A couple more questions

Started by Magica, June 05, 2009, 06:57:09 PM

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Magica

My first question is about ... mountains I guess. If I save a terragen file and come back later to finish working with it, my mountains and everything are completely flat and if I generate a terrain again I canget it back. But this also happens randomly when I'm working on a piece, I'll try to add water or add a surface shader or something else and my land will just go completely flat and if I push the undo button, I still can't get it back. Why does this happen and how can I stop it? It's so frustrating.

My second question is about the water shader. Before my mountains went flat and I had to start over for the gazillionth time, I tried adding a water shader to my lake to make some waves, but when I do that, EVERYTHING is covered in water. My mountains/hills look like they're covered in some type of goo. How do I fix that so my mountains are dry and the water shader only affects my lake?

neuspadrin

#1
When you save it shouldn't change at all when you reload as long as you hit generate again or put it on autogenerate before you save.  maybe post one of your saved tgds and we can take a look?

as for your second question....added water shader to your lake? a lake object already has a water shader applied to it... you should be using the water tab and lake objects, not putting a water shader in the shaders area.

Magica

I've attached one of my saved pieces. I'm not sure if you read this before or after I edited it, it does regenerate after I load the svaed image if I press the generate button again, my only problem with that now is that sometimes my terrain goes flat randomly when I'm trying to make a piece.

I'm only a beginner with this program so perhaps I'm going about water wrong but I was under the impression that after I go to the water tab and add a lake, I then have to go to the shaders tab and add a water shader in order to create waves in my lake, but clearly I'm going about that wrong. How should I add waves?

neuspadrin

well having to hit generate is a normal feature once you load up again, and the option to turn on autogenerate is there so it will automatically do it for you.  when does it go flat? do you have any examples that you could save step before it goes flat and then explain what you do to get it to go flat?  did you add a new terrain?  when you add a new terrain they start with "flatten surface first" checked, which flats everything out.


as for water, check below image to see where you go.

once you add a water lake object on the water area, you down at the bottom of that switch to surface shader, which should already by default have a water one, open that one up and there are your wave options, along with water color, transparency, etc.  only for the lake object, not on the terrain.

Hetzen

Neuspadrin is right, the auto generate check box in your height field is un-checked, click it on and see if you get the same problems.

As for water, there is a roughness and wave scale slider to tinker around with, but to be honest, I've never been happy with the results when I try to create sea waves with it. It's better for still water, like err lakes. What you can do, is turn off all the wave settings to zero, and then use it like a surface shader to add colour, reflection and refraction, to a series of power fractals. That way you have far more control over the shapes. Perlin and Perlin Ridges are good noise types for this application. Be carfull how much distortion you put in, ie the smallest scale, as this will eat up render times the further away to the horizon it tries to calculate reflections. But with this method, you can turn off the water shader, and use a blue in the PF whilst you work on your island to save time for previews, then turn it back on for final renders.

Magica

The next time it happens I'll try to get you a visual. The last time it happened was when I tried to add a water shader. And it's happened a couple other times, usually when I'm not even editing the terrain.

And thanks for the help with the water. I'm pretty dumb when using this program at the moment. XD