I’m currently spending some time trying to figure out how to obtain the right mountains, I use my terrains in a game called Minecraft and I’ve noticed that a lot of terrains wich often look good when rendered in various CGI programs don’t look good or feel playeable in Minecraft.
That’s probably caused by the voxelized aspect of the terrain, it basically takes the heightfield and for each pixel it puts a voxel at the correct height.
I’ve noticed that the parts of the terrain wich look best are the indent erosion channels, wich are fairly easy to obtain wich the carved macro, but also easy to exagerate with, what looks good too are steep but not to tall teraces, wich are a bit more tricky since I don’t want them to look too straight, but I already figured out how to obtain a strata effect, but also I want the terraces to not always be on the same level, or ascend with a constant gradient, but I want multiple terrace layers, so that there are not uniform steps, but also some random steps wich don’t correspond with the mayor terraces (I hope you understand what I mean).
Now the 2 listed nice effects are not the only thing which make a mountain look good, I also like to have some decent looking mountain ranges, with some nice “arms” or smaller ranges sticking out of the mayor range, wich also doesn’t have to look too “fat”
I hope you guys can help me out and maybe also show me your favourite mountain making process, maybe attach a .tdm file, I really like to dig through the techniques of all you guys, but there are not a lot of shared worlds in this forum, maybe that’s something to suggest, just share a save file of your process in producing interesting terrains
Also I’m sorry for spamming this forum a bit too much, but for me it also helped to research through the older posts on here and find some interesting topics discussed here.
I know I am necroing a chat here, but I think JakBB is still active.
Regardless, I am trying to do the exact same thing. I seem to struggle to actually recreate realistic mountain chains, not so much singular mountains. Though, I would love to discuss how people go about creating them, and perhaps swap details of workflow, et cetera.
One thing I struggle with in addition with mountains is proper terrace modulation - I’m just not sure how to make it look natural. I have tried gradients but they look strange, so I must be either using them wrong or shouldn’t be using them at all.
Furthermore, this is pointed at JakBB, don’t you stream WorldMachine? I think I joined one of your streams as Lothiredon at some point, might be mistaken.
Hey yes I streamed World Machine a couple of times.
For terrace modulation I recommend not having too much height variation in the modulation input or it will look weird, especially if there are steep areas in it.
For mountain chains there is no real way right now to get anything close to the real life mountain chains (those that look like fractals), but maybe there will be an update soon™ that implements something that could help us.
Right now your best shot is eroding very heavily and using that as a shape for the mountain ridge.
Oh wicked! You should stream more if you have time - taught me a great deal in 30 minutes haha. I have managed to get something half decent, mountain wise, by figuring out how to properly use erosion after like a year, lol.
Furthermore, I think I added you on Facebook, I’m Guus Ketelings - part of the WM Facebook group. Just thought I’d let you know that I am not some random person adding you haha.
I’m going to mess around a bit more with mountains then, cheers for your advice!
