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Landscape enhancement for Blender3D
Erosion is a landscape enhancer for Blender3D that works on a "per vertice" manipulation of your landscape. It modifies the mesh to a more natural and organic flowing look, and generates UV-map channels for use in complex shading setups with low res- textures. 


You can download it at Click 2 Sell for €20.- 

The menu of Erosion offers a few parameters to define the way the surface is eroded. 

"Size" and the "new landscape" button are for generating a random landscape from scratch. But you can apply Erosion onto any mesh you want.

"centuries" is the number of steps which the erosion shall be simulated. the higher the longer the calculation will take.

"erosion%" is the value at which fractures will vanish from the mountain.

"bulge" will define how convex the resulting debris will gather. a meadowhill for examplle will have high bulge value. a canyon will have low bulge value.

"peakbias" and "groundbias" give the borders for smoothing the ground. the peaks wont smooth much. the ground will smooth out strong. 

"Wind" and "angle" define the strength and direction of the wind. it will influence both: the vertice-offset due to erosion, and the uv-map coordinate of the z-normal channel (which is usefull for sand and snow laying on the landscape)

"length" and "count" will determine how many additional thin flows will run down from the peaks and how long roughly in percent of the hight. 

"forest" and "forestbias" will generate particles for trees up to the bias level, in percent of the hight.

"optimize" will subdivide and decimate the mesh to get an efficient topology. this is recommended if you don't care about the exact position of your mesh-vertices and topology.

"camtrack" will subdivide the mesh with respect to the distance from the camera. this is very useful to save polycount if the landscape isn't for interactive use, but has a fix cameratrack to be rendered from.

"vertcount" limits the optimization to avoid too high polycount. usually some value between 150.000 and 1.000.000 is convenient. higher mesh resolutions will take very very long to caclulate. (up to an hour)

"hq" will add a subdivision modifier and a displace modifier after the calculation. this is to save mesh resolution and get smooth uvmap-flows.

"vgroup" generates some vertex groups for further work on the ladnscape, like fracture-vertices, "forest" vertices (be sure to check vgroup if you generate forrest particles) peaks etc.

"selected" only modifies the selected vertices, and leaves the unselected in place (except for optimization).

"z only" will manipulate vertices only along the z-axis.

choose a "landscape" from the selector to define which mesh to manipulate.
click on "erode" button to manipulate the vertices of the chosen landscape.

click on "map" to generate uv-maps for the material.



 

the landscape in the image above was mapped and textured using the low res texture on the left. Complex uvmap channels vanish the need for detailed texture work, leaving the texture to a simple gradient from "clean" stone to "dirty" debris. the uv-map is doing the work of coloring each vertice with the right color, so that a natural impression of sand flowing down is achieved. But the texture is very low resoluted and therefore memory friendly.


precisely speaking the v coordinate in the uvmap is for the height and the u coordinate for the erosion. the more erosion the more right. the higher the landscape the higher the v-coordinate. the simple gradient textures below show examples for green mountains (left), sandy canyons (middle) and vulcano lava (right) 



 

 Copyright by Richard Nagy 2015. Click2Sell is an authorized reseller of nm-8 Erosion.