Specific shaders to specific terrain.... is this possible and how ?

[pclavett]

Hi all !

Another stupid question... is it possible to construct a scene with different terrains being attributed different shaders ? That is.... one terrain having a set of shaders that does not extend to the who planet or adjacent terrain with the neighboring terrain having another set of different shaders and so on .... This is sort of the thing that you do in Vue but without the annoying instability and crashes that always occurs on my Mac and which has just about turned me completely off of Vue ! As another remark....Vue does not seem to be able to produce those natural and realistic works that Terragen does (of course by those who know how to do them well !).

Thanks for all suggestions !

Paul

[buzzzzz1]

Hi Paul, long time. I've often asked myself the same thing without an answer. But with the new painter shader, perhaps that would be the way to go? Only thing is, it would probably be very time consuming with many painter shaders and possibly very cpu intensive. Might be worth a try though? I have a render going or I would test it out. I'll let you know if I get a chance. And you do the same if you don't mind.

[Hetzen]

You need to set up masks, ie black and white coloured ouputs into surface layer's blending input, be that from power fractals, images, or sets of rules you've created with the node network. Black equals nothing and anything up to white is apply what ever you want.

It can get complicated the more rules you put into a scene. It would be rather good if you could set up channels/layers within TG which would be one of my top 5 features. In the meantime, it's a good idea to name your nodes, eg "Field 1 Mask" etc so that you know what's doing what.

[cyphyr]

In the past I have made an orthographic camera render of the area I'm interested in, say a 20km square. The camera is placed directly above your centre point of interest with the sun moved behind it. In the orthographic controls you can set the size of the area to render. Render out an image at a fairly good resolution with the atmosphere disabled. You can now use this image to isolate the different areas of your terrain and build up as many masks as you need. Its not an ideal solution but it works ...

Richard

[pclavett]

Thanks guys for the tips and they all make good sense but it does appear to be rather time consuming ! The idea of layers makes a lot of sense and hope the planetside guys key in on this !

Thanks again !

Paul

[neuspadrin]

you could also do distance shaders + multiple cameras couldn't you?

[Oshyan]

In TG2 you don't usually think in terms of separate terrains, the idea is to make everything cohesive. If you want to apply specific texturing to a specific area of the terrain, whether it's made up of multiple heightfields, multiple procedurals, or whatever else, you can just use any form of masking - blend shader inputs are available for this on most shader nodes, the Surface Layer's Fractal Breakup has a similar (though slightly different) function, the Default Shader has an Opacity function input, etc. All of these can accept either image-based masks, or a painted shader output, or fractal-based mask, etc. As usual there are lots of ways to do things.

- Oshyan