Terrains?
wscottart
Posts: 447
in The Commons
The fluid simulations , wow how exciting! Now that gets me wondering are there any toosl to help create terrains inside of Studio? That's the one tool that made Bryce so powerful and drew me deep onto 3d. I miss that old grey scale modeller with its clipping brackets and all. Yes I could set up an old machine and create and export them for use in Studio, but as somebody else pointed out its kinda nice to do all your work in one app as much as possible.
Love Daz Studio, but would really really love it be able to create terrains and skies =).

Comments
That would be awesome if we could do terrains.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4440536/#Comment_4440536
This Daz Studio's plugin creates terrains:https://www.daz3d.com/infinito-1-0
I've never used Bryce, so this may be a silly comparison for all I know, but I've used TerraDome a lot and it allows you to create some very nice terrains and skies.
Thank you for those links. I will check them out vey soon.
Just found this tool. I had no ideal this tool existed.
https://www.daz3d.com/infinito-1-0
Has anybody used this? Is this similiar to the terrain creator in Bryce? Is it easy, hard?
It is fairly easy to use and uses grey scale maps; so, you can, for example, use grey scale DEMs to create a terrain. However, I don't feel like the detail is as good as Bryce. This is a terrain I created a few years ago with Infinito using a Grand Canyon DEM.
Not bad, I wonder if that terrain would be better today using the smooth modifers. Its not bad it looks like it needs some subdivision, We can do that in Studio 4.10 can't we?
if you have photoshop this may work.
https://www.3d-map-generator.com/
Terradome 3 Iray
Export them from Carrara, which has an excellent terrain builder.
well yeah
I was just linking Casuals script for the poor souls who cannot look beyond DAZ studio
there is a whole world out there, hell Bryce even has a bridge, if too stingy to buy Carrara
also free are Gaea, Terragen
https://quadspinner.com/Gaea
https://planetside.co.uk/free-downloads/terragen-4-free-download/
I too have Carrara, but if If i have to work outside of Daz Studio then I would still choose Bryce for terrain creation. I've simply never encountered an other program that was as fun to use for terrain creation. I agree with everyone that there are alternatives many of which i use occasionally. I am simply looking for a way to create them directly in Daz so I am not jumping out all over the place. That infinito appears to be my solution for the moment.
My issue isn't usually creating terrains, there are loads of ways to do it. The big issue is usually TEXTURING.
Specifically, getting a nice texture that looks good at different distances is hard, and can turn a finely crafted mesh to looking 10+ years old tech.
It can take a bit of 'thinking outside the box' to get really nice textures for close-ups no matter which method is used to create the terrain. Carrara comes with some really nice presets that get a person started on some of the many ways that we can create our terrain shaders, yet they're all procedural - no texture maps. Making good tiling terrain maps can be really fun, and will make close-up terrain look really nice - especially if a little care goes into getting the scale right.
I like to look at terrains not as a single piece, but many. This way a single time-consuming scene can be reused as another, entirely different scene with a bit of rotation here, nudge there - and that way I can make a really nice texture map for my terrain under my feet - the immediate surrounding ground - and keep that as small as I can while still maintaining the right appearance. So some scenes might need a 100' x 100' terrain, others might do fine with a quarter that size, give the rest of the surrounding terrain makes up the difference.
Another (of many) major advantage to Carrara is the ability to quickly and easily create simple ground clutter objects and replicate them onto any surface in several powerful ways. The Plant editor is also incredible. The preset examples that come with Carrara are basic, but give great starting examples. While Howie farkes products (for Carrara) contain amazingly realistic presets that add directly to the system, thank to how Howie set it all up.
Finally, Carrara's ability to quickly duplicate these terrains around the scene, use relistic skies, etc., etc., makes for an amazingly easy way to drop in a spherical camera and make a Dome Map for your Iray (DS) needs. I've done a lot of experiments on this. HDRI can become a bit of an exercise in patience - getting it just right takes a lot of practice. But even without using HDRI as a dome map, Iray can make wonderful use of any good spherical map.
yeah... i was going to say it possible to export the Bryce terrains into DS ..
This!
Is there any chance you would considered making a set of elevation controlled shaders?
The free Ground Control plugin from Digital Carvers Guild plugin will import DEMs but they are totally unshaded: http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/os.php (click on the top heading until Ground Control comes up) and some elevation controlled shaders to use with it would be great.
there are 3Delight shaders that do this
Where ?
radonmised by location https://www.daz3d.com/rock-shader-for-daz-studio
are others related to elevation but damned if I can find them, I possibly own them or DAZ culled them
I did however find how to do it
https://direct.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/62081/daz-studio-height-based-terrain-shaders-or-similar
if you render a height based terrain shader from top view you could use that texture
I used to do that in Carrara before I got inagoni baker
now of course since it is no longer for sale people without it still have to do that, carrara will render normal maps too
so you can make some fairly good textures to use in DS on your imported Carrara terrains
Carrara has a isometric camera too
I have a shader I've been poking at that layers elevation and Normal-based layering; I'll have to poke at it some more. Mmm.
Ground Control to Major Tom.
There were quite a few shaders here for terrains ... i think i saw them, because i all of a sudden one daqy said to myself, geez self, you have Bruyce and it exports terrains, or objects ... then I looked around and found some, plus I just added shaders for rocks and stuff like that to what I imported and it looked basically OK.
The infinito looks like it was going to be developed to version 2 back in 2012. Does the current version work in daz Studio 4.10?
Terradome 3 looks pretty cool too. I'm tempted to give them all a try.
Yes
I like it but it uses morphing terrains and doesn't work with grey scale maps or DEMs
Using high poly primitive planes with dFormer/push modifyer weight maps works pretty well for me.