Exporting terrains

Oso3D

Been playing around with terrains lately, and attempted to do a texture export.

The result a) has weird scalines that look awful, and b) doesn't really follow the pattern it originally had.

Help?

 

Philemo_Carrara

Terrain shaders are procedurals that work in 3D. They are very difficult to export to 2D as terrain UV mapping is planar. The steeper the slope, the worst it looks afer export.

Philemo_Carrara

And, BTW, if you use obj export, texture export is buggy to say the least. Baker may give you a better result

WendyLuvsCatz

I use inagoni baker but before I just rendered a top view as the diffuse and you can do a normal pass too

Oso3D

Top view, that's a thought, thanks!

 

Diomede

You might also be interested in this Cripeman tutorial, even though it is about a workflow from Bryce to Carrara.  The info on transferring texture maps might still be useful.

Oso3D

I'm trying to do a top view, I have distant light pointing straight down... but there's shadows. All other lighting seems to be off. ???

Edit:

And after sweating on it for an hour and finally posting, of course 5 seconds later I find a solution (shut light off, use ambient)

 

WendyLuvsCatz

timmins.william said:

I'm trying to do a top view, I have distant light pointing straight down... but there's shadows. All other lighting seems to be off. ???

Edit:

And after sweating on it for an hour and finally posting, of course 5 seconds later I find a solution (shut light off, use ambient)

 

I should have said that and isometric camera fiddling with settings for a true flat render

Oso3D

Still looks awful when applied. Hrmph.

Edit: Although this is all waaaay easier in 3DL with Daz Studio, so there's that.

Dartanbeck

timmins.william said:

I'm trying to do a top view, I have distant light pointing straight down... but there's shadows. All other lighting seems to be off. ???

Edit:

And after sweating on it for an hour and finally posting, of course 5 seconds later I find a solution (shut light off, use ambient)

 

You might get more control by using your lights and turning off shadows in the render room.

Dartanbeck

You might also try adjusting the Quality of the terrain in the Terrain Editor to get the mesh more accurate. It's hard to tell what your issues are by text alone. Screen shots always help resolve these things SO much more quickly and accurately ;)

MarkIsSleepy

Here's an example of a quickly made Carrara terrain in DS.  I upped the quality of the terrain to 2K (see dart's post above) and exported it as an OBJ.  Attached is the procedural texture converted to an image using the export options - you can see it doesn't look great.  Also attached is the texture baked out using Inagoni's Baker at 4K and two 3DL renders of the imported OBJ in DS using the baker map.  The baking process took about 2-3 minutes on my creaky old laptop but creating the terrain only took about 30 seconds and the export from Carrara/import to DS part took much less than that.

If you took the baked image map into a photo editing program you could make the green parts white and the rock parts black (or the reverse) and use it with HowieFarkes Ultrascatter to place extra grass/plant/tree geometry on the grass and loose stones on the rock and I think it would look pretty fantastic in short order.

Dartanbeck

MDO2010 said:

 Attached is the procedural texture converted to an image using the export options - you can see it doesn't look great.  Also attached is the texture baked out using Inagoni's Baker at 4K and two 3DL renders of the imported OBJ in DS using the baker map. 

Right. The reason for the huge difference is that Baker knows where the terrain shader is placing the various portions of that layer list onto the actual mesh. Baker rocks that way and can also create normal maps if I remember correctly, which I believe will also take any bump/displacement of the shader system into account as well. I could be wrong about displacement. 

Very nice demonstration, MDO2010!!!