Hi there…
sorry for my noob question, but im a beginner.
i draw a canyon and i want more details (rocks, cracks etc) on the side…how can i make it
Hi there,
try making the canyon walls a bit less steep – very vertical cliff walls don’t leave much room for details due to the way heightfields work.
Once you’ve done that, you can try turning up the persistence of the fractal generator to create a rougher surface, which then gives erosion more to work with in terms of creating cracks and details.
World Machine is typically just the start of your workflow. You may want to take it into (say) Mudbox and add those types of details manually (depending upon your application, of course). If it is for a video game you may want to fake it by cleverly placing rock models on the side of the cliff.
Without knowing how you created the canyon, it is hard to say exactly what you need to do in WM to get that affect. That said, the vertical and horizontal axes are handled much differently with heightmaps. The mesh vertices are evenly spaced in XZ coordinates, with variable Y (height). This makes overhangs and fine details on the side of cliffs impossible.
That said there are other things you can (and should) address first. Your scene looks like Horseshoe Bend in the Grand Canyon. Assuming that is roughly what you are going for, try adding a gradient to where the river would be. Also, make sure the river is contiguous. You should be able to figure out how to mask out the lower and upper parts of your image to add more, and appropriate, detail to both. The top of your model looks like it is at 100% maximum height. There is no reason to do this. I typically scale my models so the bottom of the map is at 20% and the top is at 80%. This gives me plenty of wiggle room for further manual editing, while getting the maximal allowed precision (save a fraction of a bit).
Good luck!
Also, take a look at some of the terrains being created with Terragen 3:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=16222.0;attach=44235;image
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=16222.0;attach=44151;image
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=16222.0;attach=44015;image
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=16222.0;attach=44039;image
World Machine and Terragen work quite nicely together.