Stupid Shader Tricks 3: DCG's Terrain Tools
MarkBremmer
Posts: 190
Vue has a pretty cool little feature where you can make plants grown close to other objects or thin out in shady areas.
If you have Digital Carver's Guild Terrain Tools, you can do the same thing in Carrara with the Intersect Shader feature and the Surface Replicator.
The uses are pretty vast, dropping fruit under trees, adding garbage next to buildings, gathering crowds around objects, etc. The nice thing is, you can also hide the object that creates the intersection – so having people all gather like a crowd around a podium means you could simply drop a cylinder into the scene, designate it as one of the intersect objects, then un-check the visibility and magically, a gathered crowd.
The best part? You can move any of the objects around and simply click "shuffle" in the Surface Replicator and everything reorients to the new location
Pretty fun.
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Comments
Awesome stuff Mark!
I need to do a render soon which will have a beach fairly close to the viewer with small surf and am in two minds as to whether I should just texture the waves by hand and model the greenback parts or get this plug in.
Unfortunately the evaluation copy times out after one spot render ..... so I can't really tell whether it will do the job for what I want .
Advice welcome ;)
I purchased a license for the plugin back in march, for a project I was going to do, but never started the project lol.
I need to install and have a play.
@headwax, I've had nice results using Terrain Tools for up-close surf images. (calm surf that is)
There are some really cool ways to blend photo or procedural textures together. I'll see if I can dig one up.
One thing to note, the surf effect using the intersect function, is ubiquitous. By that I mean that it circles the intersected object 100% so effects like wind or directional waves do not have more surf on one side than another.
I'm not sure I understand which object exactly you choose to intersect. Just like your first pic, I have clumps of grass in a surface replicator. I would like them to be gathered around the tree. So I guess I would have to make the grass clumps intersect with the tree. But where exactly, in the shader tree, do I use the "Intersect" function from DCG?
@ headwax, I quick made a sample during a coffee break. I don' know if this is the type of look you have in mind.
@ Argus1000, in the Surface Replicator interface, you'll need to check the "Use Shader" option and then build the intersect similar to the image I posted earlier in this thread.
Some great uses for this plugin, I am very tempted!
thanks Mark, that looks superb, appreciate you doing that!
I like to support Carrara plugin makers as much as possible, so normally I just would have bought it but the cost at the moment is 42 aus dollars - I didn't know our dollar was so low!
thanks again !
cheers
thanks Mark, that looks superb, appreciate you doing that!
I like to support Carrara plugin makers as much as possible, so normally I just would have bought it but the cost at the moment is 42 aus dollars - I didn't know our dollar was so low!
thanks again !
cheers
I don't ever remember them going on sale - but perhaps now would be a good time!
Looking at the ocean intersecting with the shore line and generating a foam look, I wonder how it would work in conjunction with the Ocean primitive and other procedural functions such as the elevation/snow?
@ Evilproducer, You'd have to animate both the ocean primitive and the Surf noise configuration. There is a DCG item called EnhanceC which has animatable water effects. That said, you can also animate cellular noise functions too with the seed. It would take a little play time to get things right I think since Carrara doesn't actually have a fluid solver.
The snow primitive is very cool. The Terrain shader is even better. If you haven't played with the Terrain Shader, and can't sleep tonight, play with the shader. It's absolutely awesome. Changing snow across a terrain and making it stick to one side of an object but not another is completely possible. Apologies if you don't get any sleep tonight. :D
The attached image is just me playing around instead of going to bed, which is where I'm going now.
now that's very 'cool' Mark ;)
Okay. I made a distribution map and the grass clumps now cluster around the tree. By the way, it's thanks to your tutorials on Carrara 7 that I learned how to make that map. But I still don't have the grass clumps intersect with the tree. I just don't know how to apply that function. Is it to the grass clusters? And, if so, in what place exactly in the shader tree?
@ Argus1000, Thanks for the props on the C7 tutorial! Much of Carrara is still the same as in v7 - it's just faster now.
I suspect that you still have a distance setting greater than .1 or 0 in the "Minimum distance between objects and/or the Objects try to cluster > "Average distance between objects" in the Replicator. Adjust those and also experiment with the distribution precision settings. You may want to also expand the range of the intersect effect to something like 8 ft/3m or something just to see how it effects the scene. It's always a process of adjustment.
As an aside for organic objects, it's also a good idea to set the random rotation of the replicated objects to 360 degrees on the Z axis to hide the fact that there are many of the same thing. I'll usually put in 4 or 5 objects to further break things up.
**Additionally, for any given object you have multiple surface replicators applied to it, each with a different distribution map.
When I was doing Beta testing with the replicators for the Carrara team in 2006, the below attached image is one of the landscapes done with distribution map tricks. The terrain had 3 replicators attached to it: one for the trees and two for the vegetation.
Thanks, Mark, fort the precious tips. What I was asking you, more precisely, is where exactly do you use the intersect function in the shader tree? Here's the shader tree for my glass clumps.
@ Argus1000, Ah, got it now.
Scroll up to the very top post in this thread and look at the interface screen grab. For the Distribution map, you use the Intersect function within a Mixer branch/node as the blender. You blend a white color (things replicate where there is white) and a black color. The Noise ability is to create better organic blending between the two colors which results in an irregular edge/termination for the placed objects.
I suspect that there is some confusion here - you are using the intersection of the tree with the ground to produce the distribution map for the grass clumps.
Mark - lovely image! I always think that this type of landscape image is woefully under-represented in Carrara, and yet it is very capable of producing them.
I am very confused here. I have been able to produce a cluster of grass clumps around a tree using a black-and-white distribution map made with the paint tool. (See pic) But I knew how to do that before. I didn't have to use Digital Carvers Guild Intersect plugin to do that.