Creating a terrain with Corona displace modifier - viewport view

[HannesN]

Hi there,

i have a question about a good working to work with corona displace modifier to create terrains. Normally i use a displace modifier (w. a heightmap) in combination with turbosmooth. This works, but high settings on turbosmooth will lead to crashes and bad performance.

Now i tested the only a corona displace modifier and it worked perfectly. The downsite is now, that viewport only shows the flat plane. For doing the camera, textures, scatter and detail work i need to see where the terrain is of course. Its too bad that the corona displace modifier can not show a preview of the displacement. What is the best way of working in this case?

My current solution was to make a copy of my terrain, set it to not renderable and added the displacement modifier with my heightmap. This will act as my low poly preview terrain. In forest i used the flat plane with the corona displacement modifier as area and added the heightmap for scattering on displaced geometry.

is this the best way or ist there a simpler solution?

Thanks
Hannes

[maru]

I am not aware of any other methods than what you already mentioned. Maybe other users will have some ideas.

[romullus]

Making a copy of terrain for viewport representation is a good workaround, but my suggestion would be not to make a simple copy, but a reference object. That way if you will need to make adjustments to the terrain, the viewport copy will automatically gets updated and you won't need to make a new copy each time.

Another option is to use only one terrain object and utilize Max's modifiers display options, so your stack could look like this plane|CoronaDisplacementMod|turbosmooth(off in render)|displace(off in render). The downside of this method that if you'll use interactive render, your terrain will become flat in the viewports and also you can't use scatters on that terrain object, because Chaos scatter doesn't work with render time displacement. So yeah, you should probably stick to your old workflow, which is not bad at all :]

[pokoy]

You can keep using one mesh - with the standard Displace modifier for the mesh in the viewport and CoronaDisplacementMod for rendering.
When you right-click on the Displace modifier (and the Turbosmooth mod if you wish), you can set it to 'Off in Renderer', and set the Corona modifier to 'Off in Viewport' the same way.
That way, each one will be passed to either viewport or renderer, making it possible to keep working with one mesh.

Not sure this is what you're asking, but it sounds like it is.

[HannesN]

Thanks for your fast replies! The solution with turning the displacement off during render was new to me. I will definitely try that. I'm doing my scatters in the viewport and IR turned off. So this will cause no problems for me and it make the scene simpler to setup.

Greetings
Hannes