Smoothing Lower Elevations

Bug Reports
#1

Can anyone offer me some assistance in smoothing the lower elevations? I have a .TMD file I’m fairly happy with. The only aspect I would like to change is to be able to make the lower elevations such as the valleys smoother by eliminating or greatly reducing the hills that are showing up between the mountains and ridge lines.

Clip doesn’t do this because it totally removes all of the features by flattening out the elevation I set the macro to. I’m not looking to remove the elevation … just smooth it out a bit. I have 2 ‘transform’ macros in the .TMD process that I use, in part, to smooth things out a bit. Unfortunately that smoothes out the higher elevations as well, so I don’t want to use this process any more then I have to because it’ll kill the detail I like on my mountains.

Hopefully that all makes sense. I welcome any and all help/suggestions.

Regards,
Paul

#2

Use a splitter on your “base” terrain before any smoothing.

Take 1 output and hook it up to a Height Selector and set it so that only the lower heights are selected. You will probably want to use some fuzziness (but not too much!) so that the border is not too sharp (between smoothed and unsmoothed areas).

Take the next output and hook it up to your smoothing devices. If you’re registered you could use Gaussian Blur, or possibly Curves, or a combination of other devices. How you do the smoothing is up to you, but these steps will at least help you limit it to the lower areas.

Anyway, next put down a Chooser device.

Finally, hook up the output of your Height Selector to the “Control”/mask input (bottom) on the chooser. Hook up the original terrain (bottom output of the splitter) to Input A (top of Chooser), and hook up the output of the terrain smoothing function to the B Input.

You should now see the lower areas smoothed and the upper areas not. Adjust the heights, fuzziness, and smoothing to get the desired effect.

Of course keep in mind that the Control/mask input of the Chooser could take anything as an input. So you can use a Height Selector, Angle Selector, Slope Selector, or even another terrain or hand-drawn mask (through a File Input device). And you can use this same technique to limit any effect to one area of a terrain. As long as you have the original, unmodified terrain as your base input, and the modified version as the other input, you will end up with a terrain output which is a combination of the original and effected terrains, controlled by the mask used. So it could be any effect from simple terracing to a complex network of terrain modifications.

  • Oshyan
#3

Thanks Oshyan!

I’ll give that all a whirl. I do have the registered version. I appreceiate your time!

Regards,
Paul

#4