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WorldBuilder 4 Basics: Part 3, Editing New Surfaces; Placement Conditions and Area Feathering

Now let’s select Placing Conditions. This is an invaluably useful common property that allows you to combine overlapping shaders in a realistic manner.

First, let’s disable the Ignore All control (otherwise Placing Conditions will have no effect, and the most recently added material will obscure the underlying one).

Next, let’s try an initial Altitude Range of 20 for Max height, and 10 for Min Height. The sandy material should appear within as a narrow horizontal band, overlapping the underlying rocks18 material that we applied in Part 1 of the tutorial.

 


To speed our render a little more, right-click on Aspen 1 in the Scene Tree and Hide it.

When we render our scene, we can see that our Altitude Range places the sandy material too high on our landscape. We need to lower our range so that it falls between Aspen 1 (note the shadow map which is still rendering even though the tree is hidden) and somewhere below the waterline.


Let’s re-apply our Altitude Range values as -2 for Max height and -6 for Min Height.

Re-render to check the results.

That's better!

 


Notice that the boundary line between our sandy material and rock18 is unnaturally sharp. We can adjust this using the Area Feathering parameters.

The Area feathering property allows us to adjust the softness/hardness of the transition between areas, and between different materials inside one single area.

Selecting the area in the Properties Tree can access this property; the Area Feathering Properties Page will appear below.

The boundary in our case is defined by the Soft Placing Conditions in Area by: Altitude parameter. We’ll need to change it the from the default value of 0.1 to 0.5.

Re-render the scene to view the adjustment.



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