TG + World Machine marriage, (a work in progress) Finished

Started by Tangled-Universe, November 11, 2012, 09:04:54 AM

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Tangled-Universe

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

Henry Blewer

That's an interesting setup in World Machine.  The bit maps are used to mask various parts of the slopes?
http://flickr.com/photos/njeneb/
Forget Tuesday; It's just Monday spelled with a T

Tangled-Universe

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.


Tangled-Universe

Thanks mate.

Here's how it looked before I added any vegetation.

Kadri


Actually this looks good too Martin.
I would be tempted to use this in a kinda as it is way probably :)


Oshyan

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

TheBadger

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.

It has been eaten.

Tangled-Universe

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.

Saurav

Great results there Martin. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Tangled-Universe

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

Icegrip


mhaze

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!

Tangled-Universe

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!