How to get acceptable quality Heightfield Masks?

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Hi,

I am trying to use Houdini as an alternative to WorldMachine for terrain erosion, but no matter what I do, the results are abysmal. Even at excessive resolutions (8k) which take ages to compute, the resulting masks are extremely noisy, even with post smooth enabled.

I am getting all sorts of banding and pixelation artifacts, which make these masks unusable in the game engine, because they are very obvious:

For comparison, this is how the masks look from WorldMachine:


I tried playing with every single value in the HeightField erode node but nothing helped. There doesn't seem to be any samples setting I can increase to get rid of extreme noise and aliasing/pixelation.

How do I do reach acceptable quality of the masks? The only thing that works is using obscene heightfield resolution, like 16k, but the memory often runs out and the calculation times are unacceptable for any reasonable degree of iteration/lookdevelopment.

Attachments:
Screenshot 2024-07-01 171012.jpg (246.1 KB)
wm.jpg (266.9 KB)

https://www.artstation.com/artist/rawalanche [artstation.com]
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Same question
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Hi Ludvík, would you be able to share an example of your setup?
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paulmarkd
Hi Ludvík, would you be able to share an example of your setup?

Here's the file:
Edited by Ludvík Koutný - July 5, 2024 03:38:39

Attachments:
HoudiniHeightfield.zip (1.7 MB)

https://www.artstation.com/artist/rawalanche [artstation.com]
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I'm curious about this as well, I think it's been like this since at least version 17.
Houdini FX 20.5 | http://techie.se [techie.se]
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