Vast Landscapes

#8

Comes down to resolution and rendering…

What I have noticed is the terrain generator is the problem…(also the renderer)

Where you get your brush and paint a cool mountain…is…very much Bullshit…

Map generated terrain is too small even using 4K maps…

procedural terrain is where it is at…

with procedurals you can resize a terrain and the closer you get the procedural…it automatically rerezez for distance to camera (depending on rendering settings)…Imagine if you took it into a serious package Like Maya or Lightwave…

I have bought all the tutorial DVDs (which are F*&Cking boring and dry)…you have to wait a whole hour and listen for the peice of info (that you really do need to know about)

Example…the procedural terrains out of the box suck…if you want detailed terrains you need to go into (there version of the hypershade) and attach fractal and math nodes till you get something pretty…even then you cant control it well…

I wish you could just load a DEM satellite displacement map…and boom you get something like Z-brush will give you from a color map…

…thoughts or insights are welcome…

in the end…who ever is making cool procedurals and then rendering it in Mental Ray is the ticket…(I dont think so much of there rendering engine in V6)(Im glad they give you the option to mix it with outher packages)…

#9

http://cajomi.de/Forum/index.php?sid=1c346d580211b19791aeea0b9cf83dac

GeoControl is a standalone terrain generator that can produce results far superior to built in terrain generators. Version 2 is far along in it’s development.

#10

Sorry, I’m on a Mac.

#11

and then there´s world machine 2 when that´s released.
http://www.world-machine.com/

#12

So if I was an art director or a post superviser on a job…and said “I need this picture of a mountain reproduced in Vue”…you could easily bang it out in the Terraine editor?

no you coundn’t (and have it perfectly match a photo)

You take a bunch of procedural terrains with play for a couple of hours with math nodes, and fractals…and you try to build a mountian line …and maybe push together a couple of terrains that over lap each other…and even then it may not resemble EXACTLY the reference photo you were given…(THEN you retouch the shit out of it in photoshop)

all Im saying is …I wish V6 could take a DEM map from the satelite service…and one click of a button and I see a the Grand canyon…

Vue is great dont get me wrong…

Plant editing is becoming a standard…(and becoming a matte painter killer in some cases…or a tleast a tool for matte painters…especially at ILM)

the skys arent bad…

I still see more photoreal terrains in Terragen…but lighting an atmosphere and animation controls really do rock in V6…I just wish the terrain editor had better map displacement as the procedural side of the editor…

Like some of the work Eric Hansen is doing…(which can be seen on one of those gnomon DVDs)…

Vue is becoming program that is CLOSE to changing the industry…(almost as vastly as Z-brush did)

#13

Ill check out geocontrol…looks great…how much control do you have with it…

and can you take it into Vue then Maya Mental Ray?

Thanks for the help!

#14

I use DEMs all the time in Vue. I personally think that it is the only way to go with most landscapes.

I posted a quicky tutorial on YouTube (which it compressed the heck out of, so it looks really bad), but it shows how to load a DEM into Vue.

Here’s the link if you want to check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eBJUIGR81c

Hope this helps.

#15

Dude Thank you so much for the DEM tutorial…

I guess my next question is…where is the best place for getting DEMs? (I didnt know which one to buy from the USGS…they had some strange format and I could figure out which converter to use)

Also what is the differece between the color ones and the B&W…

Thanks for the help

#16

[QUOTE=miden1138]I use DEMs all the time in Vue. I personally think that it is the only way to go with most landscapes.
QUOTE]

yeah thanks for sharing, looks good…as imagemaps mostly do.
But it´s a little limited to the fact that you are not actually designing you own landscape,
but if thats not needed it sure is the way to go.

otherwise world machine is cool and produces realistic terrains to for exporting image maps
to vue, I haven´t used it so much thou because I have just tried the demo version…and
it will not allow for any big resolution exports so I don´t think the demo will do.

so the big thingies for designing your own landscapes I would say world machine and or geocontrol, personally I liked worldmachine more than geocontrol, but both programs have new upcoming versions soon and geocontrol looks to be very good.

of course if youre in to the node editor and learn that really well, some really great stuff can
be done with that to.

Michael

#17

Paul,

Okay, here you go. The National Map Seamless Server Easiest way to get DEMs.

I’ll try another video to walk you through the process of getting DEMs and converting them in Photoshop if you want.

Let me know.

@ Mike,

Yeah, Geocontrol (an awesome program) and World Machine (ditto) give you outstanding control over your terrains. And a few nice functions for mapping.

If you wanted to you could use a DEM and then convert your standard terrain into a fractal terrain and have endless detail by adding functions. Or you could mix and match your DEMs in the terrain picture editor. (Which I think is the better way to go). Heck, you could even mix them into GC and WM terrains.

But for me, imho, I think nothing beats a good DEM. :slight_smile:

#18

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/pub/tutorial/USGS_SDDS%20Tutorial.pdf I found this one its pretty good…Thanks for your help…

#19

That would be awesome. I’m really rusty on working with DEMs, and while the USGS Seamless site is good, I can’t figure out how to get usable information out of it yet :confused:

#20

I’m trying to figure out how to use this data on a Mac Pro in OS 10.5.2. I can’t find a reader. I did find this, but can’t make heads or tails out of it. http://qgis.org/index.php

#21

I dont know for macs…but this DEM shit can get really confusing…especially converters ands stuff…LOL…

GL

#22

I think the last time I tried to do this for Bryce on a mac, MacDEM still ran. As of now of course you can’t run classic apps anymore, so MacDEM, which would be perfect for us, is right out.

I couldn’t even really find anything for the PC side. People just talking about editing in photoshop, which I can’t get photoshop to open these files of course…

Edit: The pdf linked earlier is really good:

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/pub/tutorial/USGS_SDDS%20Tutorial.pdf

#23

Sorry it took so long to get the video up, hard drive crash. Had to re-install everything. :frowning:

The most important things about converting the files in Photoshop are:
#1: You have to hit “Modify Data Request” and change from ArcGrid to GeoTIFF on the USGS site.
#2: You have to have a version of Photoshop that can open 32 bpc files (I know that CS3 can, but I’m not sure about CS2).

I show it all in the video. Hope this helps out a little bit. (And I have to agree, wrapping my head around all this DEM stuff took a while. Keep plugging away. If you are like me and love a good DEM, it’s worth learning.)

And the link would be good I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW4e6qqVkv0

#24

hi all
I use height data here in the uk, it costs a fair bit but its worth it, i usually get the terrain from a company and then use global mapper to create 1km tiles, load these into lw along with aerial photos of the same area, using vue extreme i can then add all the foliage i need
here’s an example

#25

Thanks it works great! Now after importing the dem where should the slider be set for blend?

#26

I usually leave the slider at the default of 50%. Every once in a while I’ll bump it up to 60-65.

#27

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