Hi folks,
I want to combine / merge a 2049 terrain with a 4096 terrain (centered) and can’t get the edges of the smaller terrain matching the bigger terrain. I always get some “cliffs” at the edge. How can i smoothly combine the two terrains?
Thansk in advance,
Markus / RealUser
Hi Markus, could Howard’s seam finder/remover devices help?
http://www.howardzzh.com/research/terrain/worldMachine/index.htm
I see these are large terrains so it may take a while but I think with a judicious mask (and possibly only running the devices on the immediate are to be merged), it might be one way to do this.
monks
Hey monkschain,if I would own the Pro version of WM, yes. But I unfortunately don’t. :-/
Oh, sorry.
Come to think of it, I’ve had the same trouble. So I’ll be interested to hear any solutions. Up until now I’ve not tackled it- but I’ll have to at some point.
monks
I’m trying to understand your problem…
So, the 4096 terrain takes the full area, and the 2048 one is centered on it, and you want the 2048 terrain to appear in the center of the area, the 4096 to appear in the borders, and the transition between both to be smooth ?
You should try to use a Chooser. I’ve attached an example TMD…
Open the TMD to follow my explanations.
Look at the way the mask is made : two gradients perpendicular to each others, combined to make a sort of diamond (in fact, the same Diamond than in the Radial Grad, but rotated by 45°). This is the base of the mask.
The Height selector selects the lower half of the mask (which represents the place where your 4096 terrain will appear), plus a part of the higher half (this is done by the Fuzziness parameter, in the Height selector - the value of Fuzziness represents the size of the transition). This is the mask in its (almost) final form : white for the 4096 terrain, black for the 2048 terrain, and grey for the transition between both. Note that the transition is created inside the 2048 terrain, not outside.
The Transform device then modifies the mask to create a transition less linear.
And finally, you just have to wire the mask and the terrains to the Chooser!
I’ve used two perlins to simulate the terrains, but you just have to replace them by the file inputs correctly placed.
…I hope I understood your problem correctly 
And as an aside, the upcoming WM 2 will be able to do this much easier, as the File Input device also produces a “footprint” output that takes the place of the transformed and combined gradients in Rhalph’s example. You would be able to just use a Chooser to insert the File Input into a network in a given location.
Thanks for the info guys. I created my terrain before I knew about the Chooser…it does seem better suited in some cases than the Combiner. I can always go again with this.
monks