Day 4 : Displacing the terrain

Today after lunch i went to the library to borrow books with ziyaad. The titles were The magic of houdini and Houdini on the spot. But the books did not provide much help for me but it should help ziyaad in his crowd simulation

Mr douglas came in today to further explain to me his "Mount doom" terrain concept, he also suggested to add a lake around to highlight the dramatic feel of the last shot. He taught me a way to eradicate the sharp edges look at the side when doing camera blocking, he told me to use a circle shape instead of a grid and the result turns out great, the edge are smoothen out in all views. Besides, he also taught me to the way to blend both a painted height map and a VOPCOP height map with just simple a layer and file node

With circle shape

Layers

Test render

Test render 2

Thus i painted a simple map of a white spot in the centre to displace and outstand the peak in the middle, i play with the background weight in the layer node to have a good balance between the bumps and the peak

Paint in PS

However i am facing limitations with the VOPCOP network, i was told by Jia bao, that VOPCOP is made from 2D heightmap which consist of only black and white, and the downside is they only have a limited value range of -0.5 to +0.5 for the height, thus the peak can only go up that high

WIP