Gaea Tiles

Started by aknight0, January 03, 2022, 10:53:10 PM

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aknight0

Gaea finally dropped the long-awaited Tiled Build update.  Essentially that means very large heightfield resolutions without insane amounts of RAM.  I've been happy with the results so far, the attached image is 8 4K tiles, half of a 16K map, and the result is a lot better resolution for such a large area than I've been able to get previously.  Only two nodes in Gaea for the geometry as well, which is great.

Two holdups I have so far:

A) Putting the tiles together manually takes forever.  As far as I can tell, the tiles don't have position metadata, and I haven't been able to think of a way to position them automatically.  Any ideas?

B) I've been turning off border blending on the tiles to get them to attach seamlessly.  However, that leaves a hard edge around the outside of the terrain, making it difficult to integrate with anything else.  I'm not sure if there's a better way.

Gaea_tiles.jpg

aknight0

A closer view.

Gaea_Tile_close.jpg

WAS

This is great! Now I just can't wait for these programs to due vectory displacement. Heightfields are fine and dandy, but I want lateral displacement and real cliffy environments. Once things get to lateral the displacement seems to just stretch (at least in World Machine / Gaea demo long time ago).

digitalguru

Quote from: WAS on January 04, 2022, 12:14:55 AMbut I want lateral displacement and real cliffy environments.
Agree, the next generation of terrain generation apps needs to adopt vector displaments as a standard.

QuotePutting the tiles together manually takes forever.  As far as I can tell, the tiles don't have position metadata, and I haven't been able to think of a way to position them automatically.  Any ideas?

I've had success writing out Terragen clip files from Python, it should be possible to create a setup from a few input parameters (number of tiles, area, and centre position)

D.A. Bentley (SuddenPlanet)

I find it easiest to combine the tiles into a single image map using World Machine.  You can use the Tiled File Input node connected directly to a Height Output.

Just make sure you have enough RAM.  64GB should be plenty for making 32k heightmaps.  Also make sure to turn on the setting "Merge tiles to single output file" in Project Settings/Tiled Build Setup tab.

I suggest using EXR (OpenEXR 32-bit) for your output file type.  World Machine can export huge EXR's unlike Photoshop and Terragen loads them in flawlessly.

Derek