How do you use the shape guide input to control multiple octaves in the advanced perlin? You can use the “Shapeguide lead-in level” to control more octaves with the shape guide, but every octave added is identical to the first, which is pretty useless. I would expect each octave controlled by the shapeguide to get successively smaller by 1/2, just like normal.
Anybody have success controlling more than one octave with the shapeguide? If all additional octaves are the same as the first, then I don’t understand it’s value.
Octaves are what make the form, so controlling the octaves is controlling the form
The shape guide can replace octaves in your advanced perlin, up to 8 octaves, using the “shapeguide lead-in level”.
From the help file: -Shapeguide lead-in level: Allows you to set how many octaves of noise the shapeguide takes over.
If you set the shapeguide lead-in level to 0 then the shapeguide will not replace any octaves in your advanced perlin and thus it will have full strength, since it is simply added on top. As you increase the lead-in number the shapeguide replaces more and more octaves, and thus has a weaker and weaker effect. Why? Because the total strength of the advanced perlin is distributed between all its octaves.
I’m wondering what success anyone has had using lead-in levels higher than 1.
It seems using the “Custom Fractal Profile” is simpler to use for the same effect.
You misunderstand me. I didn’t say Shape guide’s “function”, I said “value”. Octaves mean the detail level to which the function is to be calculated. Form means the overall primitive shape. I’m assuming you know fractals, so I’ll start from there.
A fractal is essentially a function F(f1(f2(f3…(fn(x); where n->infinite.
Now to the case at hand. The advanced perlin device generates a custom variant of perlin noise (a fractal function), which is evaluated to a limited number of octaves, to keep build times finite. Each octave adds a finer level of detail to the terrain (octave1=coarse noise shape, octave10=smallest scale detail). When you add a shape guide, the shape you provide replaces one octave level (coarse first). As you increase shape guide lead in levels, the same shape copies or replaces the next 7 levels.
From what I understand, you are trying to do one of these things:
Replace the subsequent levels with new shapes, not the same.
As the lead in level increase, at each octave level, the shapeguide should be half of previous level.
I believe both of these are not possible.
Custom fractal profile does work to mix up the multifractals, but based on percentages, not octaves.
Thanks for the detailed info. You are right about what I was trying to do, but I see that’s not how it works.
I’m also interested in what other people may have done with that feature, and what advantages it may offer.
For example, let’s say I feed a 4 octave large scale advanced perlin into the shape guide of my main small scale advanced perlin set to a lead-in level of 4. Now I have 4 octaves for which I can control parameters independently of the other octaves. Is that useful? That’s what I’m fooling around with.
I can, for instance, control their multiscale fractal parameters separately. Or even their steepness. Then I can logically organize and say to myself, these 4 shape-guide octaves will control large scale features while the remaining octaves will control smaller features. Then I can set how steep the large scale features are independently of the steepness of the small scale features. Maybe that would be a useful way to organize things
It seems like the shape guide can also help with more naturally connecting different terrains. Right nowI have a landscape that is much more organically connected than I had in past when I tried to force different terrains into the same landscape using only masks.
What I’m trying to do is learn how to effectively use the more advanced features, with the same goal in mind as every other WM user out there: creating that more natural, interesting, and realistic terrain. We shall see
I’d say, decide on your landform type first. If you don’t have a certain grasp of the geology you are trying to simulate, there is no magic slider (or combination thereoff) that will make up for it. I find the top-down approach is more fruitful.
Yes, I have done the top down approach too, and was able to emulate the geoglyph dunes device,among other things, with which I was pretty happy. That’s pretty much how all the tutorials do it too, which creates some really nice terrains, like volcanoes and snowy mountains. The problems is that creating a landscape from these terrains results in a frankenstein style landscape of tacking things together that don’t seem to fit quite as well as I would like, and require manual intervention. I guess my secondary goal is an entire landscape that can be generated anew simply by clicking the random button without having to, say, enter the layout mode to readjust the location of the mountains or rivers.
