Hey Mazak!

Thank you so much for ordering the book. 

And thanks for posting that link. I got distracted yesterday, and am still.

Anyway, I'd like to point out a few artists from our Vue community who were involved with making some images from the book. They did some fantastic work!

Visit http://www.vue7fromthegroundup.com/about.php

Hi Mazak,

It will be available in Europe, but not until June. If you want it earlier than that, you can still order it through Amazon.com.

Yup. The book is scheduled for release in mid May and everything is moving according to plan. I've seen page samples and will soon be diving into the proofs.

Vladimir and I are very, very excited about this book. We had wished for a book like this, and thought about writing a book, then got a bit of a push in that direction. It's been a cool ride.

Anyway, later on today I might be giving you another link of interest for the book.

This is a really quick, off the top of my head reply. Try adding a filter node that would constrain the altitude values before the blender. (not talking about the altitude constraint in the influence of environment tab of the filter editor, but the filter itself bringing any value above a certain height down to a lower value so nothing appears above your set height)

But functions are really visual. If that sounds wierd or doesn't work, can you give me a screenshot of the function you made?

Thanks.

Hey Zone8,

Sorry about the displacement materials slowing down.

The book isn't out yet, but look for it in May. However, Geekatplay has a series of tutorials called Discovering Vue which I recorded.

And last, :), slope constraints can be found in at least three places. In the Advanced Material Editor, If you're using a Mixed material you will have an Influence of environment tab. In the middle of that tab is the Influence of slope. That isn't exactly a constraint, but it works with slope and is part of what makes mixed materials useful. Layered materials, where you haven't selected mixed type, but you are adding layers, will give you an Environment tab. This has an actual Slope constraint group. The values on the Slope range slider go from -1 to 1. 1 is a flat surface. So is -1, but that is upside down (As, for instance, on the underside of a sphere) and 0 = vertical; straight up and down. Anyway, so you see you can set it so a material layer only appears at around a 45 degree angle (as with scree - the small rocks that break off a vertical rock wall and pile up at the bottom). Altitude constraint can also help with this too. As you can probably see, you can control the material through slope better with layers than using mixed materials.

Anyway, the third place this slope influence appears is in the Influence of environment tab in the Filter editor for materials. This lets you have a filter that, for instance, works very strongly if there is a slope. Here, you can't change what values are influencing it. The influencing values are -1 and 1. This means that with a strong influence, things are more likely to appear on flat places than vertical. So you can make some kind of color or bumpiness appearing through a function and filter be stronger in flat areas than sloped areas.

Hope that helps.

Ami

You can also create your own rocks in Vue using displacement materials. This is very exciting, since it allows for different kinds of rocks and minerals.

Working with materials in Vue is really an important aspect of making realistic terrains. For instance, a couple of months ago I discovered using slope constraints with filters in a bumpy and colored material to get a great looking layered plateau with soft rock layers and hard rock layers of different colors. Have to play around with that some more now that I have a bit more time.

Also, for the terrain chapter in our book we had the goal to create something great looking using terrains only that could be explained in a single tutorial. I think we've accomplished that. Our opening chapter image was pure Vue as well and features dramatic, stark mountains with snow in them that are incredible.

Resolution in terrains (and plants) count and can often be the reason for less satisfactory results.

Okay smallspace,

E-on may have little competition, but they're not a huge corporation, either. People complain about prices going up, well those prices have to pay for the building, employees and all their benefits, equipment, packaging, etc. As a partner in a small business, one that has suffered server problems and lost sales because of it, I can promise that it isn't easy. You don't know why the server crashed under the dl pressure, and I can guarantee that there are several people at e-on software totally stressed out right now. Everyone involved in C3D is losing sales right now, including e-on.

Argh from a serious lurker.

Paula!

Ack, that's horrible. Glad it didn't do too much damage. Hope it is all getting worked out. What a mess to have to deal with during the holiday season.

Take care.

We don't have cats in the house, or dogs. Once we had both, and the dog tipped a speaker over on my laptop that was on the floor (was working while on my stomach). HD was okay so we just transferred everything.

But then, there was the time I was 5000 words into a story, and I got worried that I didn't have backup. 5000 was a lot for me back then. Even now it would be a loss of about 15-30 hours.

So my husband installed a CD burner in my computer for me. During that process, we had to unplug the harddrive. It was only a year old, but it fried. All gone. Everything I'd ever written that I hadn't printed out.

At the time I told him that I would rather break both my arms than lose all of that. 

Thanks Greg,

I'll add that to the list, and our Geekatplay quotes if that is okay.

Very glad to have helped you :)

Yah, I got all of those. 

Thanks :)