Attached Link: Bloodsong's Gallery

heyas; guess what i found! (not that it was hidden, i just never looked at it. ;) ) you can use a function on a terrain. it's one of those buttons down near the lower right somewhere in the terrain editor. anyway, i have a pic in mind i want to work on, and it involves a distant city. i kinda dreaded trying to do that part... thought maybe i might stick in some freebie skyscraper models or something (ugh), or maybe i could make squares on a terrain fill in as buildings. so then i tried to figure out how to make squares on a terrain without doing too much work ;) i thought, i dunno, something would pixelize it and make plateus, and.... i dunno. then i found this button, and loaded a square-making function thing, and ta-da! blocks! with spacing between 'em for streets, even! wohoo! the city is made of two terrains offset from each other to fill in the gaps between 'em. the taller one has the grey building with mirrored windows material, and the shorter one has the salmon-coloured buildings with random 'lit' windows on it. and man, i finished the hardest part of my pic in like ten minutes! i'm happy! :)

oh... and need i say... might be a fun idea for a vue challenge? ;) to create a terrain with a function and... see what you can make with it. i know i want to play some more!

heyas; this is fun! :) here's a square function rotated 45 degrees for a rusty chain-link fence. and here's um.... actually, not sure quite what those are, some spot functions making a little future encampment... or a walled fort! okay, some stuff i learned: if you want just a function (ie: not to apply a function to a mountain or dunes, etc), reset the terrain to clear it. functions with lots of white will work on an empty terrain. if your function is very dark (ie: leopard spots), invert the terain first, it'll work better. the scale number works much like it usually does, the lower the scale, the more time the function repeats itself, in smaller iterations. i think 12 is actually the scale to use if you want one iteration of the function. um... well, it's some multiple of 3. :) the amplitude affects how high/low the function scale value makes the terrain. it goes from 0 to 100. around 30-40 is good. if the amplitude is too high and the scale is too small, you may end up with the function spiking itself out of existence. (experiment with the leopard spots, they're easy to see what's going on.) some functions dont seem to want to scale onto the terrain. the checkerboard functions, for example, only seem to make one square on the whole terrain. :/ the wood grain function and the vertical stripe one have their radial center in the lower left corner, and there's no talking them into putting that in the center of the terrain. (maybe if you reset the origin in the function editor.) i'm not sure what axis of the functions the terrain is actually following. to get the squares into diamonds for the chain link fence, i rotated the z to whatever (last slider) in the function edit: rotation deal. changed it to 45 degrees and got diamonds. besides making a new terrain out of functions, you can apply them on top of existing terrain features. (hmm, i'll have to try that for my fortress/city, try to make one on a hill.) you can also stack them on top of each other, but you might need to turn down the amplitude on functions that have strong blacks or whites.

ps: sure, the fence looks the same as a flat plane with a transparency map at this angle. but it does have some dimension. also, since it isn't using transparency (it uses terrain clipping), you won't get blue gunk! :)

This is great - Thanks Have fun Neil

Wow bloodsong-- I've been confronted by the exact same urge and problem already a few times; I want a distant city skyline, but I don't want to take all that time, ya know? So, I figure, well one of these days I'll get around to arranging a mess of blocks just right and then save that as a model.... But thanks---this is trememndous news! And yes, this idea will be the new challenge. :) Cheers, Mike

I was using the Mosiac hidden feature in bryce, exporting and importing into Vue :-) You've made my day.

bloodsong, this is SO FUCKING COOL!!!!!! FUCKIN AY!!!! why am I not home where I can try this? damn! k, back to non-cuss mode Mary

Uhh, yeah, what she said..LOL

wow! mary must really like this idea. she only cusses when she REALLY loves something!

AMAZING!!!!! uhmmmmm I am hesitant to ask what she does when she HATES some thing then ;-) j/k Sacred

Well Sacred, it certainly never involves cussing. Nope, sure doesn't. Not from lil old me.

LOL That was PRECIOUS Mary!!! I'll have to remember that one =) Sacred