Is there a technique for creating waterfalls?

Started by jritchie777, May 25, 2010, 09:05:45 PM

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jritchie777

Does anyone know a decent technique to create realistic waterfalls in T2?
                                  and/or
Be able to put a water shader on a painted shader so that you can paint where you want the water?

Thanks,
JR

FrankB

That's not easy. There have been attempts but I don't think any has been truly convincing. Most people used a local cloud with low samples to get a similar effect.

Secondly, you can paint on surface to mask uot the water shader. For example, use the paint shader as a blend shader for a surface layer. Then, plug in the water shader into the child port of the surface layer.

Regards,
Frank

jritchie777

I would have never figured that out.  Thanks for the tip on painted shader!  :D
JR

neuspadrin


dandelO

#4
Oh, I deleted that when I was 'an idiot', Neuspadrin. Sorry, I'll remake the waterfall file and upload it here and redirect the wiki page. I'll repost here when that's done, it's quite a simple technique...

dandelO

Here's how I done it before, Jritchie:

This isn't pretty-looking but it shows roughly how to make a waterfall. You can make it as deep as you like with the displacement shader in the terrain tab. A painted shader describes where the ground is negatively displaced and a water-shaded plane object is placed a little above that, the plane takes displacement information from the same painted shader.
I've stuck a basic fractal terrain in and some stones etc. too.

[attachimg=#]

And the .tgd: [attachimg=#]

You could paint the waterfall in any shape or size you liked, here it's just a wide stretch of open water like I made last time. :)


jritchie777

That is truly Beautiful!  Thanks for the help!
JR

Goms

i would suggest a combination of dandelos water-based and my cloud-based technique...
But good to get this in my head again. or not good, as it eats all my time.
grrrr
Quote from: FrankB
you're never going to finish this image ;-)

Armored Cow

Hey sorry to resurrect an old thread but I was looking around for some interesting scenes to try and understand Terragen 2 a little better.

I downloaded DandelO's .tgd waterfall scene but I can't recreate it myself. It appears to be because I cannot get my Plane object to have an input "triangle" on it. Therefore I cannot attach the displacement shader to the water shader and that to the plane object.

Here is how DandelO's Node Network appears:


And here is mine:


Any help/explanation would be great.  Thank you  :)

dandelO

#9
Just open the plane node settings panel by double-clicking the node in the node network window. Any shader node is then able to be assigned, use the plane settings panel to select that node with the pop-out menus from the panel.
Beside 'surface shader' on the plane node settings panel(and almost any other node too), you'll find the way to assign any other node to that input. This will automatically make the surface shader input triangle appear on the main node, instead of inside it. You can even use nodes that are inside other nodes by assigning them this way. :)

*Predictable Topic Digression*
I would love the ability to do this with the main input for shader nodes and the child layer inputs of surface layers but for now, you can only assign specific nodes to functions of the particular node you're dealing with.

While I'm at it, I'd also love more inputs to the null shader, that would even take away the need for the digression above.
If there were, say, 5 inputs to each null, I could set out 5 networks inside a single 'container' null node to have an extremely tidy and easy to manage network. The best way for me to do this just now is to use one transform shader per hidden network. (The transform shader seems to be the only one with both an input to use in the main network and a blank 'shader' input to use for internals).

Dune

Why not use a surface shader as 'null'? You've got it all there. The 5 you want should be different kinds of input, I guess. Not 5 children (beware).