Terrain workflow

[SteveDeeGreen]

Hi,

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?

Thanks,

Steve

[tyFlow]

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.

[SteveDeeGreen]

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.

Cool, thanks - will try adaptive!

[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.

[tyFlow]

Units are completely arbitrary and are dependent on your scene unit setup.

Not sure what's going on with that spline...

[tyFlow]

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.

[Amir]

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? 

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[tyFlow]

Can you post an example of what you mean?

[Amir]

Can you post an example of what you mean?

Oops sorry! Tried to attach some photos to the last post but they were too large and didn't go through. These should work:

[tyFlow]

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.

[Amir]

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.