For Vue'ers: Increasing Terrain detail

[Xpleet]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to make a seperate thread out of it to share this useful trick. I Know some already know but others don't.

We know that 4096 is at the memory limit for imported terrains in Vue and currently also the limit of GC² terrains. When zooming into the terrain, the lack of detail sometimes can be really disappointing. But there's a way to improve it drastically.

Depending on how strong you set the impact it has on your terrain, it could enhance the look of your sediments, or just give only a small rocky noise, or only come in to view if you zoom up close but further out it would be invisibile and you had an unmanipulated GC² terrain.

This is a rather dramatic example of what you can do by just using a material with a fractal enhancement on your terrain:

http://s2.directupload.net/images/080319/zdlcnzrp.png

At all distances we see a great lack of detail. ( used a 1024 terrain to demonstrate this )


http://s2.directupload.net/images/080319/ty8t8irk.jpg

fractally enhanced. Note: They fit seemlessly to a bordering material that uses a different or no bumpmap at all.

Due to the nature of the fractal that I used in the images above I can not send nor show you how they were made.


How you make it:

( i hope this helps some )

[Criss]

I wonder if this same technique could be used inside Carrara as well. I gave up on using Vue. To many bugs. :(

[cajomi]

Of course. The carrara terrain bump is very good. All you have to do is to set the bump size and power small enough.

[Xpleet]

I wonder if this same technique could be used inside Carrara as well. I gave up on using Vue. To many bugs. :(

It's sad to hear that Criss.

I am using the STOCK version of Vue6 and yet have not had any severe bugs.

Crashing here and there yes i guess that is acceptable isn't it?

What got me really fired up is that when Vue loads a procedural terrain from an image, and you override that image......:rolleyes:

[Criss]

Well there are other issues to but i don't want to waist my time complaining about Vue sense it changes nothing about how the developers think.

Also i became more used to Carrara and it's work flow so i tend to use that more then anything else but this of course is just my preference. Now if only Daz would dump the old sky editor and re-write it.

[Felix]

Thanks for posting I look forward to trying this out

[dballesg]

Due to the nature of the fractal that I used in the images above I can not send nor show you how they were made.



What do you mean with that? It is because your original terrain was done on another application, or maybe proprietary software?

David

[Far Star]

thank you for the tip it works great!!!

[Shonner]

I wanted to make a seperate thread out of it to share this useful trick. I Know some already know but others don't.

We know that 4096 is at the memory limit for imported terrains in Vue and currently also the limit of GC² terrains. When zooming into the terrain, the lack of detail sometimes can be really disappointing. But there's a way to improve it drastically.

To save RAM and Vue resources, I start with just a 256x256 size Vue procedural terrain that has been reset and apply the GeoControl2 4096x4096 TIF image for both the Vue terrain Alititude and Bump and apply the GeoControl2 4096x4096 JPG image for the Vue terrain Color. Works great.

The reason why 256x256 is used instead of 4096x4096 is because Vue's procedural terrain adds detail to the heightmap regardless of the size. The terrain can then be resized and the detail is not lost.

And using the TIF image also for the Bump adds "pop" to the terrain detail in Vue.