I would like to procedurally generate a terrain either by using shaders or geonodes.
Also the idea is to use real world scales … IE if you look closely to the right of the image there is a height scale that corresponds to a color, so if i measure the scale key (bottom left), I get a width of 21.25KM, and the heights remain consistent.
The reason to do this is that real world sizes are just easier to manage and blender is capable of managing this size as is the box I’m using. This would mean I could have real world sized objects and characters without messing around with scaling, compositing and whatnot.
The Image Texture node does have a color output and I’m hoping some one here knows how to use it better than I do or the dry description in the manual. The other benefit of doing it as a node group is that it would be a real time saver for any other topo map further down the line, and could help other users with archviz or previz.
Just to be clear I don’t want the image to texture anything, JUST drive the terrain hight and shape( to the mentioned size). I have a addon that will do the trees and shrub’s etc, it is quite efficient at doing high end trees and grass assets.
Thanks for any help and for reading
yeah thanks Kim
I have done this in the past the GIS addon is not bad but what I’m after is a geometry node set up that works in a similar way … where the slope and contour are derived from the colors in the elevation key and then used to drive the shape and height of the plain or cube.
Did you pull this from an OSM layer? do you have a way to turn the gradient into a dumb white to black image instead? that would make things easier. I’m not sure how to reverse-map the colored gradient to a value gradient.
I can not try it out because I have no pc till monday, but I would try to Sperate hsv and try using the hue value, it should give you a greyscale gradient (although maybe with an offset.
that is what i was hoping to get … I have attached this image(from you tube tutorial) to show how it might work… this example is, I think for a hit marker in games (only guessing). My thoughts were that this would be quite simple… sample an the RGB values and displace the points in the mesh from the difference between the green and red values. I also naively thought this would help with texturing. I’m wondering now if this is a massive undertaking for a small gain…
Why exactly … ? I mean if the only way a displacement modification will create shape and height is through the difference in values from black to white then i could just turn the current image to grayscale and be on the way, as I’ve mentioned I thought this would be trivial to a person skilled in the arts of the goenode lol
The different color representations of height are not a linear spread and if the intent is to have and accurate to scale map output the curves would need to be sampled/ set individually. The other issue becomes the overlays of road maps etc…
From what i understand the image texture node does output color …
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_nodes/texture/image.html
(sorry looks like you may have to copy the link)
I am wondering now if I may have thought this would be a nobrainer, but now i think it may be more effort than it’s worth…
My reasoning though was sound … real world data and real world scale, would mean an easier pipe line with regard to real camera’s and characters, objects and other assets. Also having a recognizable land feature in a shot would be cool …
late now will try some things in the morning …laters
Ahh… Got yah
I only really considered the very rural image I had… but thanks you have put that to bed … Just out of interest how did you displace the image in your example?
Also do I mark this post as solved ? @DNorman@Hadriscus@oo_1942 Thanks for your time Gents you’re all
which is more or less what i wanted, but like you say it’s not great and not a worthwhile work flow ? … Like what I had in mind was an approximation to a real location but working at scale like that is not as fun as i thought it would be, although the effect is nice and I don’t have to use the full 21km size 5km might be better to work with.
(see where the gixmo is … thats the camera and figure-- see second image)
Also the text and other features in the image as mentioned in your previous reply is pretty much a deal breaker. one other thing about this is that the plane is offset by a scale of 1 (z axis) so it might be a pain to animate or use animated objects relative to the plane. When i applied the scale all the displacement disappeared and the plane was flat. Might need a position node to keep the plane zero to world coordinates zero.
thanks a allot man
Not really. I had a silly idea that This would some how be easy and like mentioned in the first posts, a quicker way of getting stuff done … it’s not
I have just downloaded blosm and the last time I used osm was a few years ago(no geo nodes back then) so I’ll check it out.
What I had issue with was creating a terrain that was km’s wide on a plane that was at best 10m wide which is how the procedural terrain tutorials I had seen have made terrains.
I see how I get on with blosm
Thank you
