Terrain Shader

[JoelOtron]

The terrain shader is pretty much useless in my opinion--not sure why it was included.

You apply it to an object and the only way you can preview it is by rendering it.

If you want to make a quick terrain--your best bet is the Terrain primitve in your objects menu.

[kraal]

a quick terrain shader tut....
http://land.liquid-light.org/material/material1.html

[Thalaxis]

You could do this, also:

Place a plane in the scene. Put it in a HyperNurbs object, with a fairly high subdivision (at least for rendering). put a fair number of segments in the plane.

Add a texture. Put a fractal texture in the displacement channel, and use a BhodiNut gradient shader in the color channel. I don't remember offhand which mapping option to use, but one of the linear ones gives you vertical displacement as an input.

Tweak the gradient until you get what you're after. :)

It's nowhere near as elegant or powerful (or easy to implement and visualize) as in LightWave, but the results can still be pretty good.

For realtime previews of the displacement, check out DiTools... which I also don't remember the site for (I think it was www.remotion.de, but I could be wrong).

[AdamT]

And don't forget the Relief Object, which is Cinema's built-in heightfield generator. Like Ditools it does show displacement in real time.

[JoelOtron]

This thread started a few days ago--has some similar advice in it for what its worth:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=41547

[Arrias]

JoleD:
Ah ok, I was just hoping for an even faster way to get a quick terrain, more out of curiosity than anything else. It just would have been nice if Maxon had put more of a description in the manual because it's the equivelent of "This is the terrain shader, put it on something".
Anyway thanks, as for the links in the other thread I've read them before but they're a good reference none the less :)

Thalaxis:
Interesting approach, it seems a bit long winded because normaly I'll create a heightmap (either with terragen or a similar height field editor) & use it in a relief object as adam suggested or just render it in terragen and use it as a background if it doesn't render too badly. Still, it could be worth trying out :)

I'll also check out DiTools, I think I downloaded it a fair while ago but I didn't get around to trying it out

[JoelOtron]

It would be nice to have a terrain shader that works the way you "think" its gonna work. When you access the shader--it appears that you are able to choose values for mountain tops, rivers and lowlands and the assumption is that that shader would be applied to a landscape you already modelled. The weird twist with that shader is that it isnt really a shader as much as a virtual landscape generator. Again, I really dont see how this shader could be helpful. If someone has found it useful--i'd love to be enlightened.

One thing I'm enjoying playing around with in R8 is how the Attributes Manager allows you to see the changes you make to the terrain primitive in real time. This allows you to really see all the possibilities you have with that object much more easily and quickly then when it was nonmodal.

[Thalaxis]

Arrias --

The benefit of the method that I suggested is that it lets you use a procedural texture (i.e. no resolution limit -- and could also be a DarkTree channel shader) to create the heighfield right in Cinema... which also means that it's easily animatable. :)

(Wavey oceans, anyone?)

If you use DiTools (I think the specific one is DiShaper, but I might be misremembering that), you can see the displacement map in the editor in realtime, which also means that it's interactive... nice for placing objects on it. :)

What I don't know is whether or not you LOSE any of those benefits with your approach, having not tried it.

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