Blender - Some Awesome New Features

[efflux]

I've also got thousands of pieces of real world work here. Drawings and painting stemming back decades. None of that angle is being used. I didn't do much in the way of landscapes.

[Tangled-Universe]

Procedural texturing is a logical use for computers. It can't always work, say if you're doing protraits or something but it amazes me that we have all this power in Blender and such like but people choose to create bitmaps for rocks textures etc. That's mad.

They don't know any better.

Their argument is that procedurals are too difficult to control and that you're handing over your control to the quirks of fractal seeds and such.

Of course they have a point there, but it's mostly that everybody starts doing 3D in this way, because the vast majority who's interesting in learning 3D learn it from the people who swear on bitmaps and they learn it with software which has deep foundations with this workflow.

[efflux]

The fact that they took those extra basis functions out of Cycles sums that up. They are still there but in Blender internal renderer. I expect to those to come back to Cycles and one way of doing that is to show what the procedurals can do. I was on the Blender forum but I've not gone into details just tried to push this a bit with some suggestions and an amazing example was the revalattionary discovery by some people that you could take the position coordinates through some noise function then into the fractal and that would warp the shapes. That's been there for years. I think it's changing now though because of concentration on node networks. This causes people to experiment more.

[efflux]

Another example of the total underuse of procedurals is with clouds in these other apps. Terragen obviously defaults to creating an entire cloud layer limited to certain altitudes but these other apps have volumetric materials. What people often do is meticulously sculpt cloud shapes with mesh and don't bother much with the volumetric content. That's all well and good but within that bounding area you can volumetrically use fractals to control density of the clouds. It's not disimilar to way it works in Terragen. It's just that people haven't experimented with the fractals to get nice forms.

[efflux]

Here's the first test I did trying to create a cloud layer in Blender but I used particles and a fractal. I think this method is a cludge so I'm going to do more tests. The particles way is a method to make sure the bounding box doesn't cut the clouds off but there are there procedures to sort bottoms and tops of clouds. I'm not sure how Cycles will handle this sort of thing though. This test was done with the internal renderer. Basically a fractal can open those clouds out to have spaces. It's simply a matter of density. What people are doing is relying totally on mesh and particles rather than getting a fractal to do the work.

I think one problem is that people using these more standard apps want instant render results and if you have a bunch of volumetrics it slows things down but these slow speeds are perfectly normal. Terragen is slow with clouds as well.

[efflux]

Here's some tests while working that I've kept. I'm not getting too into trying to make them really good but just testing how to go about this. Once I find the best way to deal with getting the terrains out of Blender then I'll be able to explain that then I'll go back to utilise more power from the nodes to do more obvious stuff that Terragen can't do and blow the size up to the maximum I can get away with. Click on these to get bigger size.

[efflux]

This one doesn't relate to Terragen use but it's my biggest breakthrough in Blender. It's simple and small but this one is where I've been trying to go. This terrain is mesh and displacment so it can have bridges etc and the mesh can be procedurally moved horizontally to any degree. I chose a bad terrain shape for testing that angle though. Imagine those last terrains but without the vertical displacement limits. The terrain can become any form in any direction.

[efflux]

OK. At last I've finally got there. This terrain is exportable from Blender to Terragen. This method is a bit convoluted but easy when you know how. Yes there are some glitches like the edge but that's just minor details to tidy. It needs fall off towards the edge and I didn't go masssive res because this was a test. Basically I'm rendering out the displacement map from Cycles displacement by utilising a camera method. There is no "bake" as such. This means the full detail of the fractal is only handled at render time. What that means is I can render to giant res. This is actually unchartered Blender Territory now. The displacement map can be used in Blender as well in a completely unique to Blender way.

[efflux]

It should also be possible to export exr from Terragen to Blender but Cycles displacement seems to have a problem with exr. Exporting the exr from Blender at massive res will be no problem though.

[efflux]

This is the last Blender render on this thread. Click to view full size. I have this angle sorted. I'll need to now drop back and design better terrains for export to Terragen. The main thrust of this Blender render was to pack in massive small displacement detail. It's real displacement not bump map but bump map is still useful. I didn't even try to optimise this scene so this is really successful. I can now bring in slope distributions and such like and have proper control of blend region curves unlike Terragen. You ain't seen anything yet. Although these hills are smooth I could have sculpted in a lot of larger detail because there is a mass of geometry to take that.

[Dune]

You are making tremendous progress, and I'm looking forward to what you will do in TG with this!

[efflux]

I'm going to do the Terragen bit eventually but what I'll probably do is post on Blender forum to clear up all possibilities so the process is smooth. I nearly abandoned this due to some Blender regressions but I'm glad I kept going. The secret to the success is going to be Blender's new displacement. It means giant maps can be made and I know those fractals in Blender have masses of nice detail. It just needs capturing. I can kind of work blind on this because I'm used to using fractals and I think that's problematic for Blender users so you don't see too many scenes with very rich fractal detail. However, the Blender users will be able to help me use nodes.

The basic method is that you use Cycles to render the terrain displacement at final render time in full detail. Cycles does not have baking to UV. However, the workaround is in fact better than baking to UV because you've got more control of render features. What you do is set up a camera as ortho and position that to look at the terrain. That can be perfectly matched. You turn off the texture colour and replace with emission shader. You then render only the emission. you get a perfect rendering of the displacement forms. It's maybe not exact (height might be slightly different) but it's so close as to not matter.

This isn't without a few hitches. It's a cutting edge experimental feature of Cycles. The preview render looks different from the final. You have do a few low quality final renders just to check things are looking OK.

Also, I have to work out how to create nice fall off so the terrain edge is flat. Blender users may have some ideas on the best way to do that. I'd rather do it procedurally than paint in a fall off.

I honestly think that Blender is almost up with World Machine in usefulness for terrain. They would both work well together. They are different though. World machine is terrain specific so has fancy erosions and such like and it's easier to use for terrain generation since that's basically what it's for but because Blender has a really good node network and really good fractals, that opens up a lot of things.

[efflux]

Just some more info. All those voronoi that Blender has can be used as well in the final terrain. The reason for this is that although they aren't in Cycles you can use them as displacement modifier for mesh and since this Cycles method simply makes a map of the whole end displacement then all Blenders procedurals are usable. It's just that the displacement modifier can't used nodes but you can add in one fancy voronoi texture.

[efflux]

What should be cool in Terragen is the variety. I haven't seen to much of this but why don't people really blend up different stuff with multiple totally different heightfields? I assume you can have a bunch of heightfields? I've never really used them much but I'm a bit sick of this vast expanse world scale thing now. It's too much to deal with.

[efflux]

Here's another thing in Blender. You can take any models at all. Lots of them, dump them on the ground then create a plane and get Blender to render all that stuff into a UV on that plane suitable for heightfield. Obviously it's 2D but that could be useful since that's what we bring into Terragen. So you can scatter real geometry around like rocks and Blender can make a heightfield. Obviously overhangs might be a problem because you'll get an absolute vertical but it could be useful.