Procedural Canyon

[jamfull]

A procedural canyon. Thanks efflux for the Tex coord from xyz blending method.

James

[Tangled-Universe]

That looks like an interesting start. Good shapes and nice strata. You may consider adding some more surface layers or powerfractals for color variation.

About the Tex coords from XYZ blending? Can you elaborate a bit more about that? Tex coords from XYZ updates the texture coordinates and not normals/slope (compute terrain = compute normal + Tex coords from XYZ).
So I suppose you blend something by altitude?

[efflux]

I'm not sure what you did with the tex coord from xyz because it's not immediately obvious from the render but no matter what you did, it's a nice terrain.

When you use more than one fractal for terrains you can't get coordinates from one to another to blend them with altitude because it will not know any altitude until it passes through the compute terrain. The tex coord from xyz will allow you to blend terrains via altitude before they go through the computer terrain after which you can then add all your surfaces as usual but the terrain can gain more interest before you start layering over your final surfaces. The more you can build in at an early stage, the better. It makes your scene simpler and more efficient to deal with.

[efflux]

Just to add here. The basic idea of using the tex coord to xyz is to have terrains at least slightly change in character at certain altitudes. There is more complexity to it than just that but it's why we can't obviously see how it's been used here. Maybe it is used for the steps (which, by the way is a result you can get) or is that the strata and outcrops?

[Tangled-Universe]

Right, exactly what I thought, but I didn't know the idea and proposed outcome so that's why I was asking. Seems it's not obvious here or perhaps as it should be.
Most important is whether it looks good and that's what it does, so keep going

[jamfull]

Thanks guys. Ya I used it to blend by altitude to get the largest steps in the terrain. Here's a node network screenshot.

James

[TheBadger]

Looks real nice to me too. Just needs a little color variation for the final version I think.