Planetside Software Forums

I'm working on a procedural river preset (for NWDA, presumably), where the water has deposited higher banks and left low areas in its meandering business. The plain colored areas are masked and open to any adjustments.

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Looks good............ :)

Killer idea! Should be a "necessary" item for most of us here.

As all of your offerings there, this could become a 'go to' preset and could save many much time...looking promising.

Ah, very nice. 

I'm trying to create a river at the moment and that preset would be extremely helpful.  :)

I will add some more masking presets (perhaps for a road as well), and get this to NWDA one of these days.
With a few reseeds totally different, but still logical riverscapes should be possible, and adding details in specified surface shaders will change the whole appearance quite easily (do I sound like a salesman already  :P )
One more basic masked file render and some results from one POV, just added different stuff to different surface shaders:

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Sweet :)

Not so much a salesman as an educator...looks promising.

nice set-up!

Nice, you've got one customer already!

Looks good and very useful.  8)

(I'm still unhappy  that Planetside chose to deprecate the "make river" heightfield option in such a way that old files that used it don't simply give a warning message, they crash Terragen immediately upon opening them . But then I was apparently the only one who used it. )

Quote from: fleetwood on October 23, 2016, 08:23:26 AM
Looks good and very useful.  8)

(I'm still unhappy  that Planetside chose to deprecate the "make river" heightfield option in such a way that old files that used it don't simply give a warning message, they crash Terragen immediately upon opening them . But then I was apparently the only one who used it. )

No, I used that feature too, fleetwood. I don't know why either.
That said, I am wondering Dune, when you make these presets, do you test them on units that the general public have, old stuff like a few of us still have, to see how they function? I love this program from day one, but don't know if it can always be used for just pleasure, or going in a new direction?

Either way I can piddle with what already works, but would hate to not use it at all.
Your efforts are outstounding yet again!

Not an elegant solution but have you tried to edit the TGD files directly?
Although it wouldn't help much if you want the river and if it doesn't work at all in the newer versions.
Exporting from an old version as a heightfield, TER  file etc. might be easier maybe. 

This preset just keeps looking better and better, sign me up!

@ Kadri
  Yes, I edited those old ones with an xml editor to remove "make river" and at least be able to still open them in Terragen if I wanted to remind myself about results and networks done some time ago such as base terrain or stone setups or atmosphere.

Quote from: fleetwood on October 23, 2016, 09:58:43 AM
@ Kadri
  Yes, I edited those old ones with an xml editor to remove "make river" and at least be able to still open them in Terragen if I wanted to remind myself about results and networks done some time ago such as base terrain or stone setups or atmosphere.

Does it crash when you copy-paste an old node directly too?

You can paste an unconnected node. But it will crash as soon as you connect it to a heightfield.

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Move it, guys, this has nothing to do with the river carving of the old days  ;) And to be clear, this setup doesn't carve a river in a mountain! It masks out a valley in which a river flows, though you can always add some gradient if really needed.

Quotedo you test them on units that the general public have, old stuff like a few of us still have, to see how they function

I tested this on the latest TG4 version, but there's nothing in it that wouldn't work in an earlier version, no fancy stuff (and only one or two blue nodes).
Here's some screendumps from the pdf.
It's a very basic but versatile, masked setup, and you'd have to fill in the blancs using the masks to get the terrain you want. If you want a grassy plain in the valley, add grass colors and displacement or pops; if you want strata in the high country, add strata; if you want rocks and gravel or sand in the river, add some fake stone setup and color it. If you want a tarmac road, add tarmac (which it almost is now); if you want a gravel road, add a fake stone mix.
If you want another layout of the river, reseed, and the other components will move with it, if you don't want the mudflats; slide the stream itself wider; if you don't want the road, disable it. If you want just a path or a highway, adjust the width. It's pretty self-explanatory (I labeled all nodes, added some notes, and there's a pdf), and actually not very difficult to understand (no internal nodes either, so easy to follow lines).

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I just opened the file in version 3.7 and it all worked. Did some reseeds to check what happens....

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Quote from: fleetwood on October 23, 2016, 11:02:21 AM
You can paste an unconnected node. But it will crash as soon as you connect it to a heightfield.

Hmm...i see. Maybe Oshyan and Matt can help.

Quote from: Dune on October 23, 2016, 11:46:50 AM
Move it, guys, this has nothing to do with the river carving of the old days  ;)
...

Nooo! What is a forum for without off topic posts  ;D

Ulco,  Sorry if strayed into old stuff that has no importance... for sure that is all water under the bridge  :)

I really like the added road, that always screws me up for some reason. Hopefully the new machine will be running by the time to get ths in the store as this machine is just tooooo sloooow for anything...spinning wheel syndrome....

Quote from: Dune on October 23, 2016, 12:06:07 PM
I just opened the file in version 3.7 and it all worked. Did some reseeds to check what happens....

3.7 was never public Ulco. You'd have to check in 3.4 to make sure it works in the last public TG3 version.

- Oshyan

Quote from: fleetwood on October 23, 2016, 11:02:21 AM
You can paste an unconnected node. But it will crash as soon as you connect it to a heightfield.

I'm almost positive this is not intended behavior, primarily because we take backward compatibility pretty seriously around here. So even when we decide to deprecate something (which does happen sometimes, always for good reason), it should not generally be causing crashes, especially when loading older projects. I'm not sure if we can fix it at this point, but I just want to communicate at the least that "deprecating it in a way that causes a crash" is not a normal Planetside Software approach to such problems.

- Oshyan

You've certainly put a lot of effort into this, both in designing and documenting it. So you get both a road and a river in this package if I understand it right? What, no waterfall? Just kidding  ;D

Just butting in on this thread to thank Ulco for the awesome birthday surprise...now I just gotta figure out the network but fortunately there's a pdf which looks like it should help lots...Many thanks Dune....

Anything to spark some more interest in TG (and get some more nice renders on this forum). And yes, I added the road, which you can expand of course with lines and such (the colors you see are mere masking colors). I realize seeing a network by someone else, first dazzles you, but I tried to add a lot of explanatory information in the titles, and have it layed out logically. The now added (extended) file will certainly help to see where you can put your details.

EDIT: a waterfall could be done, a small rapids-like feature is not that hard.... maybe some day.  ;)

Quote from: Dune on October 25, 2016, 03:25:53 AM
Anything to spark some more interest in TG (and get some more nice renders on this forum). And yes, I added the road, which you can expand of course with lines and such (the colors you see are mere masking colors). I realize seeing a network by someone else, first dazzles you, but I tried to add a lot of explanatory information in the titles, and have it layed out logically. The now added (extended) file will certainly help to see where you can put your details.

EDIT: a waterfall could be done, a small rapids-like feature is not that hard.... maybe some day.  ;)

The .pdf really really helps..we all should include those on complex shares...If I ever come up with a sharable idea that's what I'll do.

Good idea, Bobby!

Looking forward to the time, when I have time to play with new experiments. I think this river preset would be one of them  :)

Wow! That river is looking amazing!

Thanks.

I never had the pleasure of the NWDA store in recent years but it's posts like this that really make me wish I had!