Gaea Tutorial: Shaper Node

hello everyone and welcome to another tutorial so I've gotten some recent complaints about the scaling in the node graph here that people can't read the nodes that I'm using because it's either too tiny or blurry I've changed some recording settings here I changed the resolution of my monitor have an ultra-wide monitor so I just changed the resolution to 1920 by 1080 and that's what I'm recording in and I also increased the the yeah the outputs when I'm building it out to a much higher quality so let's see how that works just let me know in the comments and I'm just gonna make a quick video just so we can test these new settings as well as just talk about something else the Gaia so I'm going to delete all these and let's throw in some other things here that I really like playing around with and believe it or not it's actually the gradient right here and I've played with the gradients in the past couple times but you can make some really cool things with them like cliff faces and stuff like that things that are really hard to make in a top-down height map or yeah like a height map program like Gaia but you can make the cliffs in Gaia and then export your landscape from Gaia to a different program like Mudbox or ZBrush or whatever it is that is available out there now maybe blender and you can carve out your your cliffs in greater detail but you can make them here but using this but that's just one example we're not going to do that today what I want to do is I just want to show you guys what the shaper note does so let's go ahead and add two of these gradients and we're gonna combine them but before we do that we've got to change the direction of this one so we've got to change this to 180 so now that they are complete opposites of each other and let's go ahead and combine them and I can't remember which combine method it is but I think it's screen yeah and then you got to increase the ratio all the way and then throw in an invert now make a little u-shape that's cool all right so that's what kind of like what we want then on the invert node go ahead and hit the level button and that will just auto level it so now we have this u-shape you can make a lot of cool stuff with this I've made quite a few things that I quite liked when using this shape but now I want to throw in the shaper node so let's go ahead and throw in shaper and we'll show you what it does so by default it doesn't really do anything because we haven't changed anything here it's at a zero percent here so it's not increasing or decreasing on either side but I like using this u-shape to show it off because if you use it on a landscape with a lot of features it's just a little bit harder to see what it's actually doing but if we use this shape it's easier to see it so let's go ahead and decrease the shaper note all the way you can kind of see how it's pushing in the edges down here it's making a really sharp peak and then it does the exact opposite all the way on the other side it makes it more like this rounded square shape so that's you can kind of see how this can come in handy when you have to kind of reshape your landscape to bring in Peaks may be dependent on height you can make your Peaks really spiky you can turn on the local effect and you can kind of see what that does there you can maintain the fine details if you have some mind fine details you need to maintain so that's pretty nice there as well you can increase and decrease the local effect to kind of fill in everything that's kind of like more of our base object that we had you increase that now we have like these little beveled edges over here the detail size that depends on how much detail you have here we don't really have anything so we have to worry about that so that's kind of like what the the shaper does and let's put it into a more practical sense let's use mountain and we're just gonna plug this right into shaper right delete all this we don't need those anymore but please play around the gradients the gradients are very highly underutilized and I they are really nice you can get a lot of cool stuff with them all right so we're gonna go through the seeds here till you find really okay that's what we're looking for really I was gonna say I really peak looking shape and now if we apply shaper it's more of this Mesa looking shape and if we were to decrease it now we have a really sharp peak and get some really interesting shapes using this and let's go ahead and enable the local effect you can see what we're getting there and if you were to think of a Mesa in this sense you can get some really interesting shapes this is more like a little nipple or something let's take off the local effect and let's increase it all the way no maybe not all the way we want to maintain some other details in the actual shape up here so if we check maintain fine details you can see what that's doing for us just maintaining some of those details and we're just gonna decrease this until we get maybe something more like that where we have some details on the top and on the sides and let's add terrace and terrorist's just does exactly what Tara says it does it just adds these terraces and I like using the residual Terrace option because it puts in these terraces broken up by noise and it's not being applied everywhere it gives it more of a random effect and you can just change the seat of that around until you find what you like we can do a soft fall-off so instead of having a nice hard fall-off in between the terraces we have more of a soft fall-off and we can also reprocess those if we so choose there we go but I think I'm gonna keep this default these default settings just checking these and then changing it to reprocess and I'm gonna fill it in with a stratify and you might say well that's kind of redundant you have these terraces and now that's stratify but what stratify does is we have our terraces made right here and then stratify actually stratifies the actual noise inside the terraces so it's just not adding more steps I'm just gonna increase the substrata just to kind of give it a more soft tone like that and then I'm also gonna just decrease the strength by about half from the original value maybe even a little bit more there we go so that way we just kind of add a little more stratification everywhere and you can call that good I was also asked to do more desert scenes so this could be your first basic Mesa if you wanted we can I will get into a more advanced stuff later down the road I like to start with basics so people who are first learning the program or first find it can kind of understand the basics of what we're doing and then they can kind of play into more intermediate and advanced things so I like it start out with a lot of basic stuff first alright and then as usual we're gonna put in some breaker here breaker will give us some nice awesome cracks in our landscape and we're not gonna get a whole lot with the default values which is what I usually keep because I don't necessarily want to completely break up the entire landscape the way I that the way that it's like intended to do so we're gonna need to throw in a little bit more than what we get from default so I'm just gonna go ahead and increase the duration just a tad bit it doesn't have to be a whole lot and I'm it's probably repair gonna have to add more than one time here but that yeah we're probably gonna have to add something more like maybe 220 yeah there we go that's starting to look a little bit more like what we want let's do it one more time for 40 okay that's that's looking pretty good this crack right here is a little bit too much can't really help that in some cases but you can kind of see the overall shape or starting to get with breaker and with breaker being used we're gonna go ahead and increase the resolution to 1k because we want to see how the higher resolution breaker node is going to look on our landscape with such a high duration I guess it's not like a extremely high duration but higher than default and as any of you guys may know a lot of the nodes inside of Gaia or any of really any of these node based programs are all dependent on resolution so what might look good at point 5k might not look good at 1k and as you can see here the resolution increase not only does the stratify come in a lot more but so does the breaker so at 1k I think we have too much of this breaker going on so let's go ahead and decrease that by half again and we'll see what it looks like at 220 instead of 420 or 440 I like some of the smaller details we're gonna get from that stratify looks pretty good so I think 220 is gonna be good the stratify node that we have on there's gonna be fine because we're actually going to erode this train even more so let's go ahead and add some more erosion and I like to use fold but in this case we don't really have to use fold there's not a whole lot of terrain folding that occurs like on maces or these like Plateau kind of areas so we're gonna go ahead and just add straight up erosion and we might play around the default settings a bit depending on what we get and I think we're gonna have to because it we kind of lost a lot of the detail that we wanted inside of our like little Mesa that we're making and there's a very basic Mesa it's not by any means the most exceptional one but again and like I said I just this is more of a basic tutorial for those who are just starting out so let's go ahead and decrease the duration of the erosion so it doesn't last as long and therefore we still get erosion but we don't lose a lot of our details and if that's not gonna be enough for us which it looks like it's going to be but we still have a lot of stratification down here that we want to get rid of so this was before we added the erosion and this is after so I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and increase the erosion duration to four again but in decrease the rock softness so the rocks are a little bit harder and let's go ahead and change the process mode to hybrid let's go ahead and apply that there we go I think that works out a little bit better what we could also try doing before we add this erosion and I'd really like these smaller details that we're getting down here with the strata fire being down there we can throw in a thermal and there's a lot of thermal weathering that occurs in the desert on a lot of the objects that are created or you know that nature creates in the desert so let's add a thermal weathering real quick and let's go ahead and just align these up I like keeping my work node graph really clean and what the thermal weathering is going to do is it's going to give us these awesome sediment deposits all over the place which we really want because a lot of thermal weathering and wind erosion occurs and a lot of this sediment will kind of flow downwards but what I want to do is decrease the anisotropy if you decrease the anisotropy what it's going to do is we're gonna still get these these patterns of sediment falling down but we're gonna have more of the rock coming in and then it'll create these little Tallis's that build up at the bottom of the rock a lot better a lot more realistically than if you were to increase the anisotropy a lot and then you just lose out on a lot of detail on your rocks like that it could still look really good in some situations but in this situation we want more rock than we do sediment even though there's still a lot of sediment we just want the rock to be more prominent and I think this right here will do pretty well if you wanted to do something about this basic shape to kind of change it around so it's not so square or circular you go back to the stratify right after this stratify add a displace or you can do it after shaper actually you can do it after the shaper and change it to rugged and you can increase the complexity change it to high-quality a bit and now you've kind of changed the shape around increase the strength and now you've got something more like this where the overall shape isn't as uniform it's a little bit more random and then you can just connect that to the terrace it'll change the terrace around especially in the reap the residual option and then you add the stratify and then the breaker and then so on and so forth so that's what you can do if you wanted to change the overall shape around so it's not so uniform just in case anybody was wondering the displaced note is really good at making sure you add a little bit of randomness to your overall shape in your terrain and then you get these cool little hoodoos that pop up on the edge like you would normally find in the desert and a lot of Mesa places so let's go and see our erosion looks alright and then our thermal erosion let's go ahead and look at that and it's looking pretty good and now since we have these two erosions here we need to combine them so that we can get the best of both worlds before we do that if you look in here in the sediments from the thermal erosion it's really flat and boring increase the debris size and then you'll see these sediment deposits actually fill up with sediments as you can see there just adds like a nice little noise to it makes it look a little bit more natural just be careful with that because at higher resolutions they start to really populate and are really easy to see and then it doesn't look as realistic so I found that anywhere between ten and fifteen is a good realm to be in when you're using the debris size at higher resolutions but I mean it's all up to you and your taste so you can do whatever you want obviously alright so let's go ahead and add these together with a combined we're not actually going to add them what we're going to do is we're going to just do a regular 50/50 blend that's all we're going to do so we have that we have that and then this is what we get in the end so if you were to look at it with just pure erosion we get a lot of weird stretching and if you look at thermal we get a lot of softness coming in and then when we combine the two we get a little bit of both and it looks overall much better than it did before okay so let's go ahead and just texture this up real quick so literally we're gonna use texture right there we're gonna use two of them and we're also going to use a slope and what we want to do is want to attach the slope to the output here and we don't need to attach the output to anything just yet but we will and what we want to do with this slope is want to select the very flat areas but also some of the steeper areas not much and I find that 60% is usually pretty good when you need to just select a little bit of the steeper areas especially on very vertical landscapes like this let's attach that to the mask of this texture and then we're just going to attach both textures to the combined node and then we're gonna combine the two textures together using a blend actually you don't even have to use the mask on this texture sorry I'm getting ahead of myself let's delete that that's gonna have to rebuild the texture node does take a long time the bill that does a lot of processing so just keep that in mind because you don't want to like continually change that around because it's just gonna take a lot of time to do that and you got better things to do than wait for nodes to build out so let's just go ahead and find some colors that we like this is my favorite part of any terrain creation is the texturing I really like it we're going to attach a oops it's gonna do this to me so let's do a set map there we go and that's actually a pretty good decent color to start with we might have to swap them around depending on where we want this orange to come out I should learn not to do that after it fails once set Matt back and that's not even half bad either but we're gonna go ahead and choose a more brown color I think we're gonna do the brown rocky color uh which one is this one which one are we using here we are using 102 so let's change this to 102 this will be our slope areas so we want an orange look to it and then for this texture right here we're going to change the seed because we have the same seed on both I do believe or we did don't anymore we increase this by 1 and we want to just make sure that both textures are different from each other just so we get different details in certain areas just take Schmitt build alright 36 96 that was okay so they're completely different all right just wanted to make sure that that was known those just make sure the textures are slightly offset so that you don't come you don't compete with other selections in the texture now you're gonna take this slope and you're gonna connect it to a mixer you're gonna connect both of these in change the option the method the blend and change it to 100% and this slope is going to connect to the mask of the mixer and what that'll do is it'll mask out this slope selection and the mixer or should anyways yes it does that'll be we're using the same color so it's not gonna do much for us so we got to change one around so let's change this one to some of that kind of blend still but isn't the same like that maybe there we go so you have this orange color is all dependent on this slope right there and that will go into the mask of the mixer and that way you can have these two things blended together to get this which looks a lot better but that still might not make sense because this is more of a light sand color and it's kind of fading down into an orange so let's change this around just even a bit more let's find let's like try 114 right there and we'll try 101 here so those are very similar but still different and go those are more like a purple Mesa which might not really make sense in some places in Utah most definitely not so that's 119 what I really like is finding two colors that are very similar but very different so like 159 and 160 are different but similar so we got this right here and then this one right here is just like it's kind of burnt when you combine the two that's kind of like what you get that looks decent but I think the colors are just a little bit too vivid for what we want at least for what I want this one and this one are pretty similar so 173 and 174 this one right here looks better as maybe a sand and that looks better as maybe a rock so we'll use this one at 173 and this one that right here will be 174 and there we have it and you can just kind of play around with it back and forth just to kind of see what you like and you just keep going but essentially that's all you're doing and you can add more selections if you want you don't have to stick with just the slope you have a whole data set that looks really good I like the way that looks quite a bit but you have a whole data map like tool set here you can use so you have protrusion you can throw ahead go ahead and throw in some protrusion here what this will do is it'll just select the protrusions the rock protrusions essentially and you can select those separately from each other throw that into a SAP map and just make another mixer node keep it as blend set it to 100 connect it to there and then connect the mask to the protrusion and now you've got what you went from this where you have like this light rock selection to a more Brown Rock selection right here but you kept the overall color here all you did was select the protrusions the the rocks and you can change this around to be a really interesting color like maybe that that's my alarm I apologize so now you went from this where you have this light rock selection to a more dark rock selection now it just overall gives it a different look you can even throw in something red make it look like you have bleeding rocks there you go that looks pretty cool too and it's like your imagination is your limit here you can just do whatever you want but that's essentially all you're going to do and then this is what you've built out right here so you start out with mountain shaper to get this shape and then you used a terrace or displace depending on whichever direction you're taking this fix that up so it's straights bothering me there we go and then you just stratified it our terraced it's stratified it broke it apart eroded it and combined it together to get this overall shape and it didn't take a whole lot of notes here you have one two three four five six seven eight nine notes it's all it took to make the landscape and you have about the same for texturing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 about the same for texturing so yeah I mean it's a very easy very easy landscape to make and the shaper node is extremely versatile and if you want to change the overall shape again all you do is just come over here and just change it to something else you don't have to go through and add different nodes everywhere you just change that one shape or node to make what you want and now you've got something that's slightly different we can just go through and see how this is going to build out break and you just yeah you just go through there and change one slider and you get a whole different shape that's that's why the shaper note is so versatile and super nice you just get just one easy note just changes everything we'll just get a look at the combine here on how it looks total combined doesn't look half bad let's go ahead and look at mixer and there we go we've got like this dark red rock that looks fairly interesting and all it took was changing one little note so anyways if you have any questions on how to further use the shaper note or if you want to see other videos or different tutorial types please be sure to leave them in the comments section below let me know how this video looked for all of you if it looked better if the node graph was crisper and cleaner for you to read and understand I apologize for those who watched and couldn't see and voice your concerns I'd literally only changed one thing and that was the video output settings but apparently I have been completely incorrect on that and it's just harder to read overall despite me not really changing my resolution so anyways leave the leave your comments below let me know if it looks better and go ahead and use the shaper note it's badass alright thank you might

Channel: Dylan

Views: 10,827

Rating: 4.986711 out of 5

Keywords: Gaea, shaper, node, tutorial, quadspinnner, Dylan Yarbrough, pwndesign, studio, 3D, landscapes, texturing

Id: AOwGW8n97cM

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019