Terrains And Landscaping

[Jonnie63]

I made an item of furniture which is really a bit of landscape using Blender.



I followed directions from

https://johnflower.org/tutorial/make-mountains-blender-heightmaps

Height maps in this context are just monochrome images where (say) white stands for a high point and black stands for a low point. They can be created "by hand" in a creative way simply by adding some white spots and then grey spots to a black image and then using graphics tools to blur, smudge and generally smooth it all out.

The mountains in the tutorial were a little severe for the lawn so I used a graphics application to blur the original height map image I wanted bumps not jagged mountains.

I saved out the mesh as an OBJ file and then imported as an item of furniture.

The nice thing about the SweetHome import was that I got not only to size but also to stretch and distort by unchecking the box that keeps proportions, I stretched this one out from the size it imported as which was only a few cm to 16 metre square with a max height of 2 metre.

I would be the first to admit its a bit ugly - like there has been a punch-up between two out-sized moles but I think the potential is there.

A bit of graphics work and it could turn into a convincing landscaping or perhaps a pond ( as long as the water level is higher than ground zero otherwise ground zero will show instead ).

Maybe there is a library out there of hundreds of freebies but anyone wanting a custom terrain might find it useful?

If terrains are in demand but not available I would be happy to get involved in getting a small library together for use by others - who knows maybe its already out there - just a thought.

[Puybaret]

I liked also the idea of deforming an area proposed by Jacques (Google English translation).
You'll find also other good ideas proposed by contributors in the forum, like in this thread or that one.

[Jonnie63]

Hi Emmanuel,

Thanks for the leads, I agree with some of the points raised in those leads.

These are the issues I encountered and solutions.

I set myself the target of creating a terrain to more or less completely surround a house, if the land is not completely flat then builders still usually level the area for the house.

I quickly gave up with height maps available online but I will not lengthen this post going into the detail.

I tried various graphics noise filters but they did not "respect" my constraints - for instance a zero height around the boundary of the height map.

In the end it was simplest to use the airbrush and blur tools in my graphics editor and paint it myself. I was careful to arrange for the boundary and central areas to be darkest so that the texture would not flood the house or have open seams around the edge.

To avoid excessive triangle count/ file size I used Meshlab

[specifically quadric edge collapse decimation]

When I imported the terrain into Sweethome, even though I had been taken great care the terrain texture (grass in my case) flooded the house it was at the right level 'by eye' but I guess a small numeric issue meant that the grass was maybe a few millimetre above the floor and although I like nature I am not fond of grass carpet [:(]

The final correction was to go into blender and cut the terrain so that all areas at "ground" zero were cut off, this also gives SweetHome a nice datum plane for import - the imported part now automatically sits neatly on the ground when imported and does not flood the house.




I think if I did this one again I would do the following things differently.

1. I think I would be even harder with the decimate settings in Meshlab - I asked for a 90% reduction in number of triangles but I think I could have been much harder - its only for grass hills !

2. I think it would be easier to make up a terrain from a set of small hill clusters - more flexible.

The process is simple so if anyone shows interest and there are not ready examples out there already then I would be happy to make a collection of terrain furniture that others could use, I think for grass hills it should be possible to have fairly small part sizes so that it does not slow down people's machines.

[Jonnie63]

In this photo I had a different scalings on the grass textures for the hills and the 3D view default ground - when both textures were set up identically it was harder to see the hills ( I am using the basic render options so no shadows or subtle shading to help make the distinction ).