3. How to mix and blend stamps on an existing terrain

The simplest thing you can do with the Gaia Pro stamper is to pick a single stamp and just place that across the entire terrain. However you sometimes want to add additional features to an existing terrain, or place multiple stamps on a very large game world. This article explains some tricks and techniques on how to do this best.

For a video tutorial on terrain stamping please check out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l72itAbZoks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5xDUVxYno4

Selective Positioning

The simplest thing you can do to add additional features to the terrain is to take the stamper and position it in such way that only a mountain peeks through the terrain, then stamp.



In reverse, you can of course switch the operation type to "Lower Terrain" and cut valleys into the terrain as well.

This however requires you to carefully position the stamper, and ideally pick a stamp image that fades out towards the borders to not get ugly edges or steps on the terrain. Read on for more advanced techniques that will mitigate that.

Setting Influence to Global

You will soon notice that positioning the stamper is a somewhat limiting technique. It can be difficult sometimes to place the stamp in such way that the square base is not also visible which would not give a good result:





What you can do in that case, is to add a separate image mask to the stamper. In this mask you can switch the influence of the image mask from "Local" to "Global". Instead of raising the height at the exact position of the stamper, it will raise the height based on the original height of the underlying terrain. This means the "step" we were seeing before does not exist anymore and the stamp will blend nicely with the terrain:


 

Using a Global Distance Mask

A distance mask can be used to fade out the features of a stamp towards its borders, making it easier to blend with the terrain. Here is a stamp that is essentially a full terrain by itself:



When adding a distance mask to it, the stamp contents are faded out towards the borders:



The same distance mask, but this time the influence is switched to "Global". The distance mask now affects the overall stamping result - since the "power" of the stamp is faded out towards the border of the stamper, the distance mask now has the effect that it makes the mountain of the image mask blend seamlessly with the existing terrain:




Using the Base Level

Another way to blend a stamp with the terrain is using the base level. At base level 0 the full stamp information is used, from the bottom to the top:



When you increase the base level, you will see how the lower part of the stamp is being omitted, leaving only the higher parts:



When you then click "Adaptive Base" only the higher parts of this stamp will be applied to the terrain, getting rid of the base you would most likely not want to stamp anyways:



When you stamp now, you got mountain features of the existing stamp without stamping the square base as well.

Using Blend Height and Mix Height operations

Note that there beyond raising and lowering there  is also a "Blend Height" and a "Mix Height" operation which allows you to merge stamps into the existing terrain. In this way you can apply highs and lows at the same time to imprint a feature, rather than just raising or lowering. 
Pick a stamp image with some mountains or valleys, and apply a global distance mask. 



When you adjust the blend strength, you can go between the original state of the terrain and full impact of the stamp seamlessly.

You can then also try the "Mix Height" operation which uses a different algorithm to blend original terrain and stamp changes:



By combining the techniques mentioned in this article, you should be able to add additional features to the terrain as you see fit to create an interesting world design.