How would you approach smoothing borders of lifted mesh? I thought of some solutions, but they’re all bad in various ways. Either too complicated or slow. Maybe some of you will enlighten me with more elegant solutions.
I’m hoping to use this even on uneven surfaces, like terrain, sphere etc.
test_smoothing set position.blend (3.3 MB)
Thanks! It’s one how to go about it, yes. Although it depends on even surface. If I want to have more uneven shapes, it would have to be handled a bit differently.
And even then, I’d like to make that transition even smoother, closer towards those tops. Without deforming bottoms too much. Any idea how to improve this?
That looks very good, but it also removes/distorts any details outside that desired area only below the tops.
I was trying to go for something like this (but I ended up over complicating it again 
), those blurs in circles are the most relevant options for morphing those slopes. But 0:0 seems to look the best, imo, if we want to keep those tops as sharp as possible. Otherwise 2:0 is also a good looking option.
test_smoothing set position.blend (4.3 MB)
What you want is erosion. You can set erosion simulations using simulation zones, or you can export your model into the free community version of Gaea and get professional erosion running on C code that will be much faster and much better results. Honestly, for complex terrain stuff, I’ve tried using Blender and I always end up using Gaea in the end. Blender is good at a lot of things- Gaea is great at one thing
Even if my inner blender-fan-boy 
is crying a this 
you are absolutely correct.
If one does not have the money for this one may also try something like that…
… there was/is also an image based version of the A.N.T. landscape addon…
but i wasn’t investigating this too much.
Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for! Now I understand how to work with weight and will try to experiment with them more in the future.
I was afraid it might perform worse than my complicated (but quite selective) approach, but your method is actually a bit faster in the end, so that’s another bonus.
What you want is erosion.
Yes and no. I actually already have and use Gaea pro edition and I’m happy with it, but this particular effort aims to give a final and also modular touch to what Gaea already exported.
I don’t want to be redoing my set up in Gaea just for subtle sediment changes (when adding/removing extra rocks in Blender). If it can be done in Blender on a fly, that’s gonna save me quite some time.
See below, Gaea created height map, rock map and in Blender, I additionally can also modify rock map further, expanding it’s boundaries increase or decrease sensitivity for rock mask and therefore changing quite drastically shape of rocks/mountains etc.
But if I do that comfortably in Blender, I wanted to have ability to add that extra sediment once everything’s in place.
In a nutshell, rock map selects are for rock formations, extracts mesh, creates volume → mesh, also lifts sediment area of original terrain and then merges both together with mesh boolean.
Before
After
This terrain generator is also pretty good. There’s lot of things to tweak and fiddle with. But the development is very slow and I don’t even recall, if it has any documentation beyond a few YT videos. It’s an interesting effort anyway and my 7900 XTX had a field day with this, thanks to ZLUDA.
But in the end, for all the reasons, I decided to go with Gaea 2 instead.
