Documentation
more detailed info about the things I've made
This page contains a summary of things I have made.
When making terrain, I often want to place details where I find them important, but I usually do not want to take the time to sculpt every little mound and rivulet . . . To marry those two contradictory facts, I made these terrain tools.
The modifiers make the whole terrain creation process procedural, from adding the base grid to capturing the final attributes. The procedural workflow allows you to take your terrain to a near-finished state, decide that a river is too narrow, easily go back, edit the width, re-enable some modifiers and, painlessly get an updated terrain with a wider river.
The terrain can be 'sculpted' with a set of guide curves and surfaces which are separate objects that I think of as controls. The controls allow you to place features, such as valleys, roads, rivers, clearings, and hills where you want them.
Then there are modifiers to apply effects to the terrain, I think of these as filters. Filters automate the addition of finer details with modifiers such as; noise, soften, fill, erode, etc.
To tidy everything up, you can add a crop modifier to trim and add side walls, and an attributes node to capture all the information you might want in a material or to control where plants and debris are scattered.
Scatter modifiers are added to separate objects from the terrain base. They can scatter instances across the entire terrain collection or in a zone defined by its surface. The scatter modifier can also mask out portions of the terrain using terrain attributes, such as steepness, erosion, elevation, or water.
Almost all of the modifiers have been designed so that an adjacent terrain tile will continue 'seamlessly' (Generally, the seams are hard to spot, but they aren't always perfect) The ability to divide the terrain into tiles allows for larger terrains, which can be edited in sections, and enabled and disabled as needed to keep the editor interactive. A whole stack of modifiers can be 'bypassed' by disabling the terrain base modifier, and you can set a different resolution per tile for lower polycounts on distant tiles.
Because I got fed up with manually setting up each bake, editing dozens of settings, painstakingly selecting objects, baking each map separately, saving each image, and fifty other frustrations, I made DJH Bake Batcher. An addon that makes baking standard PBR assets feel more like pressing F12 to render a scene, and less like a marathon of details. Bake Batcher removes headaches by sacrificing the flexibility of customizing a ton of settings, for the speed and convenience of baking in a single click.
I have a very long and cluttered addon for Blender where I test out all my crazy ideas, many of those are incomplete or too specific to be generally useful, but some of them have become a standard part of my workflow and I have separated some of them into a more polished--if equally eclectic--addon.
It adds a handful of operators that you can call from the search menu, add to quick favorites, or create hotkeys for.
In 2023 I started the LooseEdges channel on YouTube to attract attention to my nodes and also to share some of the knowledge that I have accumulated over the years.
On the channel there are a variety of different videos. There is a series with my thoughts about Getting Started if you're new to Geometry Nodes.
Quite a few videos have a focus on Geometry Nodes, but there are also some that focus more on workflows and general tips.