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@HappyPolygon Hello, I've been thinking a lot about this too. I plan to create a topic where I will share my thoughts. I am in favor of developing a unified eco system in c4d Your proposed sorting instance should be implemented as an effector or generator to start with Scenes Nodes should be implemented as a Tag, for getting used to it and solving simple problems. But not how it works in XP needs to be reconsidered. Root Scene should be present in Object Manager. I see it as a generator that passes in data from Scene Nodes for further work. Also fix the axes in the Segment node one of them is not working correctly.

Dash for Unreal Engine. Looks pretty wicked.

Lols. Yep, a bit in 'night mode' - only a small overlap between me and daylight at the moment... If you are happy with the VF approach (personally I am struggling to find any input sources for that that give me the sort of detailed, curvy shapes we see in photo refs) then Variation shader (Standard / Physical Render) does do a reasonable job of quantizing and mapping a gradient and some variably random tones over the pieces... ...but I rather think that this is only helpful in a cartoon / map style kind of way. I can't help thinking that if you want this looking 'real' in any sort of meaningful way then it has to be somehow based on those top-down satellite images, whether you pay for a solution like DEM Earth, or find a free way of implementing it. CBR

If you've got the budget DEM Earth is superb. I used to use this a lot for similar sorts of 'real world' terrain generation. https://cinemaplugins.com/c4d-plugins/dem-earth/ The other source that might be worth investigating is: https://www.openstreetmap.org/ As it's free and you can export data from it. You won't get field shapes (I don't think) but maybe the roads / streets might be of some use?

I take his opinion into account, but in a fair vote we would have won. In my opinion, this example is also one of the problems of c4d development for users

To be honest the best solution is to use the appropriate software for the job. Namely Vue and Gaea . Both (I think) has a GIS support for importing real geographical data. If you are a landscape modeler these programs (including World Machine and foliage plugins like XFrog, Forester etc) are a must. After you're done with the terrain geometry and texturing grab your paint brush and put some happy trees here and there ... The closest thing to the ecosystem brush in C4D is the Scatter Pen. But C4D doesn't handle well too much geometry, Vue on the other hand creates billboards for foliage and proxy geometry for procedural terrains all inside C4D. Rendering with vue is quite fast even with all the foliage except for volumetric skies in which case you'll need to start packing for vacation once you press the render button.

Alright, get ready ! ... for disappointment These are my findings: Long story short, you can't have it all procedural... up to a point. And its the Mesher's fault. It doesn't act as the Surface Subdivision retaining materials. Probably a feature and not a bug but let me tag @Cerbera just in case. So, let's begin. Prerequisites: Edge to Spline, humble contribution from NoseMan. Scene Nodes have a nice Edge to Spline Node but it's not a capsule so it's useless. We begin with a simple Voronoi Fracture on a Plane. Always drop the subdivision to 0. Next use the handy Edge to Spline and link the Voronoi to it Create a Cone and make it child of the Cloner. I use the Geometry Axis Capsule all the time to move the pivot around. Cones are trees and the center of mass needs to be at the bottom center. Now sign the Edge to Spline to the Cloner and a Random Effector with Absolute Scale. The fields are flat. Add a Displacer Deformer with a high scale noise to the Voronoi to add hills. Make sure use set the Projection Space to World Wonderful. Let's add color ! Use a Multishader and set it to Index Ratio Assign the Material to the Voronoi. Isn't this nice ! From now on everything goes downhill. Prepare for total destruction. To make the hills more round I use the Remesh in Polygon Count Make sure the Displacer Deformer acts on Remesh and Edge to Spline and enable Override Type and add extra subdivisions. Where did the colors go ? No one knows except Noseman. Now, you wanted to color with Fields. Let's try that ! Make two Color Vertex tags on that Remesh. Enable Fields and add the one to the other as a Variable Tag. Rename that to Smooth. We will use it to smooth the effects. Create a Material and add a Vertex Shader Effect and add the Smooth Vertex tag to it. Now on the other Color Tag I used the following for experimentation: Voronoi Field gives this : Edge to Spline gives this: and the Shader Field with Voronoi Cells and a Colorizer gives this which renders for no reason to this But it's OK because Cerbera doesn't sleep and he might take some time to report it... So there is no way to allign the field generated Voronoi with the how the Fracture creates borders. So we left the fields out and go back to the point where we left the Voronoi. Don't make a Remesh and make a Subdivision Surface instead and set it to OpenSubdiv. Addes some stripes to show how shitty the SubDiv is So there you have it. Procedural fields as far as the eye can see... fields.c4d

It's an interesting problem, because none of the fracture or noise based tools we have tend to create those sorts of very specific patchwork divisions. You don't actually say exactly what you are trying to achieve via modelling versus what you intend to do with textures. However 3 things may help. 1. Google maps does let you hide the labels and roads in satellite view and does provide that perfect top-down reference like the following I randomly grabbed just now... You could use that or something like it as photographic base I suppose, applied via flat mapping to a shallow landscape object or similar, and then add certain 3D elements on top of it using area scattering or cloning ? 2. I think you have a version of Cinema that has the variation shader ? That might be ideal for colourising sets of fields (providing you find a decent way to get those sort of shapes), and getting an organically varying colour range if you are not relying on photo texturing to do that. 3. If you fed something like the image above into illustrator (or equivalent) that should be able to trace the photo with spline paths which you could then refine and output into Cinema to help you get the field shapes, though uncertain so far what the full workflow for that would be - just an idea... I'll pop back if I have any more ! CBR

I just had other hopes for C4D. I expected to be the exception. To make the pioneering step to convert all available tools to nodes. In other words don't make a system to simulate what others also can do but rebuild the way things already work in C4D. Take for example Vue and Gaea. Gaea can generate a terrain as Vue can but the nature of the node system allows to apply the effects non-destructively. But what makes Gaea superior to Terrain Generation from Vue is not really the node system itself but the unique tools that are not available in Vue. So (I imagine so) in their plan they didn't decide to make a node UI with all the necessary basic nodes for users to have the power to generate all the amazing stuff that the system can potentially offer (because the nodes systems are essentially snippets of code) but they incorporated unique generative tools in the form of a node (for example water erosion with flow map generation). This is the equivalent of dropping a C4D Generator in the SceneNodes UI. So far so good because this is already how the Node Editor already can be used. BUT... their node form hasn't been reworked to accommodate for the advantages a node System could (emphasis on that) provide. So instead of expanding/reworking/regrouping the node counterparts with their parameters Maxon decided to add more nodes to the pool. This is not different from any other Node System except the aforementioned Gaia which I never read or watched a tutorial on how to use and I was amazed how quickly and simple it was for me do things that I just thought on that moment. That's how intuitive their system is ! You just connect things and Terrain pops out ! In C4D (probably the same for Blender and Houdini) you need to know a lot before actually building anything. You need a plan and the know-how before having any meaningless output or any output at all. So what Gaia offers as powerful nodes, Maxon is up to offer since the past two releases with Capsules (which I love very much but blur the borders of the entity ecosystem in C4D and is purely a philosophical argument). Coincidentally when I suggested to Rick a node system, Maxon was already working on the Neutron project. And my suggestions, he said, were a very useful insight on what the project could adapt to, to make room for what I suggested. Well since then I'm always a step behind and there is no way to change the system but only to expand it as it it. So to cut the story short and to make sure I don't deviate the post from what it was suppose to discuss... or sound like I don't like scene nodes... No it's not. Not all node systems have be the same. Grasshopper for example is a nice twist compared to Geonodes of Houdini. What I was expecting (and I wish people communicated earlier) was this: A system similar to what old apps used to call Labs. Special interfaces (this time modernized with Nodes) to accommodate for modern CGI needs. For example: an interface for Tiling as an extension of MoGraph. an interface for modular generative/procedural modeling using prefabricated geometry (kit bashing) with high-level nodes based on space/object relations and a based on programming with restrictions. an interface for crowd simulations an interface for procedural landscapes an interface for evolutionary systems a C4D tailored Python-like programming language hiding and automatically taking care of data structure technicalities. Class and Attribute names are easy to remember as they are the same as the attribute names of the actual objects. Easy handling of objects in scene, easy creation, deletion and nesting of objects in the Object Manager. I think these are the areas C4D needs to expand to.

What scene nodes can do depends a lot on what the user can do. You can do a lot of fun stuff with just a hand full of math nodes if you know how to break things down. But that's the same in all node systems. Most of the awesome demos you get to see in Geometry Nodes rely on the ability of the individual who built the setup, not on some high level functionality that the node system offers. Same for Houdini. Most Entagma tutorials are not about using Houdini features, but about using Houdini as a versatile platform to implement interesting algorithms (often partially in VEX).

I also tried to replicate this some time ago but went with a scene node setup. It uses the gradient of Chladni patterns as a force to move particles around. Unfortunately I don't have the scene file anymore and all that is left of it is a crappy render. 1000k_480.mp4

I still wonder where Maxon is in all of this. USD won't solve everything (yet) but down the road transferring files between apps will be a lot easier. Imagine loading a USD scene from an app into Substance Painter, where it keeps the matX materials, you paint, the textures are applied and exported within the USD and brought back into your app, or moved into UE without any linkage problems or materials looking different. Load the USD into Fusion or Nuke and comp with background plates and footage. The materials and lighting come across.