Creating Landscapes with Blender Terrain Mixer

Introduction

Hello to all the 80 Level readers. Since we spoke last, a lot has changed, both in my life and inside the Blender Terrain Mixer. For those who don't know me, I am a 42-year-old artist and designer living in Croatia. In the past 7 years, I was in charge of one of the most significant art events that gather creative folks from the games and film industries – IFCC Croatia. Now I am almost 100% focused on my art and personal projects such as Terrain Mixer, Eevee Art Shader Kit, and others. Some of my art can be seen here.

Blender Terrain Mixer is now a lot more advanced and much easier to use.

Blender Terrain Mixer

I believe that Terrain Mixer provides the fastest way of generating terrains inside Blender. It is very simple to use and after going through a PDF manual or watching one or two of my videos, anyone can start using it.

The inspiration came while I was developing the pipeline for the "Machina Arcana: Back To Eternity" trailer. I was also a director of the first part of the video that doesn't show the game mechanics. The trailer helped developers raise more than $600K on Kickstarter. My concept involved a lot of terrains. I was sure I will do a good job because I used the ultimate procedural terrain generation suite – Quadspinner Gaea. So when it was coming to Height Maps I was 100% covered. The problem was the level of control I had over those Height Maps inside Blender. I realized that I should build the tool that will help me control the Height Maps plus allow me to use other advanced Blender Cycles features. That's how the Terrain Mixer was born.

Latest Updates and Features

The most significant change, when it comes to user experience, is the Properties menu. It allows the user to edit the terrain inside the 3D viewport by moving sliders left or right. I have set two additional Blender Workspaces for a better user experience – Terrain Mixer and Terrain Mixer + Nodes. Besides that, there are now 5 possible height inputs which are defined by up to 9 sources, compared to 4 sources that were available the last time we spoke. Other useful features include Masker, Scatter Master, Mirror, Distort, Plain Terrain, Fake Sky, and others.

In older Blender Terrain Mixer versions, prior to 1.9.0, users had to work inside the Node Editor. Now, with the Properties menu, all the most frequently used functions are available right there inside the 3D viewport. Operations like adding power, clipping, mixing, scaling, rotating and scattering are all easily accessible which results in a much faster workflow. Of course, many others are still available from inside the node editor.

The last feature I added was the Scatter Master. This one is cool because it allows you to add the 5th height input, or the 9th Height Map, to the mix. which you can use to scatter the new elements across the terrain. The source can be any of the Height Maps delivered with the package or any other that the user might have in its library. Of course, you can also generate an unlimited number of Height Maps with Terrain Mixer. The process of baking a Height Map can be performed in less than a minute, depending on the type of machine are you working on.

Plans for Future Updates

In the following weeks, I will be focused on building more advanced masking tools, updating the user manual, and creating many new heightmaps. After that, I plan to improve texturing, improve scattering (for rocks, trees, grass, etc.), and a lot more of course. I have received a lot of requests to make more video tutorials that cover some very specific scenarios, and that's what I'll try to deliver at least once a week. I would like to use this opportunity to thank Dax Pandhi for creating Quadspinner Gaea which is the terrain generator I like using the most and the young Blender master that goes by the name of Erindale Woodford for inspiring me to learn more about math and node logic.

I also decided to make a video tutorial as part of this interview to showcase the workflow in Blender Terrain Mixer:

Marko Prpic Zets, Freelance Artist/Designer

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev