Hi, maybe someone can help me… I want to create a cool looking realistic canyon in blender. I want to paint my own displacement map so it has a unique terrain.
So I painted my own displ. map 3000 x 3000 px and saved as .png (see above). I subdivided the plane 12x. I unwrapped plane and I did micro-poly node setup and settings in Blender 2.78 for micro-poly displacement as per a tutorial.
Problem: When I apply the displacement map to the plane it looks inferior. Anyone have ideas what I am doing wrong? Is the disp. map too small? Do I need the map to be larger like 5000x5000?
You have visible terminator artifacts, which is a sign you don’t have enough subdivisions. (if you had enough geo, but too low res of a height map, you get an overlay smooth terrain). You need A LOT of geometry to do full frame terrain like that. What does your base mesh look like, and how is your subdivision modifier set up? What are your geometry settings in the render settings panel? Can you post screenshots or a blend file.
As an added note, good terrain displacement usually isn’t just the painted or scanned heightmap. That gives the base form of your landscape, but for fine detail you usually want a procedural or tiled image texture. Or maybe several, blended by things like height or face angle, or another painted map defining terrain types. For example, sand in flat areas, snow on the tops of peaks, etc.
In general, a dicing setting of 2.0 is going to miss a lot of small detail that is captured with the dicing at 1.0 (really small details may require a setting of 0.75 with rapidly diminishing returns below that).
Though you will need a lot of memory if you’re using 2.79 official (it doesn’t have the falloff from master that can significantly reduce the requirement).
Thanks J. I agree. I wil post to show you the base mesh. In addition to the Sub Surf Modifier can I add a “Multiresolution” modifier or do these not work properly with Micro-Poly Displacement Maps.
Ok, I think i figured something out. The first map I painted, I painted the lower recesses (the blacks) at 1000 x 1000 px. I then scaled up the map and painted the lighter greys. When I saved the map at 3000 x 3000 px. I had painted the higher elevation while the image was 3000 x 3000 px. So the map saved with the black areas having a lower detailed area. When I repainted the blacks just now at 4000 x 4000 it smoothed out the black (lower) area. You can see the pixelated (lowpoly) mesh on the ground. Those are the areas of black I missed when repainting.
J_th_Ninja - “As an added note, good terrain displacement usually isn’t just the painted or scanned heightmap. That gives the base form of your landscape, but for fine detail you usually want a procedural or tiled image texture. Or maybe several, blended by things like height or face angle, or another painted map defining terrain types. For example, sand in flat areas, snow on the tops of peaks, etc.”
I am still curious how to create sand for example in low areas. A brief explanation would be great and is there a tutorial you know of that covers this.
