I picked up V4 in the last minutes of the closeout sale, and I'm having a great time with it. I'm amazed that there is effectively no documentation on using it. In fact, the manual was buried in the download zip and did not install to the working directory. It took a tech support call to find it. Oh well. My question: Can someone point me to a tutorial that discusses how to blend the junction between two terrains? I don't have the image here, but I can describe it: a forested island terrain embedded in a beach terrain and all surrounded by water. The water/sand junction is hard-edged, which is fine (though a wet perimeter would be nice...), but so is the edge where the foliage on the mountain meets the beach. In 2D, the fix would be feathering. I don't suppose it's called that in 3D, but there must be a way to do it. Please, not in postwork. Any ideas would be helpful. Thanks, Mick

You could export the terrains into your 2D editor and do the feathering there. I would crank up the resolutions of the terrains before doing the export / import process. That may help that matter of Vue's terrain imports having steps between the pixels instead of slopes.

Thanks for the ideas. Doing the feathering in postwork is an obvious compromise. I'm not looking forward to having to hand dither all the edges in my renders. I was hoping there is some sort of dithering/feathering feature I hadn't found in Vue. Alternatively, is there something in V5 or projected for V6? I'm getting a company copy of the newest and greatest next spring. The resolution doesn't help in this case, BTW. I had already cranked it up to 300 DPI and 1600 etc resolution with no joy. M

I've read that you can use the overhead camera to take an image of multiple terrains together in order to create a single terrain. I haven't tried this though. I think one saves the z-depth image as a new terrain picture, to be used as a terrain import.

In resolution, I was referring to the 'terrains' pixel-size and not the render dpi. A typical terrain's resolution would be 256 x 256. I would use a terrain resolution of 512 x 512 for export and import cycling.

V5 has the procedural terrains. It may be possible to mix a texture map and procedural functions to create an acceptable output. The possibilities are broad. Perhaps someone else could chime in about now concerning procedural terrains.

Charles

Haven't tried larger terrains. I'll give that a shot tomorrow. Fun program. I hope the rumors of a Richard Schrade "book" are true, even if it is just a DVD. M

Just a suggestion, but why not use a mixed material on the forested terrain, mixed with the beach material? That way you could adjust how far the beach material extends into the forest material with either a distribution map or using the slope and altitude effects tab. Shouldn't be too difficult to achieve a more realistic transition between the two terrains. There's an ultra basic tutorial about mixing materials at my site that may give you some ideas on what you are trying to achieve in Vue. http://niandji.com/html/tutorials.html

Been away from the forum. I wanted to thank you for the link to the tutorial. It cleared up some stuff for me. Very compact and understandable. Cheers, Mick