Love the idea of using procedural terrains, but the handbook is a bit confusing and very technical. I would love to have some practical experience reports, about what can be achieved with this type of terrain and basic settings.

Hi Singular3d. Sorry I can't help... I'm also a bit confused. Sure was hoping to see some interesting responses to this by now.

What I've discovered so far is that 1) you don't lose detail the closer in you zoom (no more annoying pixelation of the terrains). Basically the biggest advantage to procedural terrains though is that you use a function to control the shape of the terrain, this allows you to stretch out the terrain to any size you want and it will generate new terrain, for example, if you set up a function to generate canyons, and you stretch the terrain out, it will make new canyons while using the function to control the scale of the canyons. I'm not sure if this makes sense, I will try to post a screenshot in the near future as I am not presently at my laptop to do a render.

Ok, check out the next four posts for some test renders I was finally able to do tonight. This First one is a basic procedural terrain using a stepped function to control the shape of the terrain.

This render is of the same viewpoint, with the terrain scaled up using the grips in the viewports, nothing else has been changed or altered

And finally (at least for the scale comparisons) here is an even more scaled up version, notice that the real advantage to procedural terrains is immediately apparent as you can create huge expanses of terrains rather than having to generate individual terrains for all the different features you want. The added bonus is that this final render has the terrain coming in at only 5,750 polygons!

Acck, forgot to attach the file, here's the last comparison shot...

And my last test render is a zoomed in version of the middle terrain, done to show how you don't lose any detail the closer in you get, all that was done was zooming in the camera, nothing else.

This is awesome. Seems like we are now able to do some Terragen like terrains in Vue. I always wanted to combine the awesome terrains from Terragen with the much more sophisticated options from Vue (plants, props, figures,...). Could you please post your settings too? Thanks for your investigation... - Singular3D

Here's the terrain settings, my advice is to just start playing with the settings and see what you come up with, I haven't even bothered with the manual so far, it was just more fun to figure this stuff out on my own, I've always found that that's the best approach with Vue.

This kind of scaling is something I hadn't tried, yet. Interesting! Forget the manual for this, nanoty. It gives very little on this subject. As you say... just experiment.

Which version of Vue is this? And which versions have this function?

This is Vue5e, so all versions of Vue5 should have it. What I find most interesting is how textures behave with procedural terrains. If you can match up the right terrain filters with the right material, results can be awesome. That's the kind of stuff I was hoping to see more about in this discussion.

I didn't have time to get into that yet, but you're right DigReal, the combination of procedural textures with procedural terrains is leaps and bounds ahead of the way Vue handled terrains before, here's a terrain and texture I created when I was beta testing Vue 5.

A couple things to note on the render I attached, the water is part of the texture on the terrain, the terrain is a single terrain with a single texture that has been mixed 18 levels deep.

Wow, now that's an impressive effort. I've yet to come close to that level of control over meterial position. And the water is part of it!? Wow, again. At least knowing it's possible should encourage me to keep trying. Thanks for posting that image.

Thanks, be warned, mixing that many materials does have an adverse effect on render times, especially when you tack on GI or Radiosity. Sometimes it's worth it though, since I made that material I have ended up using it as my starting point on most of my terrains. I usually don't hang on to the water portion either, even though it's configured to map to parts of the terrain that are completely flat at lower elevations, it sometimes will form mini lakes where I don't want them, but it was a fun experiment to see what I could do with textures :) Here's a close up shot of the same terrain (to show procedural terrains ability to maintain detail as you get closer to them), just zoomed in on the center mountain.

This is absolutely what I was looking for, but I think I will need a lot of experimenting with it. I also posted a thread here about the new material system of Vue5. Didn't get much response until yet. Seems this is something only few people use by now, but it seems to have an extreme high potential. Any tutotials or other practical experience around? Thanks for your efforts - Singular3D