Painted Shader

Painted Shader

Node Description and Purpose:
The Painted shader allows you to paint into your scene using the 3D Preview. Amongst other things you can paint colours for a surface, a mask to control where a surface or clouds appear, the distribution of a population or you could use the shader to generate displacement on a surface.

For more information about using the Painted shader please read the Painted Shader Guide.

Node Type: Colour Shader

Settings:

Brush tab

• Use absolute brush: If you check this radio button the brush will be a fixed size.
• Brush size in metres: This sets the size of the absolute brush.
• Use view-relative brush: If you check this button the size of the brush will change depending on where you paint in the size. It will stay a consistent size relative to the size of 3D Preview but when you paint further away from the camera it will be larger and vice versa.
• View-relative brush size: This sets the size of the view-relative brush. The size is relative to the horizontal field of view of the 3D Preview. Smaller numbers make the the brush smaller. For example a value of 0.1 means the brush is 10% of the view width and a value of 0.5 would mean it was 50% of the view width.
• Brush falloff: This controls the opacity of the brush from the centre to edge. A value of 1 means the brush smoothly moves from transparent at the edge to opaque in the centre. A value of 0 means the brush is completely opaque.


• Flow: This setting controls how quickly the brush applies its paint. Lower numbers mean the brush has less effect.
• Colour: Sets the colour of paint used by the brush.


• Clear button: Clicking this button will delete all the painted strokes for the shader.

Additional tabs for Painted Shader

• Painted Shader - Transform Tab

A shader is a program or set of instructions used in 3D computer graphics to determine the final surface properties of an object or image. This can include arbitrarily complex descriptions of light absorption and diffusion, texture mapping, reflection and refraction, shadowing, surface displacement and post-processing effects. In Terragen 2 shaders are used to construct and modify almost every element of a scene.

Literally, to change the position of something. In graphics terminology to displace a surface is to modify its geometric (3D) structure using reference data of some kind. For example, a grayscale image might be taken as input, with black areas indicating no displacement of the surface, and white indicating maximum displacement. In Terragen 2 displacement is used to create all terrain by taking heightfield or procedural data as input and using it to displace the normally flat sphere of the planet.