Creating a mask based on the slope/angle of a landscape

[hunter_williams]

Hello.

I'm trying to create a mask based on the slop/angle of a landscape to use in a blend material. Any ideas how I can achieve this in Maya?

[damaggio]

There are several nodes you can use to texture a terrain, the easiest one for slope would be the snow shader but you can create a more complex shader by adding the other layers like snow, erosion, flow line, low and high vegetation masks.

[hunter_williams]

Hey damaggio. I have been using World Creator and using the splatmaps for this kind of stuff but I want to do it within Maya itself.

What nodes would be good to use? The snow shader is one I have used before but any other suggestions would be very helpful.

[damaggio]

There are many different set ups with different nodes, depends on the landscape. Could you upload some of your tests?

[damaggio]

masks for the terrains

[hunter_williams]

Here is a basic scene with just the show node being used as a mask.

[damaggio]

Thanks for the file Hunter, you were asking how to achieve the slope but you have already done that by using the snow shader, what else are you trying to achieve? I don't know what this terrain is supposed to be. The other helpful nodes are VrayFall off, Triplanar, Dirt texture , ramps and projected ramps.

[hunter_williams]

Hey damaggio. I was just looking to see how those other nodes you mentioned would be used with the the snow node or in any other way.

[damaggio]

You can use a Vray Dirt to create the flow channels and control the height via a Vray Falloff or a projected ramp into the white color.
The bottom of the terrain can be controlled also with a projected ramp or a Vray Falloff in Local Y and set it to Distance Blend. the same goes for Snow caps, plug the Vray Falloff into Snow color white.
Also in the Snow>Effects you can enable a Color Remap ramp to create additional masks.
Remember that the Snow Depth Decay can go beyond 10 by typing a higher value.
Cliffs are better textured with a Triplanar node but also hill sides.
The important thing is to run a bunch of tests in IPR to see in realtime the results you can get and save some notes or images for the future.

[hunter_williams]

I'll give that a try. Thanks for the info!

[oglu]

Or you use Bifrost.

[hunter_williams]

Or you use Bifrost.

Unfortunately I have a deadline and don't know how to use Bifrost.