I’ve created a 2x2 km world with 1 km elevation.
I have a max height cliff vertical cliff.
I want to use the ‘expander’ node, set to linear, to expand by 1km to get a 45 degree slope. However, I get something much more shallow.
What am I missing?
See attached project.
New Project.tmd (15.5 KB)
What you’re trying to do certainly makes sense, but is not the way the expander operates. The distance is exact for the hard-edged expansion. For gaussian and linear slope, the support distance is 3.4x the given distance, and that is what you’re seeing there.
For actually moving features outward, gaussian and linear do much more blurring than they do actual feature movement. This interpretation of the distance parameter is intended to roughly match the increase/decrease of perceptual “weight” when expanding feature masks. But it’s definitely not so good when expanding terrain features according to math. 
So. One way to get what you want is to set the expander to 1km / 3.4 = 294m to get the desired falloff distance.
A better way if you’re trying to add a constant slope to primitive shapes that you are creating is to use the Shapes device, which has falloff that is more along the lines of what you’re looking for. I’ve attached your example project updated below.
New Project Updated.tmd (25.9 KB)
Thanks! Really appreciate you explaining what’s going on under the hood.
