NEW 20+ tyFlow Terrain Operators: Overview & Starter Tutorial

⚪ Download Your FREE tyFlow Project File Megapack by RedefineFX (20 scenes): tyFlow Terrain Official Promo video: Official release notes from Tyson Ibele: Anyone familiar with tyFlow’s development cycle knows I don’t normally disappear for 6 months without an update (most updates are only a few weeks apart)...but my foray into procedural terrain generation required a ton of planning, research and development time, and it’s taken a huge amount of effort to get it ready for it’s initial release. Last year when I first thought about doing some terrain stuff, my initial idea was to simply implement some kind of surface erosion algorithm into tyFlow. After all, I like erosion can be it seemed like an easy add-on for tyFlow that I would knock out in a couple of weeks. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it would be pointless for me to add an isolated function like that without incorporating it into a larger terrain solution. I also vastly under-estimated the amount of complexity and nuance that goes into generating terrains. Fractal noise on a plane will no longer cut it - applications like World Machine, Gaea and World Creator can all create extremely realistic terrains and there would be no point in adding terrains to tyFlow if they couldn’t meet a similar standard of realism. So, I’ve spent this time (fueled by the funds of those who have purchased tyFlow PRO - thank you!) working on what I believe to be a viable contender within the realm of procedural terrain generation. tyFlow’s new terrain creation framework, composed of more than 20 new operators, can perform many of the common tasks of other cutting-edge terrain software on the market - with results of comparable quality. It features CUDA-accelerated erosion, deformation and shallow-water solvers, complex layer-based color/texture generation, unlimited tile/color/mask creation, multi-tile blending, easy heightmap/normalmap/colormap/mask export, adaptive meshing, particle scattering, per-operator caching, mesh-to-terrain conversion, and more. It’s not just an update to tyFlow - it’s a whole new simulation and world-building paradigm for 3ds Max. Check out the video I’ve posted for a more in-depth glance at some of these new features, and also please understand that this is just an initial release and there are many more terrain features which I’ll be adding in the future. It’s also worth noting that I have not updated the documentation for any of these new terrain operators, and there are no example scenes for terrain stuff the terrain workflow is going to be a bit of a wild-west of testing and experimentation for users at the moment. But in the future I will be releasing more assets and resources which will help users better understand how all of this works. In the meantime, many of the key terrain operators (Terrain Erosion, Terrain FX and Terrain Color) are loaded with tons of built-in presets for you to try, and the editor right-click menu has a few new terrain preset flows for you to jump right into as it only takes a couple of clicks to see the power of this new system in action. As with any features can bring with them new save often, send me your bug reports, and I’ll try to be quick to fix any issues you run into.