Terrain help?

[dgsantana]

Does anyone know a good way to make a terrain without using the Terrain Compound Object. I also tried using heighmaps and displace but its a bit dificult to extract a good DEM from isolines that came from AutoCAD.

[priad]

Dreamscape is the best!
You must make a compound object with terrrain but with edge just to have the different height, you extract a Zdepth from top view with scanline.
After on photoshop you blur this displace map then you put it in dreamscape where yopu can adjust it how you want.
a little bit complicated but very easy to make.
hope this can help you.

[dgsantana]

ok, i will try as soon as we buy dreamscape (it been on the whishlist a long time). I try all the steps except i didn't have dreamscape and use a quad patch with displace (edit mesh with detail areas didn't help either) that slow things down almost to an halt.

P.S. Does dreamscape work with net render (with no extra licenses)?

Thanks again Laurent,

Best regards
Daniel Santana

[Da_elf]

priad. actually here is a tip on that top view z-buffer thing. sure you can render it easily then in PS crop off the parts you dont need. however why not have your z-buffer image already setup for the mapping coordinates your already using. best method for that...texporter. i use it all the time

[priad]

hey Da_elf.
Dreamscape need just greyscale image and it's very easy to do like this. Do you use texporter map directly in dreamscape? I don't thing.
I just mean that with curves you just need a greyscale image to put it in dreamscape. Make a top view render is very fast without shading.
I think that it's a good way to make terrain.

[Da_elf]

ah. well actualy i just use it in a vray displacement rather than dreamscape. Helps alot when painting in photoshop

[priad]

Fine .

[dansimon]

hey there.

Da_elf, do u think u could explain in newbie terms what and how Zdepth/Zbuffer are and what they do in relation to this topic? like i said, im sort of new at this and dont really know whats going on all the time.

I face a same problem with my terrains. We have dreamscape and love the terrain tools but not sure how to get the best result.

and tips? (explain as if u explaining to a dumb ass )

[Da_elf]

if you had a z-depth of a previously modeled terrain which you prefered to use as a displacement rather than using the previously modeled terrain then you can get a top down z-depth view of the model to use as a displacement map

[jujubee]

Just came across this:

http://www.nikclark.com/scripts/pages/maketerrain.htm

haven't tried it out yet looks extremely useful tho...

[Tom B]

Why not use a geographic tool like wilbur or 3dem to convert to a mesh?

[samuel_bubat]

My personal favourite is Worldmachine. It´s a heigtmap generator
with realtime 3d preview. Actually you can only export a greyscale heightmap for displacement or a terragen file (wich could be converted to max readable geometry format).
I prefer this tool because it has by far the best errosion filter I have seen !!
http://www.world-machine.com/gallery.html
It´s cheap and you can download a free version for non-commercial use.
http://www.world-machine.com/download.html

cheers

ps. will be interresting to use with the tool jujubee mentioned.