Change terrain detail smoothly?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi,

I just want to know if there is any ‘best practice’ to get from low terrain resolution to high detail using Blender.
Lets say I want to zoom into the earth. So first I see the earth from deep space. Then I zoom in and I will see the continents, the countries, cities, a street, a house and so on.
How can I do that? If I start with a texture of the earth I don’t need to render the details that I need if I am close to a country or street.
So there must be a way that I start with a texture of the earth, then replace by texture from a continent, then replace by texture from country from street and the house and so on. But how can I switch from the different lower resultion textures to the higher resolution ones smoothly? So I want to have a nice zoom in effect without hard transisitions between the single textures. Hope it is clear what I want.

Thanks for any help

2

Hi :slight_smile:
You’ve got two options, one is you can keyframe the transition as the camera moves in, or two, you can use the camera’s distance from the object to cause the transition. Both are doable, the first option may be simpler but take longer for many images, the second one only requires setting up once and then works along with the cameras keyframes.

First Option:

help3.png1920×1011 194 KB


You pretty simply add in the images and then mix the first two images with a Colour Mix node, and keyframe the fac value over the point where you want the images to transfer, and then do the same for the next image’s mix node, and keep adding mix nodes as you need them.

Second Option:

Help1.png1920×1016 182 KB


So you input your textures as normal, then use a Camera Data node (found in Shift+A–>Input) and attach that to the fac value in a colour mix node. Then use the output of the mix node as the colour input for the Diffuse BSDF.

For the colour inputs for the mix node you want the image that’s going to be viewed from a distance in the lower input and the image it will transition to in the upper input. (This is because the distance starts off greater than one[so lower input] and decreases to 0 as you get close [so upper input]).

This will give you the desired effect, except it will only work within a distance of 1 Blender Unit(a teenie tiny distance). So to increase the distance of the transition you need to add a Math node (Shift+A–>Converter) and change the mode to Divide. Increase this to a value that suits your scene, you’ll notice as you increase it the image should start to transfer at greater distances.

The problem is now that it takes a long time to transition, to fix this, add a ColorRamp node(Shift+A–>Converter) and move the little checkpoints on the ramp to suit your scene.

Then to add consecutive images, it gets a little more complex. You just want to duplicate the ColorRamp node, and move the check points closer to the left to decrease the distance it applies the transition. And then add another Colour Mix node, so it should hopefully look like the image below :slight_smile:

help2.png1920×1018 184 KB

Hopefully I didn’t miss anything important, if I did, shout at me and I’ll clarify.
Otherwise I hope this was helpful :slight_smile:

3

Hi,

sorry for answering so lately.
This was what I needed, Thanks!