Mortem Vetus: TerraFirma5 - The Road Ahead Thank you for purchasing TerraFirma5. We hope you enjoy using this product, and this User Guide is intended to just help you get the most out of your purchase. Mostly, this guide will be covering the basic operation of the items included in the pack. This pack is intended for use with Poser9 and newer. It will work in Poser 8/PP2010, but we feel the results are not as good as Poser 9 and higher. For the purposes of this guide, we'll be using PoserPro 2014, but there is nothing we'll be doing that can't be done in Poser 8 and above.  And initially, pretty much everything is in default, except Render settings. Once you've installed the product, your new TerraLuna2 items will be in: :Runtime:Geometries:RDNA:TerraDome2:TerraFirma5: :Runtime:Libraries:Pose:! TerraDome2:TerraFirma5:Morphs: :Runtime:Libraries:Pose:! TerraDome2:TerraFirma5:Utility:   This pack is an add-on for TerraDome2, and will require TerraDome2 installed. So to begin with, we want to load TerraDome2, as shown in image1 below. You can either drag and drop the thumbnail into the document window, double click the thumbnail, or highlight it and click the double tick symbol, 'Create New Figure'.

Image 1: TerraDome2 loaded

At this point, we're going to switch to the TerraDome2 sun, as shown below in image 2.

Image2: Loading the TerraDome2 sun

Next, we want to load our TerraFirma5 morphs on, so we're going to apply '! INJ All Primary'. This loads all the TerraFirma5 main morphs on to TerraDome2.  There are also Secondary morphs, which are intended to compliment the Primary morphs, but we'll come to them in a moment.

Image3: Load TerraFirma5 morphs

Unlike previous morph packs that we've done for TerraDome2, this one does not have each individual morph as a seperate INJ/REM. This is because there are a far greater number of included morphs, with a total of 102 individual morphs included, comprised of 51 Primary and 51 Secondary. In image3 above, we can see that the morphs are split into 2 types, Narrow, Wide, Widest. These refer to the width of your path or road.  And what these primary morphs do, is carve a space for you path into TerraDome2, like digging a foundation in the real world. In image4 below, we can see this, on an otherwise blank TerraDome2.

Image4: Applying a morph

So we can see our road foundation sunk into the ground, but now we need a road surface, And this is where 'Secondary' comes into play. We're going to load a second instance of TerraDome2. Don't panic, Poser has plenty of capacity to deal with it. TerraDome2 has around 240k polis in it...for comparison, several of our M4 outfits have 300K+ and high detail architecture such as that by Dante78 can have a sinilar amount. And we've rendered scenes with 2 x TerraDome2, 15 Dante78 sets and a dozen M4's all in full outfits. Granted, Poser needs to think about it a little more than it would have to for a nekkid V4, but it renders with that much of a full scene. So we're going to load up a second instance of TerraDome2, and before we do anything, we ought to make sure we know which is which and where they are in relation to each other. Firstly we've changed the material colour on the AZone and BZoneLge of the new TerraDome2, and in image 5 below we can see we're about to change the name of the second TD2. We're going to call it TD2 Secondary.

Image5: Loading a second TerraDome2

In image6 below, we've applied the 'Position Secondary TD2' morph, which drops it down by 50mm (2 inches), and we've applied the 'Hide SkyDome' pose to turn that off. Now we can see our path, running out towards the horizon. That would be all very well if our world was flat, but we want lumpy bumpy bits, we want to send our paths over the hills and far away. So we're going to add some morphs for this road to run over.

Image6: Position Secondary TD2

So we've loaded the base morphs that come with TD2, which we can see in image7 below. From these, we've dialled up some terrain. Now these same morphs need to be dialled up on the secondary TD2, to the same value.. For this, we thought we could use 'Copy Morphs From' , but it didn't bring the values with it. So the way we would normally do it, is with Edit > Duplicate, and copy the morphed TerraDome2. We will now need to revisit the Ultility folder, and apply 'Position Secondary TD2' plus 'TD2 HIDE Skydome' and then also '!Reset ALL Primary' We need to include the last one to reset the road foundation morph. This can also be done manually, by resetting the dial to 0.00. *TIP*: Any dial can be returned to it's default value by right clicking over the dial and selecting 'Reset' In image7 below, we can see our road runniog over the hills and far away, as we wanted. From here, we could get on and apply materials all round, which we will be doing very soon, but first we need to take a quick look at how various morphs are going to work with these new morphs.

Image7: Adding TD2 Base Morphs

While these new TerraFirma5 morphs will apply over most combination of existing morphs, there are some that will just NOT look right. For creating terrain to run roads over, we would reccomend,applying morphs at lower values. Some existing morphs however, HAVE to be at 1.00 (full strength) in order to work. This is very true of packs such as 'End Of The Line' and 'Deam Arborum'. What we need to avoid is creating surfaces that go up or down too steeply. They will apply to pretty much any morph combination, but just be careful when using high values on terrain morphs. This is a case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." We want to avoid trying to run a path over terrain that would defeat even the most agile mountain goat. While we were first testing the new morphs with the existing morphs, a scene came out that turned into a image for fun, which is in our gallery, "Vale Of The Skull". We're going to go through how that scene is put together, because that covers a number of things that we think are cool in this set.

Image 8: Dialling up a .....skull?!

In image 8 above, we've loaded a TerraDome2 that already has lots of morphs loaded, and our intent was to put these roads and paths in around this. So we've set the camera focal length to 35mm, and pulled back for now, so we can see what happens in the scene. We've got the Skull Hill morph set to 80% strength, so we have a big skull set back a little from the centre of our scene, which is where the bright spot is, as we have default PP2014 lights at the moment. Straight away, the position of the skull, and the topography of it, means we're not going to get a traversible road , and we've applied a North-South wide path in image9 below to demonstrate this.. Although....looking at it, if you over dialled it, there's potential for an image there.....fissure opening up, the world cracking, that sorta thing. But I digress, so I'll file that for future referance, and get back to the point here.

Image9: Cataclysm

We knew we'd have to put a path at a different angle, so we tried a NorthWest to SouthEast, which looked great, and when over-dialled, created a nice little feature to the left of the skull, cutting through, which will show up beetter when we get something for contrast in there.. In image10 below, we can see the 'AB_WidestCrooked_NW-SE' morph applied, and overdialled a bit. NOTE: Normally we advise against over-dialling, in almost every situation. However, for the TerraFirma5 Primary morphs, we would actually encourage it. In image9 for example, heavy over-dialling of that morph would really sell the fissure feel. This is REALLY useful when using the morphs to carve out rivers, as the morph has to be lower than the water level, regardless of what terrain it's going through. Experiment, but always remember; save EARLY, save OFTEN, and save SEQUENTIALLY.

Image10: Working out a usable path

Originally, this was supposed to form a road, which we set up as in image 11 below. We duplicated the TerraDome2 morphed, and reset the NW-SE path, applied the position and Skydome poses, and applied a contrast material colour. But here we can see we've got a problem...that road goes almost vertical as it rises to the left of the skull.

Image11: Road surface with gradient issues

We remembered what the morph had looked like before we added the road, with that nice cut through that area. So we took the skull morph off the Secondary TerraDome, which returned us to a flat level road, running through a small gorge type feature, which we can see in image12. Now, the 'AB_WidestCrooked_NW-SE' morph is already overdialled a bit, but the hillside up to Skull Hill is greater. Which is fine if you're after a landslide, but that's not what we're after.

Image12: Flat road and a landslide

This is where we thoroughly encourage a bit of over dialling, and we'll take it up until the gorge is clear. That happened at five point something, so we rounded it off to 6.0. As we can see in image 13 below, we now have a level flat road through a small gorge. And we can see that dialling the morph up that far has had no effect on anything else. The patrhe gets marginally wider but essentially remains unchanged.

Image13: Clearing the landslide

It was about this point, where turning that road into a river started seeming like a really cool idea, which immediately led to the further thought, can we have a river AND a path going on here? So we set out to answer that.  Our thinking heree was to make room for the water, while retaing the secondary TD2, to form a path conforming to the landscape topography. So on the scondary TD2, we matched the Skull Hill morph, and the WidestCrooked morph, so they were the same as the Primary TD2. TIP: Using the matching Seondary morph, just a little, will raise bits of the secondary TD2 above the Primary TD2, all in the river channel, giving the appearance of a different material on the river bed. If you have fresnal water on, or maybe a dried up river bed.

Image14: Forming a river channel and intersecting path

Now that the Secondary TD2 matches the Primary, we can add our path, which we're going to have crossing tangentally to the river. In image14, above, we can see the path running across, and it looks good except where it cosses the river. When this has water in, we'll have the appearance of the path dipping to the water, BUT if we have very see through water, or a dried river, then we need another option.

Image15: Tidying up the path

In image15 above, we managed to get the path not running straight through the river bed by turning up the 'AB_WidestCrooked_NW-SE' morph up, dropping it below the level of the riverbed. This does mean we won't be able to use the different material on the riverbed as we planned. We did think that maybe we could overcome it by dialling different NW-SE morphs on the Secondary, and get the alternate material where they intersect. However, they started showing through at the tps of the banks first and it looked pretty rubbish. The only way we can see to create an alternate material on the riverbed, would be to use a third TD, which we have done, and Poser was cool with it. However, we're going to load a TD2 Water in, as we can see in image16 below. Now obviously, we need to sort that far horizon out, which will be using some BZoneLg morphs. We could also use FBM's, BUT we might run into AZone difficulties. As always when mixing and matching terrain morphs, just be careful, and here we would be back to advising NOT to over dial.

Image16: Adding TD2 Water

We can add the extra morphs in a while, but first we ought to take a look at materials. ALL the materials we have installed use displacement, sometimes quite large displacement. Which means in some instances, you may get some interferance between them. Where we've gone for a big over dial, such as the river channel, this won't be a problem. On the path, if the Primary morph for the path is at 1.0 on the Primary TD2, then some of it's materials may come through. In some instances, this can create the appearance of an older, more crumbling path, that's becoming overgrown. The same effect can be achieved by using the Secondary morphs, on the Secondary TD2. These morphs pull the ground up a little along the path of the Primary morphs. In image17 below, , we applied materials and rendered up to see what's happening. We used 'Moorland-01' from our TerraNova pack on the Primary TD2, which we've contrasted with 'TD2 Soil 003' from Terrain Basics, on the Secondary TD2, and TD2 Fresnal Water 005 on the Water.

Image17: Adding Materials

This has been a longer than usual User Guide, and even as we were putting it together we learned something new about using these morphs. It seems there's far more potential for fun in this pack than we may have realised, and we keep finding new things we can do. Once we have found out more ways of using these morphs, we will be putting out a supplemental addition to this user guide. As always, we would recommend playing around with these morphs and seeing what happens and always save early, save often and save sequentially.

We hope you enjoy using this product and we look forward to seeing what images you make with it. Happy Rendering Andrew and Tracey :)

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