MV Flow & Erosion tools
Flow and erosions nodes v 0.1 for Substance Designer 2018.1.1
These are the lightest erosions in this package. They do not really erode the heightfield but rather add these typical flow lines on top of a heightfield.
These nodes are typically Substance Designer workflows. Nothing is simulated. Ready to drop and play with the settings.
!!Read next carefully!!
With the flow and iterative erosion nodes we will walking on thin ice. Not sure if it is a Dutch saying only, but it means, things can get unstable within SD.
The examples have been exported using Substance Designer 2018.1.1 on a Macbook pro 2013 bootcamp windows 10 but that didn’t go without a crash or two. That is also partly because the settings have been increased a lot to create the examples.
The flow node allows to increase the iterations to 4k x 4k. On my macbook pro with mac os x the nodes will compile, but the very same setup does include one node out of 10 on windows that somehow doesn’t want to compile. I had to change settings and now it should run fine.
I suspect that after 1k x 1k iterations things become unstable.
So, I added an option to clamp the iterations up to 1k which is default enabled. You can turn it off to maximise the iteration count and go crazy with the settings.
The examples that I provided have been working well at the end on my macbook pro mac / windows and the clamps in these particular examples have been disabled.
My advise is to first disable all auto generate settings in preferences in Substance Designer.
Most part of the Flownode readme is true for this node, too.
My advice is to make sure all auto generate settings are toggled off. Then open the crater graph and execute first one of the earliest nodes. The crater example mostly crashed the very first time I tried to compile the very ending of the graph. So, instead, I let SD compile the first nodes first. A second round went fine.
On my macbook pro Substance Designer 2017 Windows version was very crashy, while with 2018 (also windows), things got much more stable. Therefor, this package is Substance Designer 2018.1.1 only. The 2018 version has some user interface feedback about rendering time and memory usage, so it is good to keep an eye on that.
The erosion node does display best results with 40K iterations and up. (although not too high or you just would completely destroy the terrain)
With a limitation of 1000 iterations that would mean daisy chain 40 nodes or more. On my macbook pro with the mac version I did not notice any crashes when cranking the iterations up to crazy 50K in one node. But this wouldn’t be recommended anyways as the flows just would flow on top and across each other. Which is not what we want.
See the crater example on how I did setup these nodes. I also used my Dilation / Erosion node to tighten up the results at the end.
Blurred terrains are giving the best results. This kinda makes sense as we would want to have some thermal erosion first, just like real nature. So, for hard edges it is best to blur them first and simulate some thermal erosion first.
Important: the tiling is currently disabled in this erosion node, that is because it can generate infinity loops. The flow node does actually tile.
All nodes are fully SBS graphs, ready to explore how they have been crafted. All dependencies included.
The code is based upon numerous articles on the internet.
Last but not least…if you, after all these words, stil want to get your hands dirty on this package, then you ready to go!
Best! Tom
Artstation links:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xGGa4
https://www.artstation.com/tomjacobs101/blog/PNPm/true-iterative-erosion-wip
License
Textures and Substance graph cannot be redistributed or resold.
Digital products are non-refundable.