Stylized Procedural Terrain

Stylized Procedural Terrain

Here's my latest attempt at stylized procedural terrain for baking game environments. The first image shows a 5000 triangle model with a 128x128 pixel baked image. The second shows how the material works (and should make it easy to customize). The final image shows the results of using different color gradients to produce icy terrain (the "horizontal" gradient was white to pale blue to grey, while the vertical gradient was pale blue to deep blue to dark blue-grey) and replacing the bump map textures.

I've also tried experimenting with using a gradient node instead of the power node for controlling the behavior of slope ("horizontalness") on the textures (it provides much more control, but I've not managed to tweak it to my satisfaction).

Oh ha ... very cool - look good.

Thanks for sharing! :wink:

cheers
Wolfgang

Very interesting work, podperson! :icon_thumbup:
we talked about this before but now with the per-node-preview is a lot easier to understand how you're building your material :smile:

thanks for sharing,
Alessandro

now that we have nodes i really wish we could plug them not only into mats but into the relief and the skylight as well, i mean when terragen etc did this ten years ago why not cheetah now ?
but i'm aware that a real procedural terrain is a difficult thing as it calculates different amounts of detail depending from distance and also is obviously very hard to display in open gl editor view.
in vue they never solved this, when you want an 8000 px render you're left with the *building procedural terrain* message for days as they managed to code it utilizing a single thread only...

I definitely agree w.r.t. procedural displacement (in particular) and skylights (and infinite planes, dammit).

One simple option for the editor would be for C3D to "fake" a bitmap texture simply to give a vague idea of what you're getting. Right now I simply assign something vaguely pleasant to the color channel.

In the short term, I'd really like to be able to insert "comments" and "labels" in materials to make them self-documenting.