Infinito Experiments
Novica
Posts: 23,887
Well, after 3 years, loaded up Infinito and am going to play with it. I'm reading the PDF and showing you my results as I go. I'm definitely going to have to smooth out the terrain or my characters won't have anywhere to stand, much less sit! I have to say, this is a lot of fun though. I'm showing you my results from my settings, so you'll know what NOT to do, or what TO do, depending on if you like it!
This thread is for anyone playing around with Infinito- starting out, or experienced (and please share some tips/settings if you can help us out! If you have any questions, feel free to ask. (I can't help you, that's for sure, but others might be able to!)
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Here's the screenshots of my setup. And the results once I clicked Terraform (which shows you the initial results) The first two show the same thing, but from different views. See at the top of the viewport? You simply slide the slider to change from your Height Map to your Texture map.
The third one is the view that popped up after I Terraformed it. The others show different views. That's as far as I am right now. (You'll really want to read the PDF and follow along, then stop and play. I used Australia for the Texture/color.) Be sure to click to enlarge, I did them 1500 pixels so you could see the settings.
What you do: Your Deformer 1 and Input 1 will go up to the Combiner, and you can Blend, or Add (or more options) to the Deformer 2 and Input 2. Then at the bottom, you pick your Erosion level. (That's simplifying it a bit, but the overall gist of it. It's FUN to play with, don't be intimidated.) WHITE IS HIGH elevations, dark is low.
The green circle is the brush. You can brush over the terrain and change it (such as height.) The brush size and effect can be changed with easy sliders.
I like this view for a waterfall. If I knew how to do it, it'd be awesome!
Aha. Use SHIFT + Left Mouse on the brush to lower the terrain, without the Shift, holding the left mouse will raise it. Here's a screenshot showing the brush controls. In front of the "falls" I lowered all the rocks so you can see the bottom tier (but left it for "foam." (Although I doubt I tackle a waterfall right off the bat.) I also lowered a bunch of spikeys that were on the left, to the left of the green brush circle, so there is a pretty sky view.
made today
Cool- I haven't gotten to the skydome yet.
Here are the settings for a rolling hill Infinito terrain. Click to enlarge then click again to get the settings.
I got my start in 3D with Bryce, which is focused on generating terrains, so INFINITO adds a welcomed landscape-generating capability into Daz Studio. One of the features I like about INFIINTO is the ability to paint duplicate props onto the surface versus placing them by hand yourself. Thought I'd show an example of how to do that. Note that the additional props are NOT instances, so unfortunately they can use up a lot of memory depending upon their polygon size.
Heres the Terraform settings:
After clicking the "Terraform !" button, I went to the Populate tab. There I used the brush in Terrain Mode to create a flat valley that softly merges into the hills at the far end. The default setting in INFINITO is to not go beneath zero, so I left that as is. To get an area flat, you have to brush over it multiple times while holding the left mouse button down to push the landscape low enough. To get the soft merge, I just click a time or two at the junction so the effect is applied only a little at a time. Here's an image showing the flat valley added:
Next I selected the Paint Mode button. I then had to select the Daz Studio directory that contains .pp2 props. See image below. In this case, I chose Grass.pp2 from ART_YardBuilder. Since I wanted a lot of grass clumps, I set eco instances to 50, and as I wanted some size variation, I set eco scale to 10 ( which give +/- 10% scale variation). Each click of the brush will randomly plant 50 clumps of grass at the surface of the terrain (this usually works OK, but some props will end up floating depending upon where zero is defined; in this case, the grass is at the surface). You can see in the image above I only painted grass at the far end of the valley to minimize the amount of memory used. EDIT: I forgot to mention that to choose the prop from the file list, you have to double-click on the file name. Also, to place more than one instance, you have to hold down the shift key when you click with the mouse button.
Here's a closer view of the valley end showing the grass clumps in place:
Not shown, but I next changed the eco instances to 1 and added one copy each of Shed.pp2, Shed_FrontWall.pp2 and Bush.pp2 from the Yard Builder set to the scene. I could have done this in Daz Studio, but it was just as easy to do it here and have them in about the right place.
Going to the Create Tab, I then clicked on the button "Create Studio Scene" and the scene is generated and opens up in Daz Studio. I fine-tuned the placement of the shed and bush (the shed was floating above the ground). Here's a 3DL render of the final result:
Although INFINITO creates a large landscape, you don't have to use it all in your renders. As shown here, there's usually some nice local areas that can be used as a setting.
I may have short-cut some of the explanation, so if any of this is unclear, let me know and I'll add to it.
It looks like you have selected files by specifying folders in Windows. Can you access your custom Content Library directories from within Infinito, or do you always have to manually browse to actual file locations?
Did you just choose not to select instances from your scene, or do instances not work? Or can you not select objects from your scene, only from files, and that's why you weren't able to use instances?
INFINITO automatically identified the folders with Daz content. But it will only display props that are contained in a Poser Runtime folder and in a .pp2 format (this is unfortunate IMO). From the user manual: "INFINITO automatically references and links to the Poser format directories listed in your DAZ Studio Content Directory Manager." As fas as I know, when you are within INIFINITO, you do not have access to your DAZ custom Content Library directories.
To my understanding, instances do not work (I think INFINITO may have been developed before instances were part of Daz Studio). Also note that INFINITO's use of the term instances is different than the now current Daz Studio use of the term instances .
INFIINTO runs separately from Daz Studio so you cannot select items in an existing scene.
There is a script available for Daz Studio ("Surface Replicate") that will create instances, randomly scale and Y-rotate them, and plant them on the terrain surface but you can't control where they go as you can with INFINITO (for example, they'll be scattered over the entire terrain whereas in INFINITO, I could paint them in just certain spots. The script also makes one "Instances Group" that I have not been able to expand to move individual instances.
Note that I'm not an expert with INFINITO or the Surface Replicate script, so I likely don't have a complete understanding of how they work.
It's really cool, once you do the Terraform and move to the next step, all the pp2's show up on your right hand side, ready to use. I did mention in the Commons thread that in the pdf, it gave a link to a converter to pp2, but the link didn't work.
Rich, great illustrations and example. Thanks so much! I haven't messed with this today, but later tonight I'll putz forward. Yesterday though, I experiemented with changing the brush settings (including the angle) and found it helped flatten faster, particularly when alternating raising and lowering the same area and changing from vertical to normal.
What terrain size do you folks normally use? It's in meters so...? I put 700 but haven't a clue.
I've just used the terrain size default values of 100 (Terraform Tab) and a terrain texture size of 1024 (on the Create Tab). If you increase the terrain size and terrain elevation (Terraform Tab) the same ratio (say to 1000/100 from 100/10) the terrain looks the same to me but if you place props they will appear much smaller. I would have to do a closeup comparison to see if you get more details from the larger terrain.
EDIT: I did the comparison. Made one terrain at terrain size 1000 and height 100 and another at terrain size 100 and height 10 (1/10th as large). In Daz Studio, I reduced the scale of the larger terrain to 10%. After rendering them both, I see no difference in terrain complexity between them. Looks like the only difference is size which can be adjusted by scaling. The place it does appears to play a roll is if you are painting props and want them to be a certain size relative to the landscape. You can adjust the props by scaling them in Daz Studio too but that is extra work and it looks like their position to the surface may be slightly shifted on the Y-axis.
I'm watching this thread. I got Infinito a couple of weeks ago and haven't played with it yet. As soon as I get my activation code, I'll be playing with this, too, trying to learn how to use it. I like what you've done so far. It looks promising, just what I wanted to be able to do.
You can download real world height maps for anywhere in the world from this site.
http://terrain.party
I have used them in Bryce and have just used one in Infinito.
This is the area around Ben Nevis in Scotland. The best map to use is the merged.jpg which is below.
lick on image for full size.
Click on image for full size.
What Knittingmommy said
Fishtales, that is a great resource, thanks so much for sharing the link!
My son is getting a 3D printer later this week and mentioned wanting to print a replica of Mt. Baker in Washington, so this will be a good source of data for him. I downloaded the Mt. Baker data and tried it in INFINITO as well. Works really well.
To use the .jpg in INFINITO (the merged.jpg as Fishtales mentioned): download from terrain.party. Then on the Terraform Tab, under Input 1, select Image from the drop down box and load the image. I then switched to the Texture view and selected canadian tundra.bmp as the texture (left side, 8th preset down). Then go to the Create Tab and create the scene. Very fast and straightforward. In the image below, I added lights from 1stBastion's Wilderness: Two Creeks, the skydome from Via Serena, then Ctrl+click added the texture DNAT-Rock4 from Shades Of Life - Nature.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing the link Fishtales and for the explanation RGcincy.
I'm pulled a bit thin at the moment with my regular thread and setting up the next contest, so will have to delay putzing for a bit.
In the PDF manual it says:
Please note that at this time, INFINITO only supports props in a .pp2 format. However, you can easily export objects from Studio in a .pp2 format supported by INFINITO by using the free PP2 Exporter script available here: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=127437
The link is broken but I found an alternate source on this page. Scroll down to select PP2 Exporter link. I have not tested it, so I don't know how well it works with current version of Daz Studio.
EDIT: Don't bother with this script version. See the 3rd post down for a working version by mCasual.
Alessandro posted this in another thread:
There is a beta version (1.2) that supports instancing, see here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/31481/
Upon creating the DAZ Scene, you can decide whether to have instances or full objects.
In a prior render I showed instances added on top of a terrain. You can also use INFINITO to scatter instances in the air without showing a terrain. For the render, I created a rough wavy terrain with a very large height range (terrain size=100 and terrain elevation=50 on the Terraform tab). On the Populate tab I painted in 5 sets of 50 spears each, clicking in slightly different spots. After creating the scene, I hid the terrain, leaving only the spears visible. You end up with a shower of spears (arrows if I would have had one in .pp2 format). Something similar could be done to give rain drops, snowflakes, explosions, meteorites, clouds, birds, leaves, Mary Poppins, etc. or you could do fish in water in a similar manner.
I tried the PP2 exporter script I got from the link I posted previously but it didn't work. I tracked down part of the problem to an .obj file it created with a size range from about a trillion to minus a trillion (e+13 to e-11). I was able to do a search and replace in a text editor to bring it down to a rational size and I could import it into Daz Studio and see it, but parts of the object stuck out at a right angle. If I get a chance, I'm going to look at the script and see if anything is obviously wrong.
EDIT: Success! I was about to give up but did another Google search and found a mCasual post from this past summer that addresses the sizing problem. I downloaded the revised script and it successfully exports the .duf prop into .pp2 format and it works in INIFINITO. So now I could do a render with a shower of arrows. Here's the direct link to the script file from mCasual's post.
I just discovered this thread by accident and I am delighted to see all the experiments and results. I will add my own experiments with the 2.0 version currently under development.
As I wrote in another thread...
"The application core is ready and it took me a long time to enable multi-threading in order to allow fast computation of noise nodes. I can't say how long it will take to have it in store, but I'm working hard on it. Plus, there will be a second plugin that will complement INFINITO 2.0 but I'm not going into details on this yet :)
Here attached two IF 2.0 screencaps showing the terrain creation interface, which will allow to use and combine how many nodes you want (1.0 only features 6 nodes), and a quick Iray render to test displacement capabilities so far.
I'll post more information as the work progresses."
Glad you found it Alessandro. I'm excited to hear you are still developing IF 2.0. Hope you'll continue to post updates as you go along.
Very creative use of the instancing/placement features of Infinito, RGcincy. Already thinking about how z-depth passes of existing scenes could be used as terrains to control placement of a large number of objects into that scene . . .
- Greg
That's a very interesting idea Greg.. Hope you'll post some results if you give it a try.
Thanks for steering the thread Rich- I'm having a TON of trouble with my studio- it's crashing and I can't fix it, so not doing Infinito at the moment. Alessandro, glad you found the thread and looking forward to your input!
Glad to help. By the way, I had a couple of crashes today of 4.8 for the first time ever. Since I just installed 4.9 on Friday, I was wondering if something was interacting between them. I haven't downloaded a beta before so didn't know if that ever occurs. I rebooted my computer and it seems to be fine now.
oh really, because that's exactly when my trouble started, when I installed 4.9. Haven't had a crash with 4.8 ever, that I can recall. So since you've had it, it makes me wonder. I rebooted but no luck. Anyway I don't want to sidetrack the thread, but that is definitely interesting.
Finally got around to another try with Infinito. This started with one of the terrain presets that comes with Infinito (dolomiti, the first one in row three; the only way to tell the name of presets is to hover the mouse over the preset until the file name pops up). I modified the terrain slightly by clicking on the third icon from left, row two of the terrace filter under Deformer 2. After creating the terrain and going to Daz Studio. I created two geometry shells of the terrain. On one of the geometry shells I put the shader RockySoild10 from Shades Of Life - Nature. I then added a tiler preset and set 50 horizontal and vertical tiles. I set opacity to 50% so some of the INFINITO terrain colors show through. On the other geometry shell I put the shader Moss8 from the same set. Tiling was set to 20, opacity to 40%, and the shell was translated +0.65 in the Y-direction. I used the geometry shells to get a more varied terrain and to break up some of the visual repetition in the shaders. The lights and skydome come from FirstBastions Two Creek set and the wolf is Daz's.
I was wanting to see if the Inifinito terrains could be used for up close renders versus just a distant scene. I think this one works OK for that purpose. The shaders probably have the biggest impact as the terrains have really good variety in them already.
Does anyone know how to flatten a terrain, either using D-formers or within Inifinito? I know you can paint down to zero and get a flat area, but what if you want a flat area on the side of a hill or on top of one? I can use the paint tool within Infinito to raise/lower the terrain but it always ends up as a bulge. I've had some success with an image map as an input but it's hit or miss so far.
This is not an Infinito terrain but shows what you can do with a d-former that uses a weight map. I made a 100x100 unit primitive plane, sub-D'd it, added a dformer, then added a weight map to the d-former. I did frequent passes with the weight brush to raise, lower and smooth the terrain. It uses the shader 11 Mossy Gray Cliff from DAZ Studio 4 Cliff Face Shaders and is set in The All New Worldbase XT Lushlands.