| TIPS |
| 1. Creating A Landscape / Terrain Object In trueSpace There are are free and commercial plug-ins available that produce terrain objects (PrimPlus is one free plug-in, for instance). You could also save a terrain object from another package and load it into trueSpace. It can sometimes be useful to use ThermoClay to smooth off any unpleasant sharp edges on a low poly landscape. |
| 2. Adding Detail To Your Texture The chances are that your texture will look rather bland if you use TG Slope on its own with the default values. The first step in adding more interest and detail to the texture is to use the noise functions in TG Slope itself, as these will break up the boundaries between the colours. The next thing to try is to add a bump map, since the shader responds to those as well as to the geometry of the object. If you have a landscape, with “snow” on the flat areas and “rock” on the steep areas, then the white colour will lie on the flatter areas of the geometry and the flatter areas of the bump map. This would introduce little areas of rock amongst the snow, but could also add little patches of snow down a steeper slope (where it might accumulate on the bumps). You could also try layering colour shaders, either adding another noise pattern beneath the TG Slope effect, or even mixing 2 versions of TG Slope Bands, setting the ranges so they don’t overlap. With a 50% mix, this would work to double the number of bands you could have in the shader, but remember that where one shader produced no colour, it will be mixing black into the other shader’s colour (so you’d have to increase the colour saturation in the colours to compensate). The final thing to do is to increase the detail in your geometry, by using more polygons to represent the landscape (this can be increased in PrimPlus for example, or you can export from another package using a higher resolution / number of polygons), or you might even try Wiggledy on the landscape object to add some more randomisation. |
| 3. More Than Just A Pretty Landscape Although Slope was created primarily with landscapes in mind, it doesn’t have to be used for such things. Since it adds colours coming from a particular direction, or put another way, colours which lie on parts of the object that face in a particular direction, you can use it to add moss onto a rock, lichen onto a tree, rusting onto a piece of metal, and so on. By setting the colours to be fairly similar, you can use Slope to add some interesting but subtle variation onto an object in place of just a plain colour. These colour variations can be used to accentuate the effects of bump mapping, for example (and could even be used as a means of emphasising bump mapping under radiosity). It’s a shader that’s well worth experimenting with in a range of different circumstances! |
| TG Slope Intro |
| TG Slope Parameters |
| TG Slope Tips |
| TG Slope FAQ |
| TG Slope Samples |
| TG Pack Index |