Populating Bitmaps?

[Tangled-Universe]

My original request was neither of both, not planes, not cards - instead, simply scatter textures, without having to deal with the surface displacement or other objects. It's often available in other packages and renderers: load a few texture files, randomize positions/scale/rotation, set border blend values, maybe randomize hue and saturation.

I thought about placing cards but you'd probably have no border blending and I guess it takes some additional rendertime to displace the cards according to the underlying surface. All of this sound rather cumbersome... and even if possible it's above my head.

I'm recreating the landscape as good as I can with noise nodes and a few surface layers... it works but I'd rather used satellite textures for more realism.

Anyways, I hope it's going to be added, there seems to be interest

I know, but since it's not available you get these thought experiments

If you mean multiple textures fading in/out of each other then that's easy as pie...multiple image map shaders mapped to the UV coordinates, mix them using PF guided merge shaders and then feed that output to the texture input of the object's default shader.

[Oshyan]

My understanding is he wants to essentially have a bunch of e.g. textures of individual fields/farm plots, houses perhaps, etc., and then scatter and mix those textures in a way that creates plausible results. It would be a cool thing to be able to do, but I think getting actually good results from it would require more than simplistic texture blending. That generally shows up as quite clear fading between textures that looks unrealistic in otherwise sharp photo-based textures. 

I think the populated Card idea is a really interesting one though. I don't have time to try it at the moment but I hope someone does!

And yes, the difference between Card (populateable) and Plane (displaceable object but not populateable) is perhaps subtle but definitely important.

- Oshyan

[pokoy]

Let's say if I would scatter masks - not color textures - and make sure these have some randomness to them enough I guess the idea would certainly deliver good results, even if blending the texture border would produce blurriness. The mask would be used for nodes which would certainly 'breakup' the look.

The problem in my case is simply that noises do not produce the patterns i'm after. If the tool was present I would use it, since it's not people smarter than me will probably able to mimic this to some extent BUT there's a significant difference between a math-based solution that requires deep knowledge of present tools, math nodes AND the pitfalls and a ready-to-go node that does all of this plus some more on the other hand. And saves you and the client hours that you then can put into other areas of the job or get the job done quicker. If TG wants to be accessible there's no way around some user friendly and versatile low-entry tools.

This is in no way meant to be snarky but were such tools available the forum wouldn't probably need multi-paged threads about blocky rock displacements with 10 different ways how to get the look (or not). It would be a simple PS job to produce some masks and there you go. I don't mean to diminish the amazing stuff people produce and discuss - I really do love it - I just question the fact that in TG you often need to sort of reinvent the wheel to get somewhere. 

Sorry for the off-topic semi-rant but I spent too many hours today not getting what I was after  Thanks for all the suggestions!

[Oshyan]

Oh I completely understand and agree. Greater directability and perhaps some more  "out of the box" solutions are definitely needed.

- Oshyan

[N-drju]

Such nodes would sure be handy, but at the same time prohibitively render-heavy methinks. Kind of a trade-off.

[Dune]

A function input in a transform shader (I have once asked for it, many years ago) would already help a lot, so you'd be able to randomly rotate (rotation by whiteness of a PF/distribution shader, whatever) a texture from a tileable image map on Y. Some masking and more of those, and Bob's your uncle