Terrain Creation Workflow Proposal

[JanErik]

Totally agree. GeometryNodes need a few more noises, better masking tools are also really important and finally erosion simulation and we can create get nice landscapes.

[hmturnbull]

@LudvikKoutny

It seems like you think of a procedural texture node as final output of a terrain shape, rather than their basic building block, which is a wrong way to think about it.

I was in a bit of a rush yesterday, and upon reading my comment again today, I see that it was rather confusing. To clarify, yes, I am fully aware that each procedural texture is just a building block (although I can definitely see how what I wrote yesterday might give the wrong impression).

When I mentioned different algorithms, I was actually thinking about some of the more obscure noise functions, which could then be combined and distorted with other basic texture nodes. Sorry if I made it sound like they were supposed to stand on their own.

@LudvikKoutny

You don’t want to have one giant advanced procedural texture node with tons of hardcoded parameters.

I totally agree; that sort of texture node would be pretty useless.

@LudvikKoutny

Even the most basic perlin or fractal noise texture will end up looking like a realistic example if you feed it just through a single erosion simulation node.

Regarding erosion, I should clarify that when I expressed skepticism about “real-time erosion,” I wasn’t talking about erosion in general, but real-time simulations specifically. I agree with you 100% that some form of erosion simulation is needed.

By “real-time erosion,” I meant that the erosion shouldn’t be inherently tied to the scene time. Rather, I think we need an Erosion node with a “time”/“W” input so the user can plug any field into it (not just the scene time). I definitely garbled it a bit yesterday, but what I was trying (and arguably failing) to say is that an erosion function should be node-based.

Sorry for the confusion: entirely my fault.

[hmturnbull]

Good news! There’s work being done on some more fundamental nodes that will be useful for creating custom procedural textures:

• Signed Noise Node
• Vector Distortion

I know it’s not erosion, but it’s definitely a step forward.

[ManuelGrad]

While these nodes are convenient to have they are not enabling us to do something we couldn’t do before? Not complaining of course, they would be a welcome addition, just curious if I’m missing something.

[Kdaf]

Hi everyone here,

I changed school 6 months ago, and I need more time to study, so I haven’t been able to continue this project. And as the current direction of Blender’s node system is on other things, this project is no longer up to date.
I’ll close this thread and archive everything related to this. It was a great learning for me, I’ll keep some ideas in mind for future works. (The work done is still available at Blender Archive - developer.blender.org)

Have a good day
Colin