Another noob question- faking trees

[pedro]

I want to fake trees as a surface layer rather than adding a population of a squillion tree objects... To make this work for slightly closer distances, I need the tree texture to bump realistically, maybe even spiky texture for firs, but I'm having problems adding displacement effects to a layer. What I'm doing is going to the displacement tab of the surface layer and adding a power fractal to the displacement function, then setting this to what I think would be tree-like bumps, but what I get is only minuscule bumps, a few millimetres high. Can someone suggest what I'm doing wrong?

Another thing I'd like to be able to do is put some snow on my tree objects. Is that possible and if so, what would be the basic outline of the procedure?

Thank you!

Attached my first, ahem, masterpiece...

[schmeerlap]

I found this thread started by njen. You might find it a useful starting point; maybe send him a message asking him how he constructed his fake stone trees.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=285.msg1690#msg1690

John

[Hetzen]

When you drive a displacement function with colour, which is essentially what you are doing with the surface layer, you have to tone down the colour nosie in the PF. Try using a setting of 1, and see how that goes.

As for the snow, you can use the child input on the surface layer to add a whole string of displacement and colour nodes.

[dandelO]

I made this out of an example scene from vol.3 of my old Public Library; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6881.0

If you're quick, you can still download the 'fake stone forest' file from the following page before it is removed; https://sites.google.com/site/d4nd310/publiclibrary
You could edit the scales of the stones to fit into your own scene.

Those are some wacky mountains in the background! Pretty steep, nice scene!

[pedro]

Yep, now those are what I call mountains. Turns out they are twice as high as Everest when I measure them!

Ah, fake stones as trees! Perfect!

When you drive a displacement function with colour, which is essentially what you are doing with the surface layer, you have to tone down the colour nosie in the PF. Try using a setting of 1, and see how that goes.

Sadly I don't understand that. Which setting should be 1 in the PF? I don't really understand the notion of a colour function driving a displacement. I mean, I get that the colour values get interpreted as displacements, but what is the value of that? I was trying to apply an independent displacement function to the shader.

[Hetzen]

When you plug anything into a surface layers displacement, it looks for values of 0 to 1, ie black to white. The more noise you apply to a colour, the more spikes you create.

In the PFs colour settings, try toning down the noise value, and see how that affects the displacement.