Hello everyone, first time posting. I’ve been digging around trying to get the strata to work properly. You can see the vertical faces of the strata got stretched pretty wildly. What should I do?
Node setup
@Dark_Sage Reducing strength doesn’t help? The “Terrace” node retains cliff faces but flattens plains, strata nodes creates smooth transitions in the whole terrain except drops or small cliffs. While working with heightmapping limitations, you have to plan ahead for these things. For example, planning your terrain shape, look, and geology, around strata formations within 20-60 degree slopes.
Crank “smoothness”, and reduce strength in the strata node. If that doesn’t help, you can try fixing the cliffs after strata simulation (destructive corrections like blur then adding back selective hardness).
@Dark_Sage An unsolicited suggestion though. Hydraulic Erosion after Thermal Weathering destroys talus simulation completely. I would suggest doing Erosion first, to your heart’s content, THEN do thermal weathering. Otherwise if you’re going for a specific look that requires doing things in reverse order, ignore this whole comment.
As an alternate tip: what I’ll usually do if I find myself needing to do hydraulic erosion after thermal erosion, but want to preserve the talus buildup, is plug the talus mask into the hardness mask of the hydraulic erosion and bump the rock hardness up to its maximum. If you have specific rock hardness settings that the rest of the terrain needs to be at, a Constant device can be set to the level you need the rest of the terrain at, feed that and the talus mask into a Combiner set to add, and you should be all set. If you’re already using a pretty customized hardness mask, same process still applies, you just want to make sure to have the talus area full white in the resulting hardness mask and the rock hardness set to maximum (or pretty near to it).
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Good tips @WFab @blattacker, much thanks. I will look into you guys’ suggestions, and maybe I will come up with something better all together.
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What I identify as “vertical stretching” in your example render seems to be a consequence of straight drop-offs and can crop up with many other nodes and effects. I would try to create a mask selecting areas closest to 90° (some kind of high-pass followed by a “V” curve to turn the high/low values to white and 50% (gray) values to black). Then I’d blend in a tiny amount of noise or blurring to breakup or soften the cliffs’ fall-off.
I’ll try to come up with an example in a bit if that isn’t a good enough description.
@davidroberson Yes it seems to be one of the common limitation with height map generation. An example for your solution would be very nice 
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