With Gaea road textures or imported ones, as soon as the Dunes node is active the road texture disappear.
Is this a “bug” or an user error ?
Pretty sure this is just the settings of the Dune node and that you may want to use the Road nodes Road Output into the Dunes Removal input:
The default settings of the Dunes node are quite aggressive, they cover everything in a ton of sand:
Above you can see the road is fully covered now.
But if you want the road to be fully clear of sand, you can use the Road nodes Road Ouput to the Dunes Removal input node and that will get all the sand off the road.
From there, drop the Dune nodes Amount to something much smaller, like 0.01:
Here you can see now that the Road is fully visible in the dunes:
John
Yeah, maybe I misunderstood the initial pictures. It looked like sand color at first to me.
When you’re in the “Road” node, what you see is just a preview. The actual texture and mask for it are in the other outputs. The “Out” output provides pure height, as with all other shaping nodes, so it’s perfectly consistent that it remains textureless.
Here’s a quick example on how to add the road back during texturing.
Help 13 (Texturing roads).terrain (19.1 KB)
Of course, if you’re going to cover the road with some other surfaces (dunes/debris/else), you’ll have to do the same to the respective mask.
Thank you ! This is a perfect illustration of what I have not been able to achieve.
Thank you. I’m trying to get a textured (T1) terrain with a textured(T2) road, with some textured (T3) dunes covering part of the terrain and road.
I’m not able to get the desired look. Are you having better results? If so, please share.
But… Using the road out in to dunes removal, have you been able to get some dunes covering parts of the road ?
Also, my point was not that the road isn’t visible but that its texture ( Gaea road, highway or imported one) “disappear” / is replaced by the terrain’s color as soon as the dunes node is active. Even if the road is 100 % visible through the dunes like in your exemple.
Yup. I’m seeing the same issue.
My initial thought is the road is just a black and white mask, white being the road:
When Road Out is plugged into the Removal input of the Dunes, that tells me white or a value of 1 fully removes the sand.
My first thought would be to blend (multiply) a noise over the white road mask.I tried this and wasn’t really liking how it looked (try this thought and see if it yields what you’re looking for).
After playing with the dunes and road node for a bit, I realized something:
It seems to me a Road node should come after the Dune node and not before (at least that’s my consensus so far in the last 30 minutes of looking at this). I don’t see any documentation on it yet.
ROAD before DUNE:
Road on basic hilly terrain on left:
Undesirable results from Dune node. The sand is too tall compared to the road. Changing amount to a low value like 0.005 still doesn’t seem right.
DUNE before ROAD:
Switch it around and place the Road node after the Dune node and immediately the two work together in a more harmonious way:
**Note the road on the right, on the surface of the sand, not hundreds of feet below the surface like the road on the left.
This doesn’t answer the question about getting sand onto the road (unless like I suggested at the beginning of breaking up the road mask and seeing if you can get something out of that), but I do think this would be the way to getting to that point as it seems to me the Road should be considered the last modification to a “natural” location.
In other words, which comes first the sand dunes or the road. Dunes were there first, the road came after (perhaps there are real world locations or geological occurrences where an area once was not sand and dunes and had roads and then over time became sandy).
But it seems to me in terms of Gaea… the design intention of the road node seems to act like nature existed first and humans built roads on top of nature.
John
Got it, you can put the road before the dunes it seems. My initial thought was good, but I think it’s good for roads that don’t need sand on top.
For sand on top, Dunes after Roads seems to be the way.
I’m blending a gabor and perlin together, then blending that with the road mask to remove parts of the road mask:
You can see the breakup of the road mask here:
And now you can get sand on the road. I played with shaper on the final removal mask to push the sand onto the road just a little:
And a longer Dune duration:
Getting the road texture back in under the sand that is on top of the road seems a little tricky now but probably feasible, trying that now.
John
With sand after dunes, I can get dunes covering the road here and there playing mainly with “duration” and “amount” dunes’s paramaters and without tweaking the road mask BUT…
It means that I adapt dunes until “by chance” the road is covered by sand here and there. In the process, the dunes don’t overall look anymore like I wanted to =>
Tweaking the road mask as you do looks like the way to go once you have your dunes looking as you wish to and don’t want their look to change.
Now, I’m struggling a lot trying to texture the whole thing… = Terrain + road + dunes !
I’m jumping around between various tasks today, but I might revisit my test file later to try to get the textures all working. Not sure when just yet.
Updated here, TLDR; I think the Sand output of the dune node is broken, or the Dune node needs an additional output (If I’m misunderstanding what the Sand output is meant to be)
So should it be reported as a bug? Or perhaps it should be expected since it’s still in development?
I’m not sure what exactly your troubles are currently.
@GTJohn @MarcSaunier @ArtEyes I’ve made a demo file containing a mountain with lowlands, a road and dunes that partially cover the road. I didn’t make it look too pretty, the main purpose was to have the colours of the base, the road and the sand clearly distinct from each other to see how the masking works.
You can tweak anything in the nodes (including rearranging the road spline etc) and the masks will stay clean and where they should be, including sand always keeping its colour over the road and the road keeping its colour over the terrain.
Help 14 (Texturing roads with covering sand).terrain (54.5 KB)
If you have any questions, feel free to ping me for help.
the Sand output of the dune node is broken, or the Dune node needs an additional output (If I’m misunderstanding what the Sand output is meant to be)
Not broken, but it’s misleading.
“Sand” output is displayed as the actual amount of sand, so it’s in the range of 0-1 relative to your project limits (0 = min height, 1 = max height), same as water masks’ “Depth” outputs. It’s meant to indicate the amount of sand, not to be a hard mask. There is currently no hard mask for sand. To make one, use “Sand” with Threshold (0.0001 works the best). It’s in the file, you can find it to see how it works. “Sand” reflecting the amount of sand has the logic behind it so that you can chain Dunes nodes, plugging Sand into Sand to manipulate it further (say, the first Dunes node has a big scale and certain dune formation, the second has much lower scale and another formation or even wind direction).
It’s misleading because with other masks Snow and Water provide you hard masks, not here. I’ve told the devs about it, but I’m only a single voice, if you also find it confusing, you can always file feedback tickets in the app, those help, Quadspinner read everything, so the more people say that it’s a UX problem, the more likely it is to get reviewed.
P. S. @TyXanders Kindly merge this topic with this topic, they are essentially one thread scattered in two places at this point.
P. P. S. Some project screenshots for visualisation:
Very helpful. Looking through the graph now. Thank you for providing an example of it working.
Thank you and yes very helpful. Have you been a beta tester ?!?
Anyway, I’ll look in depth at your graph tomorrow. Thx again !
Yes, I’m officially allowed to tell about it now, although I didn’t intend to on my own. :P
I’ve had such an honour. =)
As a tester, I would very much like to say, however, that the team truly reads all the feedback and they try to do everything they can to address issues and suggestions with what resources they have, so the general message is, don’t hesitate to create tickets and share about your experience. Including the case when everything just works very well. ;)