Day 18

Right now there're a few important things which have come up to my mind about the terrain. A low resolution version of the terrain could be used to simulate the cracking (lesser subdivisions). Afterwards when we render we could bump up the subdivisions and increase the height map resolution. How to do that? We'll figure out soon enough.

I've received detailed replies from pclaes and an administrator from odforce on my thread.

Once again the thread I posted is about how I can go about modelling the extruded rocks and arc-shaped structures on the terrain. What methods I should begin with.

These are several advices from pclaes:

[For the level of detail that you have in the matte painting I would recommend working on individual separate chunks rather than trying to do it all in one surface. Kinda like putting different pieces of a puzzle together.
It will make your life a lot easier when it comes to texturing and repositioning to adjust the landscape for your desired composition.

I would start with basic polygonal shapes (not really metaballs as their geometry is pretty useless when you want to subdivide them). Make basic shapes (spikes, the semi-arc, perhaps a more plateau like fracture plate). Then use vop sop with various noise patterns (remapped noise, exponential noise, different levels of frequency and magnitude) to layer the detail by displacing your geometry. You could mix in bits of texture too. Perhaps research a bit on erosion patterns.

In regards to the rocks, it's the same approach, just use basic boxes or low resolution spheres as starting objects. I would also consider scattering them over the terrain and rendering them as delayed load instances (have a look on my blog if you don't know how to do that), because you might need a lot to make it look good.

Some shapes do create a specific silhouette, so you might want to model them a bit more detailed. If it is your goal as an exercise to be more procedural than using metaballs and volumes will probably give you interesting results too. But you will still need basic shapes/pointclouds to define the area where you want to copy the metaballs or where you want to read in the volume.

The geometry with the heightmap can be used to sit behind some of those chunks... almost as if it is the sand/dirt in which the massive rock pikes are sticking out from.
You blend the two through adding bits of rock, vegetation (even if it's dead), other props you have sticking in the ground, shading (occlusion pass, potentially remapped to reveal different material -> wear), and add a fog volume to get that hazy feel.

In regards to being creative with rocks. Do a search for Macha's rock thread.]
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I also know that this might be slightly too late but the admin michael in odforce recommended using terragen 2 to generate a terrain. According to Jiabao the height map we have should be good enough thus the method of transiting from a low-poly to high-poly height map terrain in Houdini should prove useful.

There is also one more slight problem which I've just noticed. The valley I created in the height map for the flood to simulate through seems a little narrow.  Thus I expended the grid size a little. I'm thinking about whether it's necessary to edit the height map in photoshop.

Lastly I've checked out some generated terrains done in terragen 2. This is what I found which could possibly be similar to the valley which I'm modelling.