Improving Terrains
I have not really been satisfied with some aspects of my terrain. In particular, while I was OK with the flat grass covered surface, I was not really satisfied with the vertical sides of the chalk pit, which appeared to be somewhat blurred. Although I don’t expect the sides of the chalk pit to feature much in my movie, I will later need to have some reasonable chalk cliffs for my set of Reculver, so time spent now improving my techniques will not be wasted.
I have tried using diffuse maps with greater levels of detail, but did not really observe any improvement in the detailing of the sides of the chalk pit.
The blurring seems to occur because when using a diffuse map to cover the whole surface, the amount of space dedicated to the image of the vertical sides is minimal.
As the Diffuse Map above shows, there is not nearly as much surface area dedicated to the sides of the chalk pit, as there would be if you were looking at them from the side rather than from above. So the image of the chalk surface has had to be stretched in the vertical plain to produce the cliff sides seen in the first image above.
iClone 5 also supports Height Maps. I have just started to experiment with them using Earth Sculptor and iClone 5. The key difference is that a well as the height map itself, there is a Masking Map. This allows up to 4 textures to be independently applied to the colour highlighted parts of the Masking Map.
Although I have only done a quick experiment so far, I think you will agree that the results look promising. I applied a rock material rather than a chalk one (because I couldn’t find a chalk one at the time).
I have also purchased the B2M package and will be experimenting with making my own materials in future posts.
Tony