H17 Masterclass: Terrains (Ari Danesh)

howdy this is re Danish with side effects and today and take you through a terrain master class specifically our new h17 features we're gonna go through the new Road operator which is much more accurate realistic and efficient even faster than 16 and 16 5 then we're gonna take you through this scatter operator which has been completely rewritten it's now hierarchical which means it's great for placement of villages trees and rocks after you created your terrain and we have a few other new - operators that we'll go through - so what are we gonna cover today well we'll start with a very basic workflow now this is specifically for people who are new to terrains in Houdini or are interested in on kind of how I approach building terrains it's not going to cover any of the really cool features like masking or time-independent erosion they'll be covered in - erosion and detail our next section so if you notice that our UI for the erosion detail has changed dramatically we now put up all the main parameters needed for ocean in the basic tab and then once you have that kind of lock down everything to make the fine details exactly how you want erosion to look are in the Advanced tab now and then we'll just quickly go over some stuff in the layers tab that might be helpful in your workflow and the visualization tab well that's we understand erosion we're gonna go to the new high field flow operator if you remember in 1665 flow was calculated within the road note well it turns out that flow did not need to be calculated on every frame um that's slowing down in rows in a bit so we promoted it to its own operator you use a post erosion and there's some other neat little features or workflow things that you could do a flow to again tweak your terrains to what you exactly need once we're finished with kind of the erosion part of terrain we'll start talking about scattering objects onto the terrain and that's where our new high field scattered comes in we had in our previous versions a high field scanner but this one is completely rewritten and it's really cool because it has besides a hierarchical approach to it which means you know you could drop down villages and trees and rocks then brushes whatever you need it also has things like what is the radius and what is the fall-off of these points so you don't have intersections and as a bonus these points when you add another scatter are not floating around the surface they're pretty much locked down and well finally right fish off this video by talking about a few small notes the aero precipitate erode hydro and thermal which really are the kind of the foundational roots of the actual erosion operator but we'll talk how you could double up on them and you know emphasize certain parts of your terrain or your erosion I should say and finally we did a couple little changes in a slump and we'll talk about those too and along the way we'll talk about a few new operators that we created ok let's talk about a very basic workflow so here's my basic workflow that I use and we'll go through it quickly you know in this keynote presentation and then I'll go over to Houdini and actually do it so I always start with a massing model and a massive model could be something that she paints in you can use 3d geometry you can use a lidar data whatever you need to create something that's very basic and so you can see here I'm just using a paint to mask out an area that I want to have my noise fill in and you can see the noise filled in right here to make my massing model and yeah it looks like garbage and it's supposed to look like garbage because it's just a masking model to fill up space now once it Roshan starts and needs like all seats and these ops calls for the erosion to hit and bounce off on and change kind of directions a bit if you don't have those seats erosion kinda looks boring it just kind of falls from the top to the bottom it just falls perfectly the slope of your hill so to break it up I do what's called seeding and seeding can be done with either let's say a high field noise a high field distort by noise or our new operator which we'll talk about high field distort by layer okay so I seeded it um and I should mention this is that really low resolution I'm not you know pumping up the resolution of my terrain at all right now and the reason why is my next operation I want to do is what I call lobing and lobbying is really important to me because when you especially use 3d geometry um or just paint things and quickly what you get is kind of this big chunks of terrain and what I if you drive down a mountain range and you're looking at it it's really broken up into these kind of lobes that are you know have major erosion or major waterways or glacier ways cut into the mountain and before I do my detailed erosion I want to do that cutting to make those lobes and so that's what lobing is is just a really low resolution erosion that tries to cut into those main features so here's you know lo being at two different angles and then what I do is I often remap so i'll artificially increase the elevation of my erosion to something higher than it would be normal in real life and the reason why is if you think about erosion the steeper the angle right it's the the water's gonna flow harder you're gonna get these you know really deeper grooves and I want to play with those deeper grooves and then I want to squash it down and start to build up layers of the mountains if you think about it if you look at this picture here now I want to take this area which might have been a you know an actual hillside going across here as washing down but still have really interesting detail going around it and then I could add another layer after we mapped it down of another massing model of more mountains that are a higher elevation and I could do that two or three times until I build up and nice you know ramp up from low elevations to the very steep high elevations once I go through this process and get all my low being done so I have these nice big breaks and chunks then I'll sample up my height field to something more realistic something that's you know has a lot more detail and in general I'll do that a couple of times so I'll sample up and I'll start to shape it and what I think by shaping it right now if you do an erosion it's kind of going again straight down the hills probably the angles it's following the lobes and I want to start distorting it maybe have it have some swirls in it something that makes it much more interesting and again a high field distort by layer might be a really good use yeah case for that but just something to shape it or a bit once I do that you know a little receding to add a little more obstacles for the erosion to hit and then I'll start doing my real erosion so here I am doing my real erosion and it's looking okay and I'll follow this process maybe eight second time so in total all house three erosion passes a low pass which I call the low bang which is going super quick you know multiple frames per second to maybe a second per frame for once I crank it up a bit and maybe you know two or three seconds per frame once I get a full erosion as I'm going up I'm also starting to play with the precipitation with the rain and I'm also kind of starting to make the the channels of the rain closer together so I get finer and finer teething of that erosion and then the last step is the shaders so I went from something that look like this to something look that look like this so what is a massing model well according to Wikipedia massing refers to the structure in three dimensions its form and not just its shape massing influences this sense of space which the building encloses and helps to find both the interior and the exterior shape of the building so that's for architecture now how do we apply it for terrain well or terrain what we're gonna do is we're gonna use things like let's paint our height and just get the general shape of what we want the mountains to look like or use 3G geometry and our high field project to project down shapes that will make the the kind of the basic structure of the mountain what are used 2d images like geo TIF or just plain old pngs or lidar anything that you get to extrude up the high field into a mountain range so why don't we see how that works in in the real world or in Houdini I should say so the first step is the massing model so I'll just go down here and drop down a height field and space geez so I can see the whole thing right now I'm at the object level so I'll dive into the geometry level and there's my height field yeah I'll keep it as a really little resolution of a grid spacing of two and it's a 1k by 1k geometry okay so the first thing I do is drop down a height field paint just wire it up and the layer my default is mask which is what I want and the got a foreground value of 1 and a background value 0 fine yeah change the radius to probably something like 100 just have a bigger brush maybe even bigger than that let's say 2:30 to start with and I'll just start painting left mouse button down now let's create something and I'll decrease this to 100 how about that for a train okay dad I'm gonna go here and say hi field noise and if I just do a high field noise right now you can see that it's it's creating noise over the whole high field the second input here is a mask so I'll just wired it in and now you can see that I'm just generating noise over that mask so if I look at my high field noise now I can increase the amplitude and this is something I actually usually like to do I like to exaggerate in the beginning so I have something that it looks like that and element size you can make it more detail less detail whatever you need I'll just keep it like that and that's one way of making a massing model another way to create amassing models to actually use real geometry so for instance are you going here and just drop down a torus and I'll make the tourists here maybe 150 meters and radius and then out 75 let's make it a little bigger 200 there we go and to this torus I'll put a transform just like this so I could do things like rotate it and then I'm going to use a high field project so the first thing I want you to notice here is that I do not hide field project it has one green input and one gray inputs so up to now we've been using these green in the inputs which indicates the volume so the Haiku project is saying it wants a volume and it also wants a geometry when I do that you can see that indeed this geometry has been projected on to the surface of the height field okay so I can go in here and just really crank up the resolution it's not gonna matter because I'm just gonna project it onto here to make it smoother and the other thing to notice is right now if I go here and do a transform it's going into the positive projection but if I try to go into the negative nothing's happening here so if I want to the negative it's quite easy I'm a high field project here I'll say turn off his farthest and combined method I'll make that into the minimum and now you can see that I've projected it down so let's make it a little more realistic I'll just make this a little shallower something like that okay other things I could have done here as I'm building up the masking model is right now that's really smooth and probably not realistic is I could enter a high field project not on the high field noise but directly on the high field itself so I have something like this then I could do a high field distort and this one I'll use up by noise and you can see I hit organifi that projection here again amplitude of it the element size if I want it smoother or a higher frequency noise anything you want to do to make it look much more interesting and then it's pretty much high feels that are very much like working with a compositing app I'll use a high field layer and if I look at the inputs here since the base terrain well I'll say that so in this case it really doesn't matter but I'll put this guy here and this guy for the terrain to layer and then the operation here I'll say is add and now I have something that looks like this which is a racetrack look like a very interesting massing model I resize my panels here because I wanted to show you a third way of bringing in data to create a high field or to add information to your massing model and that is to bring in an image like a geo TIFF a PNG or lidar so here I desktop I have this guy the gale crater and what I want you to really notice here is if I go command I to thanks here it's rectangular and our high field is square and it's also has a lot more resolution and this will cause us problems where's the resolution here 2880 3x3 395 when I try to layer the two high fields together I'll get border issues so we're gonna have to fix that so I'm going to go in here and I'm gonna drop in a high field file and the high queue file can either be a file on your disk drive swore single smile or you could create a cop and bring in information and filter it through a cop and bring in the cop right now we just got a file I'll go click here to get it and it is the Gale Crater I'll say except and there's my Gale Crater and the first thing you'll notice here is that while it's still rectangular which is a problem and the other problem is the height scale is set to 1 and because hey this is a huge file that's gonna cause me issues also because I can't see 1 meter it's such a huge scale so I'll just bring it up to whatever height I want it to be again I'm not using the gale crater to be accurate here I'm just using it to fill in some information in my massing model so that takes here issue 1 of the height the next issue that have to take care is about well I really can't use this rectangular piece of information and let me show you why I dropped down here a high field layer take my original guy here and then try to composite this on top of it I'm gonna give these streaks because there are different information and if I reverse this make this this train made this the the base now I got a rectangular base which is not what I wanted either so let's get that back to here what can I do well in the high field file I could change here the size method which by default is size the largest access to just grid spacing ok and then the grid spacing I'm gonna really decrease this because that's really low resolution let's say to one to start with gives me some information try 0.5 ok that looks like I got most the information back and now as you can see in my - layer - I don't have these border issues oh well actually I didn't show you that because we got to add the two but now you can see that that looks like I filled in some really nice information right there so just to drive the point home about massing models here's an example that I did here's my massing model it was just me painting a mask and filling it with noise and you can see it really doesn't have any structure it just has the general way points here of the noise and from this to go very quickly to the final model where you can see you got lots of fine erosion detail a lot of fine feathering it's just a nice approach to use so the next step and this workflow is seeding the process of taking a smooth service and adding disturbances to create realistic erosion when you use noise or a projective geometry often it doesn't matter have enough of those obstacles to create interesting erosions so seeding will add those obstacles you do it a couple of ways you could add some high field noise to a projection geometry to add a little layer of noise on top you use a I feel distort by noise which is you know was already in H 16 and 16 v or he is the news distort by layer and distort by layer is really cool and I think it'll demonstration over to sort my layer over time so here I already have an erosion as you can see taking place and I want to just add some distortion and you can see over time it's like if I'm moving tectonic plates so let's do this in Houdini for seating we're a talked about I feel distort by noise that was this guy right here so this time let's talk about a high field distort by layer which is new something I just dropped on the high field distort by layer and you'll see that it takes two inputs the first import is the layers displace and the second one is going to be the control layer now the easiest way to do this is either take it already a noise that you have or just take a high field let's drop down another high field noise and I really want to mess up kind of the directions here so my high field noise I have changed the noise - sparse convolution - let's say I don't know I'm Manhattan world let's go really bizarre and what I notice is that I really don't need so much amplitude others decrease it and a good general thing to do as you know kind of a rule of thumb when you start out is whatever your platoon is making it your element size it somehow has a nice balance that way and just start playing from there so I got this you know kind of bizarre mechanical noise here and I'll input it into my high field to sort by later when I do that you can see we're ducking much of a difference yet but what I could do is now change my display scale and start to increase it and as I increase it you could see then I'm starting to get those mechanical elements into this guy and I could also change the rotate displacement of so if you're thinking about it's going down to normal the displacement this is just rotating it out so you can play with it like that how gee where'd you want it to rotate in and there is also displacement notes called swirl which will automatically take it 90 degrees from where it was before plus whatever your rotation displacement is and you can have start to create these geologic formations that are quite cubic in this case and again that might not look really good here as a massing model but remember I'm kind of looking for what is the bedrock is there granite granite sheets underneath this and you know this could be very realistic as far as the slabs underneath the dirt some I'm liking this and I could ask smear if I don't want it to be so hard just kind of blurs it a bit also I have a control blur radius so I could really control this and just get these little smooth edges here or I can go and you know get them to be sharper it really doesn't matter again I'm just adding these seed values and what we're serious is ways to make sure that I'm breaking up the terrain so when the distri debris and the water starts flowing here and the sediment it has areas to bounce off of and start become interesting okay so that's seating so we're up to lobing and remember it lobing is just your very first low resolution version of erosion and what I'm trying to do here is to break up the mountain into you know these big globular sections that will look like it's different pieces of the mountain depth then we could do high precision erosion off of so let's look at that okay the first thing before your road is I don't want the mass to carry through so I'm just going to do a high field mass clear so you know it's back to the ugly gray then I'll do a high feel the road and the road model is you know one of our key elements of h17 that we really worked on to make it realistic so here we go first thing I do is I guess I'm gonna move this out again so you can see it a little better and let's zoom out here so you can see that okay visualization tab is the percent of the heading and say compute range yeah right now it's between minus 147 to 140 that's fine and I'm gonna go here and I really don't like all the greens and the whites are just kind of like doing some like this just what a little visualization if you know if you like that you can always go here edit say preset Browns okay so here I am and the next thing I do is I'm gonna go here to my main now let's actually run an erosion without any changes in the default settings here so I can make sure I turn on this guy I want every frame calculated so I'm gonna return on the real time I'm gonna run this and you can see it runs really quickly and you really don't need it to run it more than 20 to 25 frames now and I'll stop it at frame 25 how about that I don't look at it and you can see that it's creating these little globs here but it's not doing much on top here to chisel it out and not getting much detail at all yet for for my lobes and the reason why is the defaults are made more for the high resolution when I want to kind of keep my mountaintops intact and let the debris go down further but I don't want that here I want to just really start to cut this up so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna go to my Advanced tab here and the first thing I'm going to do is road ability adjustments yeah there's three parameters here wrap up iterations I'm sorry ramp up iterations initial factor and slope factor so the ramp up iterations say how many basically iterations before we get full erosion so if you think about the water sediment going it's not going to cut into the mountain immediately it's gonna take a little ramp up then it says how much do you want your initial to be well we're gonna say it's gonna be basically half strength the erosion and the SLO factor is should we have erosion where it's where it is shallow or should the real erosion be really where steep so right now it's saying we're as steep we're gonna have a lot of erosion and we're shallow we're gonna have little erosion okay so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna change this I'm gonna change ramp up iterations to zero so I'm going to say let's hit erosion immediately and the initial factor you know 0.9 you can even make it one and slow factor I'm gonna say you know what point to let's give that a try so I'm going to say I want erosion everywhere now let's reset this and let it run and now you can see that I am getting a lot more detail and a lot more erosion here that we had before and these little guys here and that's what I want I want to just can't create these lobes that are interesting for higher resolution to occur what else could I do well if I'm saying that there's too much debris buildup okay which is what I want it's realistic but maybe I don't want to see it I want to see actually the channels I could go over here too and where are you riverbed sediment capacity and I'm just going to over crank that to 20 so let's just zoom on in this area I get error here and reset and again run it and now what's cinnamon capacity says is how much sediment can be how much debris can be carried by the sediments before it settles down and makes debris there we go and now I'm getting the channels that I want the Lopes okay so I'm liking that now and new to h17 is instead of doing a time shift I could say just freeze at frame and I'll say I'll freeze that frame 25 here and I'll just go freeze frame and now you can see that I got this intact which is pretty cool if I were to do unfreeze it you can see it's all gone I'm gonna do one more thing here I'm gonna go back to my let's see I'm gonna go to my thermal erosion and I just gonna crank up removal rate a little more here and I'm gonna go here and we'll talk about that later and what else do I want you and slow factor zero just let everything be eroded let's just run it one more time okay here it is I'm going to freeze it at 25 again and I'm really happy with that I'm even starting to get these little nice sharp thermal cuttings that I wanted everything's looking good there so the next step in my workflow is often to do remapping and I think it's a great trick to build up your terrain and elevation passes you know the steeper it is you're gonna get kind of no more water flow going down you're probably gonna get deeper cuts so what I'd like to do is exaggerate it as I said earlier and then smash it down to create kind of these different elevations or different layer elevations and then I could repeat this process of creating a massing model seating of low being another pass to just build it up or maybe three passes total depending on the complexity of the scene so let's just do that quickly go back to Houdini there we go I'll zoom out and I'll just put in a height field remap and I feel remap the first thing you can do is gonna say compute range and right now you can see it's minus 128 ooh 133 so I'm just gonna squash this down to maybe 60 let's make it even try it a little further down 40 yeah I like that so that's looking really good and you can see that we got now a lot of detail with our low being it's looking actually pretty realistic let's go down one more 30 okay I'm really happy with that if I want to flatten off layers something that I like to do is this is your remapping so you can see you can remap and create areas that are flat for like you know bottoms or mesas I recommend that if you're going to do that go here and say set interpolation to b-spline and set interpolation to b-spline that way I don't get the hard delineation so I get a nice curve on it okay so see something like that great so now what I could do is start it filling in some detail I feel paint shift right-click interactively increase three it's my brush yeah we're doing once you have more elevation here major on the ridges here over here and maybe over here - I like that let's add a little more here okay lichens h17 terrain has really become a painter's tools it's so nice so now I'm going to just do another high field noise and we're just going to go and do that step over time on the map go save just in case and bring it to wherever you want so if I get something like that I think in my paint why don't you right after that is just blur it out a bit so I'll do a high field blur just so I get a little smoother transition here and now my noise gotta increase my elements amplitude is fine I want to decrease my amplitude just to get some more detail there oh I like that that's looking interesting and go through the same process again I'll do another high field distort lair you know okay I feel noise going here I'll just use something recent like this look at this guy say instead of a let's do a replace for my hi feel noise and that looks interesting yeah let's do it so we got here just by scale increase it yes to give me some interest I'll swirl I'll smear why not add some direction okay so I'm ready to do one more erosion Pass I feel mass clearer and again this is the lobing section of it so you know what I'm going to do I'm going to go here grab my I feel the road come and see Mandy I'd escape and the reason why I taking long because you got the fries at frame so I'm going to turn that off right here and let's just run it for that 25 frames so we got now our flat levels that we had before we remember we did a REIT map we may up here to get us our water levels so it's looking really nice and we're ready to move on to our next section so before I forget it freeze a frame and now we can start going and detailing this out okay so once the loading process is done it's time to sample up and as you can see on this map here you know work flow we sample up to a higher resolution so we get more detail and we shape as needed we might want to add some stuff we do a reseeding just like here and we'll go through another erosion process with different settings in the lobing and we might do this two times at different resolutions to get as much detail as you need and then finally off to the shading so let's look at an example that okay to resample we just do a high field resample and you come up here and you can say specify exact resolution for the grid spacing or really quite easily you could just say I want to double the resolution like that okay and if I go to I for information and it stays up you can see that now we have a 1000 by 1000 meter so now it's just one box'll per meter and that's still very low and the processing will be very fast things to ask yourself do I want the water right now if not you know what can I do and also do I like the debris as is or don't want to make this kind of back into the regular soil and that will be figured out in your high field of road if we go to the layers tab here and we might want to say add water layer to the final so it just elevates and smoothes out a bit and I should also mentioned that too if you go to the Advanced tab we have here two jukeboxes one for water flow post smoothing okay and that kind of sense you don't want to have lumpy water as you know the erosion turns into water the rainfall so that will smooth it and by default debris flow is turned off for the post smooth this debris usually wants to be pretty lumpy the only time you probably don't want your debris to be lumpy is if you're doing multiple of road passes and it just starts to get too how do I say it like potholes everywhere so you might want to turn that on and you can see just smooths everything out which is just fine for your first pass I'll keep that on for here then I'll go and drop down another high field and before I do it I feel eroded before I do that I'm gonna make sure I have my timeline back to it what frame one just so it doesn't have to calculate everything and just drop down another high field and okay so we got this guy going now in the layer setting for here I might want to say you know what I want the debris not to be like this I want to say that is actual soil so I might want to say here reset debris layer and you know depending on if I want water or not I may even want to reset the water layer so I just have a plain high field with a lot of interesting stuff let's keep it like the effort right now and I'll run a new erosion but with default parameters and you can see that's looking a lot better ready and you can see that we got a lot of detail going on here between the different erosions well that's drying out really nice already things that I'm noticing that I probably would want to change is I'm liking this scalping and I wanted even more I'll let that the caps in my case end up in the very final resolution so I'm gonna just go back to high through the road and in the Advanced tab I'll go here to thermal erosion and I'll do just a little more again point eight I'll go to my main and I'm gonna say the cut angle I'm gonna cut it more that's when this release chiseled yeah I'll change this maybe 2.05 for the erosion rate of that thermal so what I notice is that thermal really is the primary defining moment you get how you want your mountaintops to be scalloped if you want them to be kind of smooth and rollin change the cut angle to let's do it together like 60 or 50 or 40 50 probably will do it you'll see that we're not going to get much scalping here it stays pretty intact okay I'll run this for a little while you can see here it's nice and smooth okay now let's change this down to something like thirty so what this is saying is any angle greater than thirty degrees thermal erosion is going to start to really occur anything less than thirty degrees it's just going to be kind of steady state and stable so let's see the difference here and you can really see how sharp these ridges are that I didn't have that sharp bridge before let me zoom out and stop there you go so in this case for me it's now over sharpened so I'll take one more pass I'll say let's make it 40 degrees and see if that's a nice compromise in my case aesthetically yep I like that and you can see how again it's just eroding really quickly and I got lots of cool information here now one of the things I'm noticing right now is well it all looks like it's doing the same thing as far as erosion it it's following the contours the slope of the mountain which is what it's normally supposed to do but if you're looking at any mountain range there's variations you know again if there's these big granite slabs underneath then there's no slabs underneath then what might happen is you're going to get you know a different direction of your ocean so how would I go about doing that well if you look in the advanced there is a grid bias and if the value of zero says you know follow the contours follow the slope and that's where the erosion is going to occur a grid bias and negative one is going to say you know go in kind of a 90 degree change in one direction and a positive one is going to be in the other direction so what you could do here is you could go and turn on the mask and you'll see it says hydro rigid bias mask and if I click on the grid bias paint it will add a mask paint for me and it will also add a copy layer the copy layer is gonna say our source is now going to be the hydrogen bias mask and the mask paint will now be on the layer hydro grid bias mask and so it will pick up that those values as we're painting let's go to here and I don't know I'll just pick one area say this face here and you're not gonna see anything um let me do it this way now you can see it yeah no no let's make it just this area here also so I got zero and one but I need it to remap it from zero to one to a negative one to positive one so I'll just go a high field remap and I want to remap this guy and I'll compute the range and it's zero to one and really what I want is where this guy is is a negative one so I want it to go from zero to negative 1 instead of 0 to positive one and now I'll redo and will see certain areas that kind of look more like it's going straight down and there we go and it just adds a little more interest because it doesn't look like it's all the same like this area looks really interesting right now and yet the other areas you know are looking more traditional and I can freeze at let's do one more frame 25 and I'm just really happy here so what I'm going to do is just going to leave it all alone and I'll just do one more high field resample and in this high field we sample again out I'll double it up so you get even more detail and other things I could do so I'll leave the water there now it looks good leave the debris don't have to worry about any of that stuff but now I might go in again to the advanced setting and I'm gonna go to riverbed and that's fine actually I'm gonna go down to what do I want to do here I'm gonna increase the repose angle so it's not so sandy to maybe 30 degrees kind of a little more realistic and I'm gonna go here this max height is interesting it's how much your debris can build up as a pile before it's kind of slumps it falls over and starts to become kind of sediments washing down the mountain again so if I were to crank this up to let's say six your should see some of these really interesting baselines rings let's see now our oceans gonna take longer and there you go you see these lines now this is not the classic Swiss Alps but where I live in Korea Hills California when I Drive the canyons I see a lot of this type of debris where I get these rings and you can adjust it so the lower it is the less of these you're going to have the higher the value of your max height the steeper these ledges are going to be and you're gonna say okay but why did I really need that well think about your next step after you have your train is going to be decoration and a lot of times and that's way too much erosion for your final step but a lot of times this is where you're gonna have Rock lines you can decorate with rocks like outcrops of big boulders or it's gonna be tree lines they're going to go around here so let's go back to something more realistic something like this and there's my final erosion now let's go down to where in the games you might there we go where you might have your actual walking and you can't have this lumpiness here it's too lumpy no problem again I could do a high field mass by feature and then the height meal mask my feature I might go here and say mass by slope and I want the low slopes where they're probably gonna be walking so I'll say zero and bring that up nicely to maybe 30 degrees just to get these little areas here and then smooth radius might bring that out a bit so it's just nice and smooth and then I could do I hate feel blur on that and now you got the great detail where your players are not going to be and where your players might be it's nice and smooth out give me interesting information so I'm going to go I filled masks clear so you can see it that's looking cool okay so we got through the sampling up we got through shaping the reseating if you wanted to ours was looking so good I think I bypassed most of that and then it's a couple layers of erosion so I'm not going to talk about shaders and scattering it I want to jump straight to what's new and age 17 for those who have been using terrain in age 16 so let's go through the list of what's new to H 17 as far as terrains go so the first thing is you need far fewer frames needed to create erosion than sixteen five if you wanted a nitpick the frames the erosion per frame is a little slower but in a sixteen point five you would often do 45 55 frames to get a good erosion now you're talking about between 15 and 25 frames to get to your sweet spot for erosion so the net result is it's much faster in age sixteen point five and 16 it was really hard to create big water channels it took a lot of frames to let the water flow out and make kind of the rivers and the lakes in H 17 it's now really fast it flows nicely you can control it you get water quickly major all the major parameters now in 17 are controlled via masks so you could really say you know on this side of the mountain there is a lot more rain than than this side or that one side of the mountain the there's a lot denser soil so it doesn't road us quickly so there's all these mass that you could paint in so you don't have to have symmetric mountains anymore and we do not do that in the quick overview but we will be talking after the this discussion what's new about the mass and see how they work because it's really interesting that now you get really nice asymmetric mountain ranges control the amounts of feathering and floovio lines well we're a saw that there's other things we could also do but you could there's riverbed controls that will allow you to say how cheap they are when the erosion will kick over and you'll see more debris so it's just a lot of control their control the slope of the terrain where the thermal erosion kicks in you saw that in the previous sample when I change the the angle the cut angle of the thermal erosion we could get really sharp kind of scalping in the mountains or this smooth round roundness of the tops of the mountains control the steepness of the riverbank so yes we have the river banks and the riverbed controls now and we can control the blurring and the size of raindrops which we haven't looked at yet so just in the comparison here is a 16-5 after I don't know like 45 or 50 frames and this is a 17 after about 20 frames and you can see we're getting a lot nicer detail all along so what else we control how far from peak the erosion starts that was the three parameters I showed you where we say how many frames does it take to get you peak erosion what's the influence of the slope and where do we start in that erosion do we start from zero and slowly build up or do we go full force immediately control the grid bias so now it's not just one type of a road in fluvial line going down following the slopes we could actually skew it one way or the other again to create variation in your mouse and ranges to make it look more realistic okay control how fast the erosion to pause this debris shows you that but I really didn't go into detail but that is the sediment capacity and instead of in capacity you could say basically how much sediment can be held in water so you saw in my case I over cranked it because I didn't want debris to be dropped down while I was loading I actually want to see those floovio lines really clean for the lobing process so they over cranked it to 20 but in other cases you might want to slow it down to let's say five to say that I want a lot of debris deposit I want it to be muddy in certain areas and again this can be controlled by mass to control how after water carries sediment well that's really bad grammar there we just talked about though how does the sediment carry the water that was the sinem capacity and now this is really distinct from age 16 is in age 16 16 5 we calculated flow for every erosion cycle we take and flow now out of the row hf erode node and made it its own node called flow that's a post process posted road process so it's much faster and I haven't demonstrated that yet but we will so here is you know examples of different ease-in ease-out options for erosion and you can see you get nicely different looks here now how much erosion do you want on the flat lands here it's pretty smooth and pretty smooth how much do you want scalping on the top slightly different here so you have all those choices in addition we have a few new stops we have the distort by layer that we talked about we have a new erode hydro I wrote thermal and a wrote precipitation so well what did I mean by edited it here well these are now comprised of the job inside the actual hfih road that are built in smaller HTA's and so if you didn't want to go through a hole erosion process again but you want to add more hydro erosion or more thermal erosion you could append to and erode another thermal erosion for instance just to get that as a more of a greater effect okay um and I feel slump which we had in 1665 it was great for creating things like ski runs or areas where snow was gonna be develop it just lumps that the terrain so it's not so good yeah so how did you say lumpy but sometimes you want to add that grandness you want to add something that looks like you know it was coarse cement poured down so we now added a granular node or I should say granular option just lumping so it's not just always smooth you could say smooth or granular so here we go here's the smooth slumping and you can see here is the rough slumping and you can see how we have that debris buildup on the rough you know nice and smooth here so let's go through hfih Road in more detail now okay so split off of H F Row three and let's just do another um erosion off of that so let's see where do we want to go let's just take this hi feel about you and you right out to the resample so I'm gonna go high field erode and just take it right out to that resample there frame one good and let's you know go here to the main tab and talk about the main tab so we have the global erosion rate which is just a multiplier for all the other erosions so you have a road ability here for hydro and a thermal road ability so these get multiplied by global erosion so if I have something like here a two then I would say two times the global rate and if I have this as a two now be four times the right and the same thing goes with a thermal song is just change that back like that so that was pretty similar to eight sixteen point five but let's look at now things like Bank angle so I got an erosion here and the default Bank angle 70 degrees so if I go here and just do an erosion off of it you can see it's creating pretty sharp channels here okay and that's 15 frames that's good enough for you guys to see back to 15 the bank Engel will say basically how soft is these water channels so if I go here and change this to let's say ten instead and rerun this to frame fifteen you notice we're not really getting those individual channels that we got before because it's just too soft oh I made even ten degrees even softer so let us change this to let's say 40 degrees hello is it default you first revert to defaults 70 so yeah let's try 45 degrees you can see I'm getting those individual channels now but notice how soft they are and this is something that you might want if you don't want to have so many jaggies if you want to have a smoother terrain for your players to go over and so forth and again the other experience if you want to cut out really deep grooves now you can change your bank angle to say 85 you do not want to go to 1990 would be the same equivalence is like zero degrees so just be aware that and here we go and now you can see immediately you know ready frame five you're really cutting out these steep grooves very jaggedy and again it depends on the look that you want okay we ready talked about this a bit let's change this back to its defaults of 70 degrees the cut angle here for thermal so the cut angle is if we have a slope like this anything above or anything above 35 degrees is going to be cut anything below 35 degrees is going to remain the same so if I had something here let's say cut angle of 70 degrees almost nothing is going to be cut because almost everything here is above 70 so you're going to keep your caps pretty much as is and what we're really seeing here is really the effects of hydro erosion not thermal erosion and the other hand if I change this down to something severe like 25 degrees you guys see that almost everything's going to get cut and I should be able to get really sharp spikes here and I am look at that Ridgeline right there and I'll zoom out and the only reason why we're not getting these incredibly sharp spikes is because remember the Advanced tab we went to the thermal erosion and I could remove some more that debris and I'm going to remove some where the hydrogen region so you can see it so I'll say 0.3 and then here are the road ability adjustments I'll make it 0 and 1 and now the erosion start of a very peak and now we will see that cutting very severe and there we go nice sharp lines everywhere but I am a roading way too much and therefore that's why we're just getting these aches these ugly as far as I'm concerned let's stop you know just very hilly things so I'm going to go back here two main changes to 35° anything else I need to change here advanced removal rate then the rest should work just fine it was just too much of a cut so we're getting too much erosion being slopped off and it's just probably have too much debris so this reset that again and that looks much better so now I have the sharp Ridge lines but I can see the definition also so I do not mention about the erosion rates for hydro and thermal so erode ability is how much erosion occur it can be greater or less the rates are how fast the erosions occur so if I wanted for instance of the why would a very high erosion array for thermal and slow um hydro I could do something like that and it will give me a different look because it's now going to be driven mostly by the thermal erosion and very little by the hydro erosion and you can see it's a vastly different look already okay I set those back to defaults okay so the next thing I want to talk about is the advanced tap so the removal rates so we got a hydro arrival rate and a thermal removal rate and you can think of this as conservation of mass so as the sediments and debris are going down the hill how much are we going to take away from the actual soil like you know imagine like wind is blowing away the dirt I'm reeling what's underneath if you're very you know concerned that you got to keep conservation of mass that reduce the thermal rates and as you can see that we're actually now have negative values new to h17 those negative values will allow you to add soil to the terrain over time so like if think about it if you have bedrock and it's granite it's very dense and it occupies a small amount of space but as it loosens up as able to become debris the volume it takes up will be greater because now it's not so densely packed so again removal rates default is 0.1 here and let me change this also so you can see what a default look like is in the debris coming up here let's stop that and do something like change this to a negative point three so now we're saying that as the the Brad the bedrock loosens up it's going to expand more it's a space and therefore we're gonna get generate more soil as you can see you know early friends were already building up a lot more debris a lot more soil which is really cool that we could do that now ants I think I believe goes with the thermal erosion let's try it out yep negative values also what would that look like here that's a good question I have not tested that out so let's give it a quick test and what I'm noticing immediately is that my Peaks are not slumping off um they're staying pretty constant I don't see it much of it buildup oh maybe over here and here but it is jaring a lot more debris and you can see how soft the area is here so revert to defaults okay the max debris depth this is something that I almost never change it allows how deep the grooves can be and if you crank it up too high you're gonna get let's take a look you're gonna get these bad pitting is what I call them and the best way to see the bad pitting up close is I'll run this a few more frames is underneath you can see where you know we're getting these kind of channels too much of the channels falling through and actually here doesn't look that bad probably because we don't have the removal rates of that high but it's something to be concerned of if you just start to see that you're getting these kind of like these sinkholes that you don't want really sharp angles play with the max2 debris depth and lower it down we discussed grid bias already great bias allows you to change this the angle that the cement sediment falls down and therefore your fluvial lines will change let's go here look at the default of zero and you can see what we're getting over here and over here let's see here it's super steep so you're it's the slope is just going to go straight down regardless so it's kind of more the shale areas that you're going to notice a big difference so let's stop there take a notice of this area and maybe this area also and then I'm going to change this to a grid bias of negative one and you can see how everything now is really fighting the slope edge here of the previous one and trying to go straight down creating it a different type of erosion look I kind of like it over here it's a good example I'm just kind of going straight down and if I stop it and go here to positive one you'll see it biasing the other way you and you can see this doesn't look natural at all here anymore because of these kind stripes going straight up to this angle but it's really good and I highly recommend it if you have a larger terrain to use a grid bias mask and add areas that does have this it really breaks up the mountain range nicely and it really does look more realistic because mountain ranges have different types of bedrock granite and underneath it that will sway the way those flow of the floovio lines go okay next up we already talked about ramp up iterations but we really haven't seen the results so I think that's what we should talk about neck so I apologize I just experienced a power outage so it's not the exact same terrain that we had before but it's close so let's just plow through the next thing I want to talk about is Max and as you can see in h17 we have lots of parameters now that have the capability masks and also you can see that in the Advanced tab also we have lots of things that have masks so how do we use them well I showed you one case earlier but in general when you have let's say the erode ability here mask off you turn it on and it gives you a new parameter and that parameter will be D highlighted for now because for all masks and 17 its channeled into the second input of the road node so as soon as I wire this in like that you'll see that this is now highlighted now earlier we saw that we could just click on this the pink tab and let me just cut this off there you go so you can see it's t lighted idea how I didn't it looks like I made it Y instead so let's do this start fresh there you go main road ability ago masks on there's the mask you saw I could go here and click on the mask paint and it'll add two layers for you or two operators I should say a mass paint and a create hydro ability mask a road ability mask and each one has a different name and you can just paint where you want the road ability to be let's say you don't want to paint you want to get more procedural so let me delete this and I still have the mask on so I could for instance do a high field mask by feature and I'll say I want the slopes there but I want to also do it by direction so on goal angle well do spread it like this let's do the opposite so everything going over here I want a high road ability on this side of the mountain I want a lower road ability so I just created like that then I just do a high field copy layer yeah wire this in copy the name of the mass because I'll never type it correctly from mask to the destination there we go and what I want to do is make sure Road ability is one so it becomes a scalar multiplier of my mask that I created right here so now if I run this erosion you can see that I'm getting really good erosion of these slopes and almost nothing here depending on the fall off let's just spin it around so you can see erosion no erosion and again I can exaggerate that I'll reset this let's zoom in if I were to over crank this - it wrote ability and let's say three now you can see I'm gain no erosion on this side of the hill at all and getting good erosion over here so that's another way of doing your mask and probably the way you're gonna do it more often than you're gonna paint another way to do it is by noise so let's say we got that erode ability and then we want to say the amount of precipitation so we'll make the mask on here and I get I preferred I'll set this to 1 for precipitation and this time I don't know instead of using a mask by feature I'm gonna say a high field noise I feel mass noise and instead of a combined method add I'll just say replace because I already move this to the to the road ability mask so I'm going to replace this with just the regular mask amplitude is going to be 1 and I'm going to decrease this so a sharper and do I have a OpenGL issue let's see yes I do see if we can get this copy later okay that's looking much better ready and I'm just going to go here and why not doing a high field ring go you know if app mask is less than let's say zero point five at mask gets assigned zero so we got these areas are going to have rain these areas are not going to have rain and then I got you another high field copy layer [Music] yeah I'll reset my erosion here and this guy is called precipitation so we're gonna go mask to precipitation like that I feel a road I changed the mask around so to be safe I'm going to go reset simulation make sure that this is zeroed out now only certain areas are going to have rain dropped on it so again it will change the effect of the erosion and if I again wants it over crank this I could you know over crank it that way this is just going to act as a multiplier and there you go so you're going to have a different effect on your ocean good things to do about this is if you just want concentrated areas of rain in the high elevations and keep the rest the same you just paint in the little Peaks that you want to have rain and leave the rest at zero and you'll just see the erosion effects take place in the higher elevation Peaks going down the side of the mountain so that's just another way of doing masks I should mention here as you get higher up this density it's really important because it's gonna say basically the smaller the number the more channels of rows you're going to have the finer the feathering is going to be so this were like really a gross setting like 0.1 you guys see this have all coalesced together again it depends on the resolution also and if you set this to a nice low number you'll see fine channels being created and in this case two fine so it can't even you know find a channel for you so let's go 2.0 - and there you go you're seeing that you're getting these thinner vanes and you had before okay the evaporation rate is just what it says if you crank up the amount of precipitation you're going to obviously have more water going down but if you also crank this up you're saying is I want a high amount of rain but I also wanted to operate quickly and therefore you're not going to have big lakes here you got to get the floovio lines and then it will just evaporate before it could pool and right now I probably should go here to a high field layer and say reset water layer so we don't see the old water so we can see where it is pulling the water right now but if I were to go back to the advanced layer and say evaporation is two so that's really two so it's really close to the the precipitation amount you're going to see the debris if warm quicker because it's just gonna get stuck because there's not enough water to move this sediment down the channel you gonna get a much muddy or look let's talk about raindrop settings so I'm gonna go here first and just revert to defaults my evaporation rate so we get some water and if you expand the raindrop settings you'll see it at a radius expand radius and a blur radius so both of these are really useful if you get lots of thin little channels I'm trying to see where I could get a little thin channel for you let's stop it right there yeah let's say here and you don't really like this thin you rather have instead of all these zigzags here kind of one continuous piece what you could try to do is you can expand the radius of the raindrops things make them basically fatter drop of water so now upping this up to something like here every run you can see it's causing these guys to be thicker channels going down the hill and now let's see if I stopped this yeah frame 17 yeah I got those big raindrops and it's kind of creating this kind of ugly just sloshed here for me yeah it's just too severe I can say let's increase the blur radius a bit so now each raindrop has a little blur to it causing it to have softer lines and you can also see this we zoom out in our Lakes our lakes are much softer with the blur here they kind of creep onto the shore nicer it's soon back out we do it and now I have my blue radius is zero and you can see it's a harder line as far as expand radius I do it really judiciously they're like 0.5 0.2 something really small or else you're gonna get kind of that big machinist and see that's looking better over here it's not as mushy if we go into the details here and again stop I will put a little blur on there just to blur it out and smooth it so that's what those parameters are for I'll zoom out and that's looking pretty good there okay let's talk about quantization next there's two quantizations here there is debrief localization and water flow quantization let me revert to defaults on the water and let's reset the simulation to make sure that we're they have a nice clean simulation going so debris flow quantization is about how chunky is the debris the smaller the value the smoother the Tabriz going to be so let's make this a point one value and run the simulation well running for like 15 frames that's all we need to see and you can see how smooth the flow of debris is it's like a very liquidy mud it just you know it doesn't clump up anywhere on the other hand if I were to take this to let's say 2.5 and run the same simulation you see quite instantly how grainy everything is so if you need something grinny or smooth this is a good place to play with it again the the negative this is where you're going to have your characters playing it's going to look really awful there you're gonna have to do some other type of smoothing quantization should be use sparingly in small values if you ask me so again the default is 0.25 even we make it point 5 here unless we run that you can see you're really getting a nice chunkiness that you could work with on the other hand I'm going to revert to defaults here the quantization of water I find less useful it's got to make these potholes of water if you increase it too much so let me turn off post move first and show you the default there without post smooth on we're rigging these little camp pits here that you can see and so the postman will just can't you know it's smooth out those water areas and make them nice and clean but if I increase this to let's say 0.2 and I guess I should turn off post Moo's so you can see it better that's reset the simulation yeah actually I'll make this much larger so you can see it exaggerated a - there you go now you can see it ready how these you know big large drops are really clean these pits into the terrain that's you know are pretty ugly and post smoothing I do not think will help it's at this little that much yeah you got at least really gnarly Jeep crosses and you can see it really badly these spikes on the bottom so again a little quantization increasing it is fine but be very very I say subtle in how you adjust these things to get the effect that she wants next on the list is water absorption under debris flow don't think about is water absorption think about it is what it does for debris that I'll higher the value for water absorption that the bigger the buildup on the size of water flow so the default is 1 and it's weird that you're going to want to change it and you can see here where had the water flow I got to breathe on the sides of the water flow here if that's the dark brown but if I were to change it to the opposite end 0 for instance then you can see that I really don't have a debris buildup around the the water channels itself is kind of just blending in everywhere so for the most part you want to keep it as default as one it'll give you the most natural looks okay Lyrae talked about max site remember that is how much debris will build up before the flow knocks it over and goes down the hill again so let me change the water absorption back to the default of one and we have not talked about repose angle the repose angle is just like an H 16.5 it's the idea of Wednesday BRE goes down how does it clump does it be like fine sand and just be in a very low angle just building up to space or is it really you know thick kind of granular debris that will pile up on each other so let's make a really low repose angle and you can see that debris is really flat it just keeps on going and it really doesn't build up anywhere it just kind of spreads and spreads and spreads on the other hand if I were to make my repose angle something artificially high let's say 75 degrees what you're going to see is the debris starts to just pile up on itself and you can see it already evident right here and here's the circles here but trying to pile up and stack up and there's a good case for both of these yeah it depends on your soil type you'll notice that repose angle does have a mask that's really quite useful so if I have areas let me reset and zoom out where I have a steep cliff like right here I want to might want to have a mass that has a really high repose angle in this area and areas that are kind of much more shallow like here have a lower post angle to have it kind of well this was a big round of slab and when I had to be rolling off of this pile up sickly this is gonna be probably a lot less bedrock a lot more thin soil so when it builds up it'll build out and show a shallower angle good repose angle are probably between 15 degrees at the very low end which is what we have is our default - I would say 35 degrees so back in my workflow here talk to a lot about sampling about erosion bouts going back and forth in this loop a few times about remapping but I really didn't talk about shaping much and we do have a few shape tools like I feel Terrace in the height field tool so let's look over those a bit so I froze my erosion that we were playing with at frame 20 and now let's say I want to exert in areas and Terrace them just again to break up the geological formations here so I'm going to go to a high field and I'll just say Terrace and I'll say compute range you can see everything's being terraced right now all right cool there are certain things that we could do here tarah step size so right now it's have 40 meters I decrease it you can see I get a lot more terracing and as I get less smaller smaller my terracing it gets kind of muddied and the reason for that is the smooth edges so I can go here and decrease the smooth edges to get it back to the sharpness I want now obviously I didn't want to hereis everything so I have here my height layer a paint tool just click on it I get my paint and now just make my brush a little larger I'll just Terrace in the areas and want like that another thing we have is before we do that right now it's very very sharp and mechanical a good thing to do with this is just do it I feel distort by noise afterwards we already have our mask so I could go in here instead of destroying everything just mask it out the areas I want and then I'll go in here and say amplitude a little more and then we decrease the element size just to break it up a bit and there you go okay two other things like just add a little top noise on it I feel noise and bring down the amplitude to you know maybe five meters and the element size to 20 as you can see so we just get a little more edgy Latian and it so it looks more natural and the other thing we could do is we could slump areas and slump is looking for a masker right now we have it just a mask everywhere and so if I were to put this in here you can see it would be slumping these areas and kind of yeah as if you had a mudslide going on but I could go in here and do another high field mask paint or let's do a draw mask this time just to show you the difference and I'll go in and just say I want a mudslide in this area and then in the slump controls spreader iterations how smooth you want that to be or how sharp the spread rate the repose angle again we're slumping so keeping it really low so it's fine sand and you want to have a height factor no here no and it is custom control how you get your wipe out again go back to my drum ask draw in this area you can see how it's working and then to a high field mask clear at the end so you can actually see what's going on and there you go so you can see that I guess the nice wipeout areas that are not tabletop flat it works slumping really works well too but I call organifi things okay what else do we have we have a high field clip so if you don't want all the peaks you have here you can say I feel old clip compete range and says ok I want to knock those guys out right there you can see I could soften the range by my max clip height it does take a mask so if you want to just know say I only want to work in a certain area for instance this area I could go and do let's just do another one high field mask it's now let's do my object so I'll bring the high field here I'll draw I don't know a box make my box 150 150 150 and I'll water that in here and so now I can make that my mask for my clip move it into an area make sure to intersect something and you can see it's only in that bounding box region that you'll get it and what's nice about objects is look how quickly it moves so I could move it to Japan area and just clip that area like that anything else you should know about that is the mass by objects a couple of things is there's a blur radius so you can soften the edge so it's not so extreme also in the clip there is a minimum clip so if I didn't have that mask on so let's just bypass the mask I can say anything lower than a certain value gets clipped also let's just cut that compute range and minimum clip you can see I could just cut off that whole bottom area okay and let's get rid of that clip we didn't need it we don't need this mass spec object anymore you've seen Highfield masked by feature which is kind of my go-to for masking because I could do all sorts of things like saying mass by Heights compute the range I only want the top areas to be taken care of here and I want to make sure that in that area you know I don't care about the slope but I care about the direction so I could say what my goal angle of this direction is gonna be and the spread so I go down here so you can see how it's changing in rotation we also now have a mass by occlusion so let's turn off the direction so it can figure out you know what areas are occluded and you can use that to kind of calculate your ridges and your valleys it's just quite cool but besides that we have something new too I think 65 and 17 high feels mass by occlusion so you don't have to go through all those features and there it is by itself and it has things like what the few distance is the step scale the number of searches for the occlusion so you can get better and lower quality but you want a minimum inclusion to be set at so right now you can see that I was able to target the ridges pretty well one thing that I want to show you before I wrap up this video is if we go to let's say a road three here and we look at the information tab here you'll notice that when we do a road in 17 we get the mask we get the bedrock sediment height debris and water well we don't get is flow there are two ways you're going to get flow right now the first way is right here where we did a slump if I look at my slump I will get a flow a flow Direction X Y Z add it to it but if I'm not gonna use a slump then how do I calculate flow so I could use it let's say in the game engine and in 16-5 remember flow was calculated every frame of the new road but now it's a post process all you have to do here is hit tab high field flow it takes a bit it gets calculated once and there is your flow and you can see in the information but I now have the flow added to my model so the last thing I want to talk about in this video is how do I get my height the old slash terrain out into other GCC's or game engines and the simplest way is just to save out the maps as images and we could do that with a high field output and I filled out put it's going to ask for a few things it's going to ask what you want to name your file and I have a foodie XR on my desktop so I'll just write it over it and then it's gonna say okay so you have red green blue and alpha channels what do you want to stick in those things so probably the most important thing here would be the height and then it's gonna ask me the output range no remapping for a linear format we're doing our auto remand from a zero to one range or you know whatever range you want green let's say that's my debris already map then comes the blue water and then the last one I don't know what we want we map for the Alpha maybe we want to look at um I didn't have some SS so maybe I want to look at the message top so I could plant certain things at the top there and I don't remember and then I just go save to disk and if I go to and play screwy is the best way to look at it so let me open up and play you know go to desktop and say food EXR load and there's my RGB alpha but if i look at the individual channels there's my height there's my debris water and my messes so that's one way of doing things another way of doing this would be to output it just as a high field now you could do that with a rap output and specifically here would be a proper geometry output and you guys not to do that so I'm not going to go through that another way is to convert it first to geometry and you can use a convert high field for that and there's a few options you want to convert to a polygon a polygon soup a BD b we're gonna say a polygon here and you then you have to choose do you want it just as a kind of skin like this or do you want to extrude a base and that will take a bit of time it's in this case there's a lot of Polly's and that way it will give you a nice base let's do is smooth shaded so you can see it actually creates this base for you which is nice um I'm gonna convert it back here to without a base and then say you know one of the things you probably want to do here is do a poly reduce because that's a lot of a lot of geometry and I probably hit the L key so let's go and find it again here it is and do a poly reduce before you I'll put it if you didn't know a good thing to do here and the poly reduce is set it to you know it's something really low I'll so to it one percent and it might take a little time to calculate but the beauty of it is once it's calculated it's super low it's stay saved the intermediate step so it's really fast if you wanted to say five percent of the polygons whatever you need to make it look good so here we are at one percent and it's a bit mushy for me so you know let's make it five percent and you can see immediately get more detail and now I can export and then I'll just use again a wrap geometry output for that another thing you do is drop down a cop network and to the cop network use a stop import node and then you just point to whichever high field you want let's say just Road three is I can't remember the name right now and I'll open it up this guy and you're gonna say set resolution from shop and set planes from shop and now you could go here and you go here's my high field and here's my debris and do everything that you would do in a compositor so in the next video I produced for you guys I'll go through the new high field scatter which is just an amazing operator and will make life much simpler for you when you want to lay down villages building cities trees bushes rocks and debris in a hierarchical way so stay tuned and I really do appreciate that you slugged it out and listen to me for two hours thank you so much and I hope you enjoyed it

Channel: Houdini

Views: 60,934

Rating: 4.9532943 out of 5

Keywords: gamedev, game development, game art, procedural environments, procedural, terrain

Id: n6_H6Rnml-Q

Length: 115min 17sec (6917 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 31 2018