just playing around with Terrain and Redshift - at the moment I'm trying detailed meshes at 8K - render times/mesh processing are pretty slow, just wondering if I would be better off rendering an 8K displacement map + RS Mesh Parameters and using a lower res (non-rendering) proxy for scattering any meshes?
Just wondered how other people were approaching it.
Alternatively - is there any mileage in having TyTerrain send that data directly to RS Mesh Parameters and skipping writing out an 8K EXR?
An 8k terrain is 64 million verts, which may be slow for RS to process and move to the GPU...however, if you choose the adaptive meshing method in the Terrain Mesh operator, the vert count should be considerably lower without much detail loss (without any perceptible loss in many cases)...which may speed up rendering.
(03-03-2023, 04:52 PM)tyFlow Wrote: An 8k terrain is 64 million verts, which may be slow for RS to process and move to the GPU...however, if you choose the adaptive meshing method in the Terrain Mesh operator, the vert count should be considerably lower without much detail loss (without any perceptible loss in many cases)...which may speed up rendering.
I think I have missed something, but is there a way to control the size of the terrain object? It would be logical to give first the size for terrain or the initial object size should be increased to at least 5 km x 5 km.
03-06-2023, 07:32 PM (This post was last modified: 03-06-2023, 07:33 PM by tyFlow.)
You can either control the scale/position in the Birth Terrain operator, or add a Terrain Transform operator at the end of your event and control the scale/offset in there.
Many terrain parameters are sensitive to scene scale and are tuned to default scale settings, so the latter option (Terrain Transform) will ultimately be more convenient than the former, so you don't have to retune all your other settings if you change the terrain scale again. By doing Terrain Transform at the end you treat scale as a post-effect that won't affect any other settings.
Thanks, the Terrain transform operator seems to be working fine. I used scale 2 500 000. I would have needed bigger, but Max didn't allow zoom entire model with bigger scaling. I also noticed, the tape helper didn't accept bigger length than 999 999mm.
Next I try build a road to my terrain according to Finnish road construction principles. I have not yet decided if it will be built or unbuilt road. Are there any recommended tutorials for tyFlow road modelling?
04-14-2023, 07:10 AM (This post was last modified: 04-14-2023, 07:50 AM by JuhaHo.)
First thing I noticed, when adding the road model was, that the Terrain transform modifier has to be disabled. If I want to create a gravel road 5 meters in width, the correct width to be used is 0.6 mm and the ditch would be 0.05 mm in depth. Is this correct? To get the profile right, I would need to start by creating a square with dimensions 1mm x 0.6mm.
Are there any instructions or tutorials available for this?
I found also other interesting thing. When tyFlow is used splines are not visible. They will become visible when enable in renderer is activated.
I have some problems understanding the Object to terrain operator. I wonder why there's a hole on my road. Then I wonder if it's possible to define the road color. Now it uses the shape geometry (that requires some fine tuning).
That's a pretty odd artifact...if you send me the file I can take a look at what's going on. Going to be hard to distill the cause from a screenshot alone.
You can define road color, yes. In the Object to Terrain operator you can export the influence of the object as mask, then use that mask in the Terrain Color operator to isolate the road areas and define their color.
Quick question! I've been playing around with terrain operators and I've been noticing some grid-like(horizontal and vertical) patterns all over the terrain when erosion is applied. It looks like the erosion patterns prefer to follow a grid-like pattern over gravitational pull towards the slope direction in some areas. Is this something that can be fixed with different settings?
Ah, right. Erosion is biased towards cardinal axes to some extent, yes...that's a side effect of the grid-based erosion algorithm, which samples points in those directions to gather data about surrounding sediment/water deposits.
The Terrain Erosion operator does actually have a hidden particle-based mode. You can only switch to that mode from MAXScript...but it's fully featured so you can play around with it and it won't have the same cardinal biases as grid-based mode. It has its own issues (it's tougher to fine-tune, tends to be slower, and has no presets)...but in your case it may get you closer to the results you want.
You can enable it for any Terrain Erosion operator through MAXScript like this:
Code:
$.event_001.terrain_erosion.mode = 1
Just replace "event_001" with the target event name.
Attached is a scene with it unlocked and a screenshot of the result. Eventually I may make this mode accessible through the normal UI...it's just hidden for the time being.
(05-03-2023, 05:26 PM)tyFlow Wrote: Ah, right. Erosion is biased towards cardinal axes to some extent, yes...that's a side effect of the grid-based erosion algorithm, which samples points in those directions to gather data about surrounding sediment/water deposits.
The Terrain Erosion operator does actually have a hidden particle-based mode. You can only switch to that mode from MAXScript...but it's fully featured so you can play around with it and it won't have the same cardinal biases as grid-based mode. It has its own issues (it's tougher to fine-tune, tends to be slower, and has no presets)...but in your case it may get you closer to the results you want.
You can enable it for any Terrain Erosion operator through MAXScript like this:
Code:
$.event_001.terrain_erosion.mode = 1
Just replace "event_001" with the target event name.
Attached is a scene with it unlocked and a screenshot of the result. Eventually I may make this mode accessible through the normal UI...it's just hidden for the time being.
I can't thank you enough for the detailed explanation. I'll give it a try with MAXScript.
