Alright, first and foremost, I am not a massive Blender user. I mostly use C4D and Corona. However, I have since needed to move onto less expensive methods of doing what we all love. Building and rendering landscapes. So, I picked up Blender and decided to test my limited (but good enough) pythons scripting. I have made a plugin, which I call “Groundwork”. It is designed specifically to be used with Gaea.
What it does:
- Auto imports your landscape at the right dimensions (EXR or 16bit PNG. EXR recommended) with correct metrics. Or, if a Gaea scene is not available, a heightmap instead (with manual tweaks).
- Viewport and Render resolutions. Work on a low res viewport, auto adjusts at time of render to a higher resolution. Caps at the resolution exported out of Gaea.
- Iterative work. If you make a change in Gaea, build, and you have Gaea setup to make a 00X folder for each new build, a refresh button will pull from the latest build and replace your landscape and masks.
- Spacing details, so you can get an idea of what your landscape size is (useful for scaling objects, materials, etc.)
- Material layers, which can be auto derived from the Gaea build folder. Flow, Deposition, Rivers, Snow, Slope, Custom are all available right now but more will be added later.
- Material layers can be applied via exported masks.
- Material layers have triplanar mapping available to them, which is just a simple tick box. Also, stochastic randomization of the textures in the material, to cut down on repeating texture patterns. Both can be enabled at the same time or individually, or not at all. Materials are also auto-built in the shader/node network. Just grab all of your texture files from the import (color, displacment, normal, etc.) and Groundwork will do the rest.
- A color map (again, auto found via the Gaea build folder, which is applied accurately over the landscape automatically. Takes precedent in the far distances away from from the camera (or look dev, whichever you want to use it as, or don’t use it at all).
- Auto calculated mid and far band material blends. Small scale textures up front, big scale textures further away. Automatically calculated based on terrain scale, camera height, and a few other factors. Or, manually derived based on your own visualfeedback.
- Object Scattering. Which can use slope, height, masks, and even “Keep-Out” masks (aka, don’t put things here, masks), all work in tandem. So you can use a 1 or the other or all of them at once. You can even use slope and height to scatter objects within a mask. Memory and performance optimizations, like limiting instances, setting different viewport vcs. render amounts, using lines, dots, cards, basic geo, as substitutes until render time.
Scattering is still being worked on and fleshed out. Will eventually have “stay away” from feature, where you can have objects not populate close to objects you don’t want (foreign objects, like boulders, other hand placed objects. Plus a few other things inspired by Vues scattering tools (which I love).
This is not available for public use yet but I do plan on making it free for people who want to try it (maybe eventually will ask for donations if people are willing).
I will make a video on this show casing it but for now, here are some screen shots.
The render is my test landscape. It isn’t much and I will be making a new one to fully show things off, with a fully built/populated scene, rendered with decent atmosphere and lighting.
In any case. I call it “Groundwork” because it’s a tool that helps you kick things off. Not a means to an end. This tool is not intended to replace proper hard work. It should save you all a good amount of time
