The New Terrain Wizard

[aaver]

Hi,

 

A very loooong time ago I decided to make some really cool water plugins for A:M, but for a number of reasons I haven't been able to get started. Now I think I have some time to spare, though.

However, as I understand it, the v12 SDK will include some new functions that will be very useful for my water plugins and if I have waited this long, I think I can wait yet another month or two.

 

In the meantime I'd like to program something else and I thought of a new Terrain Wizard.

 

Is this a good idea or is the old one good enough?

 

If you think it's a good idea, then what features do you want it to have? Don't let reality stop you Maybe your particular feature is impossible to program, but we don't know that yet, do we?

[pixelmech]

I would love a terrain wizard. I know there is some world builder app somewhere that does it, but I don't remember where I saw it. But I would like something that works well with AM, I would think I'm not the only one

[KenH]

Yes!! Please improve the terrain wizard! I'm sure it and the water wizard would be very helpful in the forth coming movie project.

 

Some features....um.....Mr Prince would know this best. But I'd like to see improved painting capabilities. For example a "mountain button" that creates a mountain rather than having to paint the different colours.

 

And just generally an improved look. Also, if you can make the paint area larger, it would make things easier. And a variable size brush. And maybe a brush that dynamically lowers or raises the land.

 

OK, I'll stop there.

[robcat2075]

By Terrain Wizard do you mean the mesh generator, the texture generator or both?

[aaver]

By Terrain Wizard do you mean the mesh generator, the texture generator or both?

I mean a wizard that creates realistically looking terrain of any shape color and content. There may be lakes, mountains, rivers, forests, snow, ice, rocks and maybe even man made objects like roads, bridges and buildings.

 

Of course it won't contain all of this - at least not in the beginning - but what you want most and what is possible (i.e. not too difficult) to program.

[Paul Forwood]

Anders

 

I think that there are alot of people here who would be very happy to see a new, improved terrain generator. Off the top of my head here are a few things that I think would be very useful in a terrain plugin. (I don't know how practical these suggestions are but they are just to stimulate thought.) :

 

1) Realtime visual feedback of a terrain sample.

2) Image mapping.

3) Particles to generate small stones, etc.

4) Real geography texturing, such as strataphied cliffs, landslide texturing, rock formations.

 

I suppose the greatest improvement for me would be to speed up the generation of believable errosion textures, the bump mapping.

 

Good luck with this, Anders.

[pixelmech]

Point #1 there is huge BTW - a must have.

[ZachBG]

A Mac version.

[binder3d]

Great! Id love to see the terrain plug in. And the water plug in would be so great to have and probably even better then the terrain!

[KenH]

Another thing I thought of would be to use those maps of actual real places you can get on the web. Not sure what they're called though.

 

Oh yes! .DEM images/maps.

[robcat2075]

By Terrain Wizard do you mean the mesh generator, the texture generator or both?

I mean a wizard that creates realistically looking terrain of any shape color and content.

That would be "both" mesh and texture then.

 

Well, how about something like terraGen that worked natively in A:M? With that much functionality we could add our own bridges and add forests with A:M Hair.

 

I presume the textures would be procedural.

 

i bet a lot more could be done with the ToonNation Landscaper material than is being done now, but I haven't seen many examples of it in use.

[pixelmech]

terraGen was the one I could not think of - thats a pretty nice app. To have that inside AM would be sweet.

[aaver]

Terragen!?

Well, that would be every imaginable feature request in one, I guess.

Are there some features that you'd like more or are everything in Terragen just as important?

 

Also one reservation. If there are only five or six A:M users showing an interest in this, I guess I'd have to think of something else to program. I'll give it a week.

[seven]

Terrain wizard - sure nice!

But how much realism? Will it perhaps function as in a Cad-program?

You can import the real terrain... That would be nice...

Or it is just phantasie? That would be nice too.

having both it would be the nicest...

 

Terrain... that is needed

But there has to be growing something.... in the terrain

 

I have been looking at the TreeZ plugin for trees a bit

Sure it can do somethings - but the branches are a bit fat...

And it is not very versatile.... you cannot really build realistic trees of different spicies

And it often crashes...

So I would like to see something done for making trees - flowers - vegetables...

 

I believe many of us live in cities - most of us - and the sceneray for A:M animations

often can be streets - street corners - and there is not much terrain to see mostly...

But still some trees are left in the cities and some flowers are flowering....

adding some realism... and there are parks...

 

Or if you will make an indoor sceen some green leaves are nice to plant in the window sills or on the office floors... so the office slaves can do their jobs a little faster... more content...

 

Many of the users of A:M are doing some space scenaries, mars-people...

Yes that is fascinating... and a little boyish to me... and not....

There are some terrain in space... but perhaps also some lliving organisms...

and trees - plants - perhaps there are to be found - in space too...

 

I want to see - both terrain and plants plugins - but I believe the plant one is most useful... so my suggestion is that you begin with the plant one...

Or just doing some small things on a plant plugin - to get something a little more useful for doing the plants

[KenH]

Trees would probably be handled with hair. We could have a library of different types of trees that are plugged into the hair system.

 

I'd also like to see detail being calculated depending on how far away it is from the camera.

Also...what about auto horizon haze! That would be cool if it's possible.

[trajcedrv]

Six or seven users?!?

 

Hey I expect to be many many more... I do need this wizard!

 

No mater what the outcome would be, thank you for your idea and for the time that you'll invest (or plan to invest) in this thing...

 

If Brian rince would donate his materials to this project... I shudder to think what lovely renders will start comming...

 

 

Drvarceto

[modernhorse]

Just saw this post - put me down for one. Thanks for the initiative Aaver.

 

Doug

[pixmite]

I too would be very interested in a tool to help me with the development of terrain so that I can focus my attention on other aspects of my animations.

 

Pixmite

[Kamikaze]

Me Too,

 

Great idea to update the TW...

 

Michael

[frankH]

It would realy be wonderful to have a good Terrain Wizard.

[Guest RemoteViewer]

*Deleted*

[steve392]

This would be a very welcome addition to AM ,I would love to see this happen

[ddavis]

Updating the Terrain Wizard plugin would be a great idea.

I'm not a programmer so I don't know what is feasible (perhaps terrain with roads or rivers). But as Emilio pointed out with his Sweeper plugin I would gladly pay the cost of a few beers for such a valuable plugin.

Thanks for asking Aaver.

[Rodney]

The Terrain wizard has been an incredibly useful tool for A:M users.

An upgraded Terrain wizard would be even more useful.

 

This is quite an undertaking to be sure.

Congrats to Aaver for the effort!

[mediaho]

Great idea. I'd be interested. It would be cool if it could import USGS topo maps.

[jpappas]

I think an updated terrain wizard is a great idea, I'm definately interested!

 

How about an option where the wizard creates a user defined number of preset groups on the generated terrain model solely based on altitude?

 

That would allow us to simply select a group representing an altitude and assign appropriate materials/decals. I'm thinking this would make it much easier to create snow capped mountain peaks on the highest altitudes for example, or give the lowest altitude group a water material for ponds, etc...

[Flog]

please let it be an interactive plugin. I don't want to have to load a .DEM file, I'd rather just paint it or something.

 

Bryce, Vue style painting it, raising levels, or a magnet, but with other options like erosion or something, plateau, something like that

but definately a needed tool.

 

 

You also put this under General in the forum, hence not as many will see this post. I wouldn't have unless someone put it in the A:M forum at the top.

 

Thank goodness and I hope to see that plugin and the water one

 

If you can a rock generator on it would be nice.

 

[entity]

YESSSS!!

I've been trying to model some islands, but the water is static, the islands lacked detail so I am forced to do only birds eye views, with no flyby. And I tried to make them big with detail the largest that the plug-in could manage (memory-wise) on my system was a 900x900 grid of geometry. I tried displacement... don't even talk about long render times!!! It was so memory expensive I gave up... I was thinking of using photos and stock images and matte painting things without being able to move through or flyby the scene.

PLEASE!!! I NEED A BETTER TERRAIN ALTERNATIVE.

[KenH]

Aaver: If you're going ahead with this, you might consult Hash. The script for the movie demands alot of landscaping. They may be doing something already or they might have a shopping list of things if they're not. Just a thought.

[Drakkheim]

Creating the terrain mesh itself Is usually not a problem, magnet mode and go to town and you can do non function based terrain as well..

 

What would be great would be an easier way to texture it.

I'd kill for a shader/material/wizard that applies materials to the surface based on the angle of the patch from horizontal & by elevation etc etc... and then just apply the whole shebang to a group.

 

The ability to easily apply the cliff texture to the steeply vertical surfaces, grass material to the low elevation flat areas and snow to the high elevation flat areas, and have the transition between those materials be soft would be truely killer. IMHO.

 

-simon

[Octropos]

Sorry if this has already been mentioned, but

in addition to building geometry, a set of Slope and Position (Y axis at least) aware Combiners would be super helpful in texturing these.

[mtpeak2]

You can count another me too.

[Zaryin]

I started off in Bryce and have to say I miss the ease of terrain building in that. If you can build it I will use it.

 

To quote Ben Stiller in that movie Starsky and Hutch, "Do it!"

[rupert]

I'm very new to A:M, but I'd love a terrain plugin. I've been using Anim8or (free but limited in some areas), which was cool to learn 3D and decide to go 3D, which has a plugin called Terranim8or (also free). I've also used Teragen.

 

I was going to do a short in Anim8or while I learn AM, but have decided to learn AM, which means I have some terrain problems to work out, including some road animation. I've seen a few examples of AM work that have nice fly overs and I think I can eventually get much better results out of AM than I was going to with Anim8or, but I have no idea how to go about generating terrain here. Guess I should work this out in another thread, but..

 

I'd love a terrain plug-in.

[robcat2075]

Terragen!?

Well, that would be every imaginable feature request in one, I guess.

Are there some features that you'd like more or are everything in Terragen just as important?

Since we can already import TerraGen meshes, the part I 'd like to see in A:M is the texturing power. Some further advance beyond the ToonNation Landscaper plugin to get more realistic detail of the terrain coloring.

 

The Water and Sky part would be separate plugins, not necessarily part of the terrain plugin.

 

I know it's big order... but you asked.

[rusty]

When I need terrain I usually think: I need 5 miles (or 100 yards or 300 feet) by .... so great feature for me would be entering values in miles, yards and feet and have it converted to the metric system (yes I do everthing to scale except city scapes, planets and stars LOL).

 

Another thing 'I' like is to say I want it this many patches by this many patches for resolution. And it would figure out how to devide it from the above specifications.

 

Beyond that I can't think of any 'new' features.

 

Rusty

[iocane]

Someone a rough glance through the previous post so I hope no one minds to much if my suggestion has already been suggested. I would like it to be possible to make a bitmap with like red in part of the image and green in another and just apply it to the landscape like a decal and for instead of the land turning red or green, the green areas have tree models applied and the red areas get grass. With it possible to pick patterns of how the trees, grass, or shrubs or applied, like clustered scattered. Pick ecologies like mountain meadows or jungle. I think this could make for a great landscape quickly and with some finishing touches by the modeler themselves it could be spetacular.

[HomeSlice]

Iit would be very nice to be able to generate the terrain within AM. My feature requests are 1. the ability to import IGES or DEM data. 2.the ability to add or subtract resolution interactively with a slider in real time :-) 3. the ability to add or subtract resolution to selected parts of the terrain model 4. a rock generator(ala Flog)

[aaver]

Great!

There is some interest in this, after all

 

Thanks for all the feature requests! but there is still place for more.

 

From some of the posts I got this feeling, though:

-Maybe it's better to make it really easy to use Terragen terrains in A:M?

What do you think?

Those of you who have already used Terragen + A:M. What is easy, what is hard, and what could be better?

 

 

..and please explain: What is a "rock generator"?

[Guest RemoteViewer]

*Deleted*

[aaver]

Since we can already import TerraGen meshes[...]

How is that done?

 

It wouldn't be to hard to make an A:M importer for Terragen Terrain files, but if there is one already...

I haven't heard of one, though

[Guest RemoteViewer]

*Deleted*

[aaver]

Terragen exports 3d mesh models in Lightwave, OBJ, and DXF formats.

I tried DXF, but I had to terminate A:M after half an hour. Does it normally take this long or was it just bad luck?

 

The polygon count on these models is very high so polygon reduction before import is usually a must.

The size of the terrain I tried to import was just 257x257 and I usually don't have any problems to manipulate that kind of model in real time in A:M.

 

But I think this would be the case even if you wrote a plugin that could load a Terragen landscape directly into A:M, so I believe writing a plugin to utilize Terragen's ability to generate mesh models would be redundant and not very useful.

If this is the general opinion, I guess I'll find something else to do

 

We can already create a bare landscape mesh with the A:M terrain wizard that is already available. How many ways do we need to be able to form hills and valleys?

Maybe it's only me, but I see a lot of difference between "a bare landscape mesh" from the A:M terrain wizard and Terragen. The terrain wizard produces filtered noise while Terragen produces moutains. And maybe it's even possible to improve the Terragen algorithms

 

Terragen's magic that sets it apart is the speed and quality of its texturing power.

You may be right, but you are not suggesting that I should write a plugin that makes A:M:s renderer faster, are you? Actually, I've made some tests and considering that Terragens renderer is optimized for rendering terrain and A:M is not, I don't see that much of a difference.

 

[...]If you wrote a plugin that could mix and match materials[...]

With the current SDK, it's not possible to write your own combiner plugins, though. It might be a work-around for that, however. It usually does

 

Thanks for your input!

 

It would be really interesting to know what everyone else think about this.

[KenH]

I don't use landscape software much, but I didn't like Terragen. It seemed pretty disjointed to me and the results weren't anything great. I didn't use it long though.

 

I was thinking that the new "polygon modifier" for simcloth might be useful for reducing the resources used by landscape. Especially for trees and things in the distance. Maybe not.

 

OK, Here's my dream landscape generator.....

 

Hmmm....I want a mountain here on this mesh. So, I'll just go over here and get my mountain tool. Place my cursor on the mesh and the mountain grows when I press down the left mouse button. How about a lake....just go over to my lake button...and the mesh goes down.(You can let the software decide the shape or paint it out)

I want to add abit more land on this side, so I'll just get my "Excavator tool" and build some more flat mesh.

Trees....tree tool etc etc

Colouring it I can choose my material from a library and select the patch row(height?) I want the material to start and stop. The software would then automatically create a random uneven blend with any other materials.

 

A tool to push/pull the landscape.

A tool to add density to the mesh (or part of) so you can add more detail in a small portion of the mesh.

 

Golly I could go on even more!

 

PS If you don't get some more opinions, you might continue this discussion in the AM forum.

[Guest RemoteViewer]

*Deleted*

[aaver]

aaver  Posted on May 8 2005, 04:26 PM

Thanks for your input!

Well, I am definitely not trying to hog the show or to annoy you Aaver so this will be my last post to you.

This is strange. What gave you the impression that I was annoyed? When I thank you for your input, I actually mean that I'm grateful. English is not my native tongue so if I sound pissed off you shouldn't pay much attention to that

 

I just couldn't let so many misunderstandings go unanswered.

Could you please respond once more, because I don't appreciate which those misunderstandings are.

 

I tried DXF, but I had to terminate A:M after half an hour. Does it normally take this long or was it just bad luck?

As I said, the mesh you were trying to load was probably over 70,000 polygons or more. By reducing it down under 10,000 I can load a similar mesh in under a minute.

My initial tests show that it's possible to import that 70000 polygon mesh under a minute so I wonder if your Terragen-A:M pipeline is less than optimal. With displacement maps in A:M I think we will not need that many polygons, though. Also, if props could be textured like any other mesh in A:M, I think the problem would be solved.

 

If this is the general opinion, I guess I'll find something else to do

I hope you don't try to pin backing out on me Aaver! I was not trying to rain on your parade. You asked what would be useful and seemed to be interested in doing something needed without reinventing the wheel.

I really don't see why you think I'm annoyed. I'm simply stating the facts - me having much better things to do than making a tool no one will ever use.

 

Maybe it's only me, but I see a lot of difference between "a bare landscape mesh" from the A:M terrain wizard and Terragen. The terrain wizard produces filtered noise while Terragen produces moutains. And maybe it's even possible to improve the Terragen algorithms 

As I and others have said already, you can ALREADY IMPORT those very nice mountainous meshes from several programs (including Terragen) into A:M. So you see, I am simply saying that the bigger problem is being able to texture them convincingly.

Actually, I think you said that the meshes produced by the A:M Terrain Wizards was good enough.

 

You may be right, but you are not suggesting that I should write a plugin that makes A:M:s renderer faster, are you? Actually, I've made some tests and considering that Terragens renderer is optimized for rendering terrain and A:M is not, I don't see that much of a difference.

Now this one is really funny!

Now, are we laughing with me, at me or at someone else. I fail to see anything funny at all

 

Again Aaver, I felt like you were open to input. This is only my 4th and final post on this topic and I did not see anyone else breaking down the door to respond to you so I did not think you would mind. My mistake

Definitely not a mistake! I will not make a Terrain plugin unless more people take a more active part in this discussion - just like you do. Your mistake came a bit later

 

To sum up my position:

-Terragen produces much better terrain meshes than A:M Terrain Wizard.

-If there is a convenient way to import Terragen meshes into A:M, A:M doesn't need a new mesh generator.

-I haven't found this convenient way (doesn't mean that there isn't one, though)

-A:M needs a better way to texture terrain

-I have very thick skin and will most likely not take offence from something said on the Internet by someone I don't know. So just tell me what you think, in what way you like

[KenH]

I never got the impression you were annoyed! You had smilies anywhere it might seem so.

[jpappas]

Hi,

 

Just wanted to add a friendly reply and a question after reading your recap.

 

It looks like there are 8 people so far including myself who would love a wizard that makes realistically texturing a terrain easier. Suggestions include allowing variations of textures based on slope, height, among other things. So texturing seems to be a common request.

 

But there are also alot of people that want a new AM terrain wizard that can model terrains while providing realtime visual feedback, has easy buttons for quickly creating rocks (rock generator), quickly creating mountains, hills, lakes, etc... Your recap seems to suggest Terragen can handle these things and the only problem AM users run into is how to easily import the terrains. I've never used Terragen before so perhaps someone can answer if it really does have all these requested features?

 

-Jim

[aaver]

I never got the impression you were annoyed!    You had smilies anywhere it might seem so.

Then we are at least two

 

And you are probably right about continuing this discussion on the A:M forum.

On the other hand, those who really find interest in this, shouldn't have much of a problem finding the thread, should they?

I'll give it some days before I flood the A:M forum, though

[aaver]

Jim,

 

We are definitely on the same page. A:M could use a better way to texture terrains, but before I look into that, I'd like to make sure there is an effective way to get high quality terrain meshes in A:M.

 

One thing I thought of was to import Terragen meshes as Props and then use them as proxies. This way it shouldn't be too hard to composite A:M and Terragen clips together. One thing I'm not entirely sure of is whether Terragen uses some kind of displacement for their polygons. If it does, making stills this way might introduce some problems, but for animations it should still be something to consider.