Hi everyone. A little help would be appreciated on a small problem I cannot seem to get past. If you have a look at the image, you will see that I am using mixed materials to create a river flowing through the terrain. I am using a map to separate the materials from each other (second image) but I cannot seem to get the water off the sides of the terrain/banks. I have reduced the map, but of course that did not work and I am at a loss as to how I am going to correct it. If you can help, please do and I thank you in advanced. Take care Gareth:)

here is the second image:)

I think you must work with the filter of the distribution a little more. Select one that is steeper and not so linear. I guess this will do it. You can find a good example here in an old thread about distribution of objects in an Ecosystem. There i learned the trick. Do a search for that.

I have already done that, my friend. I just grabbed this screenshot from my starting point. But I have used almost every filter that I have...lol And still the same problem:(

Message edited on: 07/18/2005 07:10

Another thing to try - you have 'smooth belending strip' set to 10%. In your case, I would try setting this parameter to 0% as you want a sharp transition between the two materials.

Thanks for your reply agiel. I have also tried that with no success:(

My friend, maybe we turn the table now and you explain how you managed it to come so close! :-)) I tried it out with much worse results. Ok, i am not the worlds best map expert i guess but if you explain what you did we all can check where the "unsharpness" is. BTW, very ambitient to do it in one go. I would have done probably 2-3 terrains to get that result!

why not just use your map to have two distinct terrains? one water, one grass? :) ie use the map oon two terrians, positive for one, negative for the other?

Hi silverblade33. The only reason I havent/cant do that is because I have pretty much maxed my computer resources. The scene stands now at 1.6 billion polygons and another terrain crashes my machine. I have tried a few times and though I have created a scene (Southern Migration) with significantly more Polly's (around 4 billion), some scenes dont like/allow you to add to them I assume it has to do with the type of objects being used. I thank you for the suggestion though:) To wabe, I created my terrain the usual way, then exported the terrain out as a .jpg file. Opened it in Photoshop and the aria for the river was made white, and the other parts of the terrain were made black. Back in Vue, I created a mixed material (parametric) and used the map I made in Photoshop to drive/separate the materials. Thanks... Gareth:)

I guess you already set the water for distribution by altitude ("influence of environment"). So obvious i hesitate to mention it, but maybe that got missed somehow?

I attempted a stream some time ago in Vue 4 Pro, with a filter for stream bank and to fake moist ground near the water.

I made a little tutorial back then at Terrain Filter 1

This is a very interesting way to create riverbanks, even if you don't have it just right at the moment. I think I'll save this one as a pdf. Thanks for the tip!

Bookmark ;) Mazak

Attached Link: http://panthersxchange.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=171

You need to use a filter on Material 2, on the affected by height field. Basically you want to chop that texture away as soon as it gets any real height with a steep filter. You'll probably need a filter that goes from the top left corner, and drops dramatically so that it's at 0 value by the time its gone 10% across the filter or something similar. I attached a link to a tut I made, although it doesn't play around with either water or terrain height, it does show you how to play with filters.