Quote from: RedSquare on February 09, 2007, 07:10:15 PM
...which implys that you are a pro'.
You haven't seen the attempts that didn't work
I must confess to having a degree in scientific photography which gives me a bit of a start in understanding colour. My personal interests are in landscape photography.. hence my interest in Terragen. From my TG0.9 days it always seemed to make more sense to use the interaction between surface layers to build up the final colour rather than creating a surface layer for a specific colour. This provides a greater degree of variation although it can get a bit tricky at times. I've also had a bit of exposure to the printing industry via some friends who were graphic artists so there's probably some influence from there as well but in the end it's just high tech finger painting
There are many different ways to get to the same result with TG2 and sometimes being a TG2 noob can have its advantages because you try things that an experienced person might not expect to work.
As for my progress on this project... I spent a lot of time trying to get the variation of the surfaces to apply to the population of trees at a "tree" level.. i.e. create a shader that would only apply to some trees within the population. Unfortunately this does not appear to be possible with the exception of the altitude and slope constraints, which are of limited (but still of some) use. I'd love someone to prove me wrong on this.
After scaling the fractal breakup didn't work I tried an image map, both internally to the tree object and externally from the "root" node. Thinking further, it's probably a good thing that the surface layer isn't coloured according to its "world" coordinates as this could create vertical stripes of colour in a tree when viewed from certain angles. The only other way I can see this working the way I want is if surface layers had the same projection controls as image maps.. i.e. a choice between Plan Y and Object UV. But for now, I think it's pretty good that we can add surfaces within a model at all.
In order to create different hues of trees within a population you need a separate population of objects for each colour, although at least each tree within that population would have uniquely coloured leaves and you don't have to create additional leaf images.
I've simplified my node network, linked it into a more appropriate node in the tree object and a test render is underway.
I'll post the render and accompanying files tomorrow.