Mountain Terrain

[Kaiser_Sose]

You can use artisan in push / pull to mold one into shape

You can also use displacement mapping

I was going to ask a similar question, more on the lines on how would you texture a large environmental surface

[onlooker]

I'm trying to put together a huge mountainous desert region. Like the painted desert, and there has to be a better way to this. I have some b&w terrain maps, and White is High, and Black is low, but I would like to control how high and low the terrain goes with a ramp. I'm not that great in the hyper-shade, but I'm pretty sure it can be done.

I've also heard that you can use a displacement map in artisan to control the hight, and the depth, but I don't have any idea how to do that either. I don't think it's in Learning Maya rendering. I've been looking.

Help plz :)

[onlooker]

WOW, I solved the majority of my problem using Convert displacement to poly. Normally you can't tell how a displacement map looks until after it's rendered. I thought I was getting minimal results because Zooming in on a render is not like zooming in on a geometry. I was using a square map on a square plane, and rendering so I could see the hole thing. the bumps were not that large. I didn't realize that these maps are like 30 miles squared, and those bumps are actually the rocky freak-in mountains. :eek:
Displacement to poly is my new tool of the month.:buttrock:

[WhiteRabbitObj]

Displacement to Polygon is incredibly powerful but you gotta be careful with it. It gives you some insanely high geometry counts and needs a lot of cleaning up and paring down afterwards. I made an ornately carven door with a displacement map this way and it came out really well and is at 30k but it got as high as 600k when I was trying to do the raw convert and get a lot of detail. Anyone know if there is a way to get it to give you quads? Or more options anyhow? All I know how to do is just hit Modify->Convert->Convery Displacement to Polygons, and while it is super cool it's also pretty hit or miss.

[alexx]

white rabbit:

the conversion takes all the settings you entered in the "displacement map" attributes section of the object.

there you can tweak how huge your new poly object will become

cheers

alexx

[BigSky]

Lots of nice ways to go here:

Displacement to poly is one (yes, careful...)
Do you guys know about DEM data? Wonderful height maps avaliable for free for most of the world. Quite a process, but truly excellent:

See these:

TruFlite: An amazing program, once you get it:
http://www.truflite.com/text/demo.htm

Also try colour remaps once you have the elevation data for texturing:

createNode gamma;
createNode ramp;
createNode rgbToHSV,

plug filetex image into rgb to hsv node(image), plug rgb to hsv into gamma (value) and plug out value H into ramp u-co-ord and v into ramp v-cood....a colour remap!!
Now use the ramp values to drive the placement of grass. dirt, etc on your texture.

Also:

Artisan supports displacement maps! OH yes!

And try vertex pre-lighting with displacement on polys....much quicker than displacement to polygon (you map a texture to the outcolour of your light)

Keep on funkin!

:wavey:

[onlooker]

Originally posted by BigSky
Lots of nice ways to go here:

Displacement to poly is one (yes, careful...)
Do you guys know about DEM data? Wonderful height maps avaliable for free for most of the world. Quite a process, but truly excellent:

See these:

TruFlite: An amazing program, once you get it:
http://www.truflite.com/text/demo.htm
Also try colour remaps once you have the elevation data for texturing:

createNode gamma;
createNode ramp;
createNode rgbToHSV,

plug filetex image into rgb to hsv node(image), plug rgb to hsv into gamma (value) and plug out value H into ramp u-co-ord and v into ramp v-cood....a colour remap!!
Now use the ramp values to drive the placement of grass. dirt, etc on your texture.

[EDIT] I'm using DEM's, and this is exactly what I was trying to do. But I was using B. & W DEM's. I'm going to check your link for more info, but This was exactly the information I was looking for. I hope I can get somewhere with the info you gave me. Thank you.[EDIT]

Also:

Artisan supports displacement maps! OH yes!

And try vertex pre-lighting with displacement on polys....much quicker than displacement to polygon (you map a texture to the outcolour of your light)

Keep on funkin!

:wavey:

[onlooker]

Ok. Is there a tutorial on how to get this going somewhere. I'm having trouble.:blush:

[BigSky]

Do you mean the colour remap? Or the displacement for the dem?
Black and white is cool for remapping, and elevation data is the best source for understanding it. Ever used "colorama" effect in after effects? Hue shift? Same thing.

Here's the network:

http://staff.ci.qut.edu.au/~barkerc/DCIPublish/Site01%20folder/Site01/Images/shadNetworkDispRemamp.gif

[nervouselk]

The quickest and best all round way I have found is using Sub Divs. You can sculpt very easily and have great control over what you are doing including the tesselation. the texture mapping then becomes easy also.

[onlooker]

Originally posted by BigSky
[B]Do you mean the colour remap? Or the displacement for the dem?
Black and white is cool for remapping, and elevation data is the best source for understanding it. Ever used "colorama" effect in after effects? Hue shift? Same thing.
/B]

I'm going to try that network of yours out in a minute, and thanks it looks like it's going to do the trick on this one.

But, ever sense my last post I've decided to go all out with this. Before converting these DEM files to grayscale I have a color version. A 7 color representation of the levels in the maps. I have a feeling you know what I'm talking about, but if you don't. These are identified as VIBGYOR meaning Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, and Red. Violet represents the lowest, and red being the highest elevation. What I'd like to try is a layered shader with a ramp connected to each of the 7 layers that control distances of each elevation level. It looks stellar in my imagination, but my main problem is my vision out ways my knowledge of shading networks.
I have a few books I'm going to look through, and see if I can figure this out, but my resources are limited in rendering, and texturing literature. We'll see. I might get lucky.
If you, or anyone wants to try this out PM me, and I'll email you a good map to play with. :)

[MasonDoran]

Height Field

This draws a plane that interactively shows the displacement of a Surface texture or an Ocean Shader. It is currently for preview or interactive display purposes only, and does not appear in a render. Use it to preview the displacement effects and then recreate them by mapping the same texture displacement to your target shader.

To use the Height Field utility:

Create the Height Field utility node (from Hypershade select Create > General Utilities > Height Field).
A plane is created. Scale it if desired.

Create a texture and map it to the Height Field utility node's displacement.
Adjust the displacement of the plane by adjusting the texture's Alpha Gain value.
To improve the appearance of the shading press 6. You can also set the resolution that the Height Field utility uses. It can only display Surface textures or the Ocean Shader.

[MasonDoran]

one question though...how do i

"recreate them by mapping the same texture displacement to your target shader. "



it has to do with connections in the connection editor....but i am not sure how to do that

[onlooker]

My approach is a difficult one. I realized I could probably do the same thing by isolating shades of grey in a B&W map.

2byts your info was helpful. I tried it out, pretty cool stuff. it's to bad they are not renderable.

Someone should write a long book about shading networks and using multiple utility nodes. Experimenting is fun, but it gets old fast.

[MasonDoran]

check out "Interactive Displacement" on highend3d

[onlooker]

Wow! Thanks for pointing me to interactive displacement. I have some playing to do with that, but it's looking like I'm not going to have the trouble's I thought I was. I'm still looking for some more ideas though. These are all great ways of creating terrains.

[BigSky]

Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, and Red. Violet represents the lowest, and red being the highest elevation. What I'd like to try is a layered shader with a ramp connected to each of the 7 layers that control distances of each elevation level. It looks stellar in my imagination, but my main problem is my vision out ways my knowledge of shading networks.

This sounds cool, but I think that you are better off sticking with the greyscale (unless each layer in your image is 8-bit, which means that it supports the full 256 shades of grey, which I doubt.)
You can continually map a ramp, so this, I think, amounts to the same thing;

BTW, remember that you can map a colourEntryList swatch with an opposite mapping ie, you map a U ramp with a V ramp, or visa versa...nice!!!

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