Sculpting soils with other soils
A capability of NDunes brushes is to be able to paint a landscape...with other landscapes! The process of creating complex terrains can be greatly enhanced thanks to this mechanism. First, let's select another soil to paint with. In the example below, we select a volcano shaped soil:
We can see that on selecting the "TRE_Old_Volcano_1" soil to paint with, the list of available painting channels goes greyed out and the "All channels" text is displayed. This is to indicate that all available data channels in "TRE_Old_Volcano_1" will be used to paint our current terrain.
Note that for a channel to be painted, it must exist both in the targeted first level soil of the current scene terrain AND in the soil that was selected to do the painting operation. Below, we see the effects of the application of the volcano soil used as a brush:
All shared soil channels are painted. This is illustrated below with the painting of the shared channel used to define the flow:
Using single pressure brushes
The brush toolbar has a button that can be unchecked to make sure that on pressing the mouse button, a soil brush gets applied once over the painted terrain. This can be used to avoid unwanted mouse gesture while holding down the mouse button when painting.
Hitting min or max elevation
It's quite common to reach the elevation boundary of a given channel when painting, as shown below:
This may happen when the elevation channel of the painted soil goes white. The brush painting operation is - in the end - a 2D texture image painting operation. In the example above, we do paint a quite high region of a soil with another one and we reach out the white point in the painted elevation channel:
This can be avoided by keeping in mind that this soil sculpting operation is a texture painting operation, so in order to keep in the elevation boundaries of the image, its height amplitude must be thought about beforehand. We'll cover this in the next paragraph here: Sculpting a terrain from scratch.
Brushes | Sculpting a terrain from scratch |