's fairly simple actually. Since I'm using masks from WM2 they're already aligned correctly for me.
It's then only a matter of using the right coordinates in TG2.
What I did is opening the .ter file in TG2 and resized it to the desired size, using the heightfield resize operator.
Then in the heightfield shader itself (the red one) you can see the coordinates of the terrain.
At default the bottom left coordinate is at 0,0 and I kept it like that.
If I want to align an erosion mask or river I open it in an image map shader and set the projection to "Plan Y".
The size is the size I defined in the heightfield resize operator and the coordinates are the coordinates I have in my heightfield shader.
That's it!
that is a lot simpler than the method I tried to use last time I tried!!!
I will check this out...
thanks a lot!
J
:)
Cheers for the explanation I sympathize over the water I've had similar problems.
Looking beter and beter Martin.
I like how the grass and trees are fighting to grow up in the frocks a little. Mid-ground right side if the image. This looks real to me, I think its a strong part of the image.
Hi TU, it occurs to me that some larger boulders at the waters edge would break up that hard line....
I second that, the waterline is the only improvement I can think of.
Still, it´s one of the most realistic TG-Images I´ve seen so far!
Almost done. Still struggling with the lighting and highlights.
I tried simulating rapids by adding a foam texture to the water. The placement of the foam is based on the watershader itself.
You can see a screenshot of the network below to see how I did it.
Cheers,
Martin
Looks Great!
Hi,
Thanks for sharing it. I've already test World Machine 2 with Terragen but not like you. I can say that WM is fantastic to create realistic landscapes. But i'm too noob with Terragen to make things like you.
Do you think it is possible to share your Terragen file of it? I've already downloaded your WM file but i can't open it with WM2. I've an error : "This world file can't be fully loaded. Some devices may be missing". What is the problem? I work with WM 2.2 Professional.
Or if you dont want to share your file (thing that i'll understand ;)), can you post a step-by-step of the making of this image (from creation in WM to Terragen)?
Thanks for your work and your beautiful images.
Thank you all so far :)
I made the last adjustments and will render it out. May take some time.
Quote from: ballezballez on November 21, 2012, 04:50:24 PM
Hi,
Thanks for sharing it. I've already test World Machine 2 with Terragen but not like you. I can say that WM is fantastic to create realistic landscapes. But i'm too noob with Terragen to make things like you.
Do you think it is possible to share your Terragen file of it? I've already downloaded your WM file but i can't open it with WM2. I've an error : "This world file can't be fully loaded. Some devices may be missing". What is the problem? I work with WM 2.2 Professional.
Or if you dont want to share your file (thing that i'll understand ;)), can you post a step-by-step of the making of this image (from creation in WM to Terragen)?
Thanks for your work and your beautiful images.
Thank you, I'm glad you like it.
I'm using World-Machine 2.3 beta 4. So I suppose your version needs to be updated.
If you visit the World Machine forums you should be able to find directions on how to get the latest test version.
I will share this complete scene later, except the objects which I don't own the rights for distribution to.
When, where and how I keep undisclosed for the time being ;)
QuoteWhen, where and how I keep undisclosed for the time being
Please tell me you built your website, and that there will soon be a new TG2 resource site out there!
I'm looking forward to seeing how you complete this scene. Thank you for sharing the WM set-up, I was hoping to use WM with T2 at some point and your project certainly is a huge help. The rapids are looking great, definately a motivational exercise in and of itself. A beautiful start!
This is the final output. I think I won't change anymore to the scene.
As you can see I'm experimenting a bit with postwork.
Fabulous!
Interesting stuff, Martin. The rapid simulation works well. My only crit at this moment would be that the color of the rock debris should be a little more like the original rock. Not quite, as the standing rock may be covered in soot, mosses, lichens and algae, whatever, and the fallen rocks must have been chipped, but the color difference is very high in your latest render.
Quote from: Dune on November 22, 2012, 12:47:10 PM
Interesting stuff, Martin. The rapid simulation works well. My only crit at this moment would be that the color of the rock debris should be a little more like the original rock. Not quite, as the standing rock may be covered in soot, mosses, lichens and algae, whatever, and the fallen rocks must have been chipped, but the color difference is very high in your latest render.
Thanks Ulco. Actually I noticed that too and fixed it before sending it off to the farm for a high resolution render (3200px wide).
Hopefully that will make the postwork a bit easier too.
Good! Nice big render, huh? Great. What about the other one you started recently? Have you finished it?
Martin i like the last one very much too , but the contrast looks a little too much to me.
The shadows are very dark. I can not see the rock structures.
Did you looked at it on other monitors?
Quote from: Dune on November 22, 2012, 12:51:12 PM
Good! Nice big render, huh? Great. What about the other one you started recently? Have you finished it?
Yeah, let's see how long it takes. Perhaps I can also isolate some nice crops from it.
Quote from: Kadri on November 22, 2012, 02:02:45 PM
Martin i like the last one very much too , but the contrast looks a little too much to me.
The shadows are very dark. I can not see the rock structures.
Did you looked at it on other monitors?
Thanks man and yes I know...I overdid it a bit (too much). I may ask Frank to have a look at my EXR output if he likes. He's usually better than me with this. Basically anybody is :) lol
Hi Martin
Been playing with this and managed to make sense of it all eventually! Did manage to get my brain totally confused masking out colours that didn't exist! How did you apply the thermal erosion mask? lateral displacement?
Mick
Quote from: mhaze on November 24, 2012, 05:11:03 AM
Hi Martin
Been playing with this and managed to make sense of it all eventually! Did manage to get my brain totally confused masking out colours that didn't exist! How did you apply the thermal erosion mask? lateral displacement?
Mick
Glad you could make sense of it. What did you find the hardest? Might be useful to know for me for future documentation plans on this, see.
I didn't use those masks eventually. In this image I think I only used the erosion flow mask eventually. Either as positive or negative mask, so to say.
Hi Martin
Biggest problem was using the info from the erosion flow mask having used colour to scalar blue nodes. It turned out to be simple! I had the mindset that it was going to be hard and overcomplicated things!
Mick
Beautiful Martin! well done.
Quote from: mhaze on November 24, 2012, 09:59:50 AM
Hi Martin
Biggest problem was using the info from the erosion flow mask having used colour to scalar blue nodes. It turned out to be simple! I had the mindset that it was going to be hard and overcomplicated things!
Mick
I suppose you combined the 3 masks into one file and used blue nodes to extra the Red, Green or Blue channel separately?
If you save 1 mask as a BMP then you don't need to do anything else than loading it into an imagemap shader and set coordinates.
Nice results Martin.
Thanks Saurav.
Here's the final, time to move on to something else perhaps :)
Very nice! The talus and the stream are really exciting (I live very close to such scenery). The flowering shrubs are colorful and really set up the composition, however to my eye the scale of the small pines (?) seems too close to the scale of the flower bushes. I respect your artistry and technical mastery and truly appreciate the examples that you share, thanks!
Thanks :)
The pines you mention are at their intended size of the modeler/designer. It is a variation of a pine at a younger age.
Perhaps I need to choose other types of bushes next time.
The rock slides are my favorite part. They look out standing. They are also the only part I would complain about. Just the color. On my screen the purple seems a bit saturated with only one shade. But its still a killer image.
Another great shot Martin.
Quote from: TheBadger on November 30, 2012, 12:00:55 AM
The rock slides are my favorite part. They look out standing. They are also the only part I would complain about. Just the color. On my screen the purple seems a bit saturated with only one shade. But its still a killer image.
Another great shot Martin.
The color of the fake stones is the exact same as the as the main rocks and actually a tad bit darkened.
I fed the main rock shading network into the colour input of a surfacelayer and set its colour <1, which will darken its input. This surfacelayer was applied to the fake stones.
The fake stones have 0.025 reflectivity applied to them and together with their different angle of exposure the colour looks different.
At the bottom right is an exposed part of the main rock shading visible. This also lit differently than the steep background rocks and therefore looks different.
Very nice, Martin! But how about 291112_big?
magical! :)
really like your work on the stream, the ripples on the water and white reflections, looks just like real shoals on a river or creek.
the foliage looks a little odd but i like, seems a little blurry in some places.
yes i want to see the big version too
Quotetransfer the code to Mac platform, but I suppose Stephen (developer of WM2) would like to do that if there's enough interest from others.
So why don't you both drop him a line?
Did it. I'll let you know if he responds with good news.
Damn realistic !
I love to see that kind of render : just what you could see and take a picture of. Not a huge dramatic landscape, but a small part of a "world"
nice one, Martin !