support more image formats: eg Tiff ( 8, 16 & 32bit ) - to aid in non POV Ray/Terragen workflows… ( unless someone has already developed some good techniques for integrating with 3ds max/maya )
The Erosion device
material hardness input: black (super soft/easily eroded ) -> white ( super hard/none/little erosion effect )
This could allow for an approximation of changes in ground consistency… for example an exposed section of rock is going to wear differently than loose soil…
an erosion hardness input is definitely a good idea; to be honest there’s really no good reason why it hasn’t been included yet. Lots of things to do and not so much time to do them in…
image formats are always handy; the two that I’d like to include quite a bit still is PNG and 16bit TIFF. However, there are many, many formats out there, and only a finite number of them make sense to implement.
There’s all manner of other improvements that could be made, and I definitely would like to ease the workflow when used with max/maya… very open to suggestions in that department.
The alternate erosion input sounds great. Not sure why it hasn’t been mentioned before! I honestly can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.
Tiff would definitely be a good format to support, and probably one of the last group to implement, including .png. Beyond that there are few really “standard” formats that would be of much use. Obviously we don’t want to be exporting to .jpg or anything.
Both of these sound like great improvements to me. 1.3 Stephen?
I don’t mean to spoil anything… But I think I mentioned an input for terrain hardness sometime during early WM98 or late WM95… (possibly in a personal chat with Stephen as I can’t find it in the yahoo group) It was put aside for a while, sinse it was seen it could be simulated easily with the newly created Chooser device (when did the Chooser appear?), and also didn’t make sense at the time because the Erosion device was very young.
After that I think the idea was never remembered again… Possibly an idea ahead of its time! I’m glad it has returned with new strength, because I probably would not have remembered it so soon!
Yeah! I’ve just been playing around withe the “more nice mountains” example file. The hardness mask really would come in handy! @Fil: You mentioned this during WM98? Then thanks to you too! :mrgreen: But: The hardness parameter exists only since WM1? (At least I can’t find it in my WM99)
My wish:
The key to toggle parameter inputs on or off shouldn’t be [~] or [´] anymore.
Both only work on american keyboards. You could take a letter key for this, they are the same everywhere.
I think this would be reasonable because a lot non english people are using WM and TG, especially french and german ones.
I’m quite sure of this. I remember - in DOS times - you only had to keep in mind, that [Z] and [Y] are swapped on american keyboards.
Eg. You want to quit and the program asked:
“Do you really want to quit? (Y/N)”
You had to press [Z] on german keyboards.
The rest worked fine.
But an F number would also be ok. That doesn’t make any difference to me.
This is a most excellent program for simulating erosion, and provides a good deal of utility for manipulating heightfields. The tools are good enough that I can readily make use of them, but also frustrating because they still can’t do what I would like them to do. I hope my frustration will ease when Terragen 2 comes out…
Suggestions:
For the 2D window, perhaps we could have a zoom function like we have in 3D, except with some indication of zoom level (e.g. 100%, 50%, etc.). That would be just swell.
For strata, try this: take a 3D Perlin noise generator, squash it in the z axis (multiply by a scalar), and then tilt it in arbitrary (3D) directions to create tilted strata. Let the user choose colors and hardnesses corresponding to the value of the Perlin noise. Color and hardness can then be calculated for arbitrary coordinates in 3-space (such as where the heightfield intersects 3-space.) Let the erosion algorithm see the variations in hardness and respond accordingly–kinda makes the terrace node seem less useful!
If you’re going to have tilted strata, you’re going to want different colors for the strata, and that means you’re going to need to either 1) keep track of color as a different layer that you can bake out to a bitmap, or 2) keep track of your coordinates and make your Perlin noise identical with other software that does texturing in arbitrary detail, like Terragen 2, so that the color can be recreated there. If you merely bake out a bitmap for color or hardness properties, it may only be useful as a way to key the texture in Terragen 2, and Terragen 2 would have to have a keying system (I’ll bet it will, but whether it will be usuable…).
Baking out a bitmap has a certain advantage, though. I’m not certain exactly how the erode algorithm works, but based on working with it several hours now it looks like it may be possible to keep track of the colors of the strata as they move down the slope. At the very least it should be possible to mix the colors as they encounter other sediment, though that may not achieve a realistic look. It would be very cool to have talus slopes of different color depending upon what strata they originated from.
I have some ideas for erosion algorithms that might work better, but I have the nagging suspicion they would drive a fast computer to a grinding halt. I don’t suppose there’s an interface I can use to write erosion routines using C++ or Java?
I have long wanted a zoom feature for the 2D map, plus an easier way to scroll. I would strongly favor Photoshop-like controls where holding Spacebar and click-dragging pans/scrolls the map, holding Ctrl and clicking zooms in an Alt-click zooms out. Right-click gives you a menu of specific options such as zoom percentages, “fit to screen”, etc.
As for the rest, it sounds a lot like trying to take WM further into the realm of texturing. Something that seems potentially useful, but that I think would really need to be worked on a lot to do properly. WM currently is not a texture generator. You can really only output terrains (heightfields) and masks, both of which are black and white. You can already output masks, so if that’s what you are aiming for, some changes to that existing system might do the trick. But with your talk of colors it sounds like you actually want to do texturing in WM and that’s something I’m just not sure is really appropriate. WM just doesn’t handle color (right now at least), and making it do so - while it might not be a big deal in a technical/coding sense - would probably just cause even more confusion in the already complex UI. Some people would “get” and love it, others would just get quickly lost.
I see WM’s main use, aside from heightfields, to be in making masks for other programs to exercise their texturing strengths in. A mask that simulated the diffusion and transport of strata “colors” might be cool and I’m curious if such a thing would be possible with the existing system…
trying to take WM further into the realm of texturing
Taking it closer, anyway. Any color properties created in a strictly heightfield editor would only be useful in a later, texturing phase. The interface between the two seems a little awkward, as I indicated. Either you have identical noise and transformations in the heightfield editor and texturing engine or you bake out bitmaps and then find a way to use that bitmap to key textures.
I’m not wanting to do texturing in the strictly heightfield editing environment of W-M, but rather do something that properly belongs in the realm of heightfield editing. Erosion is a heightfield operation because it must be done uniformly to an entire surface. (Already I can think of exceptions to this, but nevermind.) Erosion also typically happens in strata of different hardness, and often in tilted strata. It just makes sense to eventually create the ability to do this within a heightfield editor, and the color bit was just a suggestion as to how a texturing engine would be able to sync with the output for a more photo-realistic result in the final render.
Yeah, you can actually already do tilted strata (in the Help section should be an older tutorial on it), and then erode that of course. Trying to simulate each layer having different hardness attributes is actually asking for WM to account for truly “volumetric” terrain, rather than just a 2D heightfield which is what it works with now. So it would be a very significant upgrade. But it would be cool, I agree.
