Population weirdness

[dduane]

Friends,

I've just started playing around with populations and have hit a wall. Maybe I'm missing something very basic: can anyone help? (The .tgd file is attached.)

I've got a very simple landscape -- nothing done to the terrain whatsoever as yet -- and have attempted to populate it with objects based on a vertical plane by using Add Object | Population | Plane.

"Pop Plane" comes up all right, as does its associate "/Pop Plane.Plane 01". After fiddling a little with the area centre and other settings, the wireframe versions of the planes in the population shows in the preliminary render window. So far, so good.

But when doing an actual render, nothing appears but Plane 01. I've fiddled with the node network but can't get anything but that single plane to show. Can some kindly person take a look at the .tgd and tell me what I've missed?

Thanks so much in advance!

Best -- Diane

[Tangled-Universe]

The planes showed up when I disabled "ray trace objects".

I have to take a look at the bug-tracker to see if it has been reported already.
I think I remember it already has.

Cheers,
Martin

[cyphyr]

As a temporary work around make a plane (.obj or .lwo) and import that instead. Probably best to uv map it first.
Good luck.
Richard

[dduane]

Aha! Unchecking the ray-trace box did indeed fix the problem. Thanks for that! D.

(Only one problem left: the population items don't seem to have shadows. I have to make sure, though, that they're just not too high up to do so.)

[dduane]

Just bumping the previous message to confirm: the population objects have no shadows. Any thoughts as to why this might be? 

Best! D.

[dduane]

As a temporary work around make a plane (.obj or .lwo) and import that instead. Probably best to uv map it first.

Richard, can you recommend a shareware or freeware program (for Win 7 or XP) that I can use to create a simple plane .obj?

Thanks! -- Diane

[dandelO]

Yes. A populated plane will have no shadows in each instance. I think it has to do with there being only one face to the whole object. If you make a .obj and use that you'll find that it does cast a shadow but you may find that the alpha channel still doesn't, you'll probably only see the square shadow of the original object. I found this while making 2D trees for BG filler.

Using a double plane .obj in an 'X' configuration returns the alpha channel shadowing. I don't know if that's practical for you to do that as I've no idea what you're making...

[dduane]

Hi dandelO!

I take your point about the single-face problem. I'll play with this in more detail when I have a little more time.

For the time being I'm going to work around the problem by populating the space with a stretched pillar shape instead of planes. (This is going to be another book cover shortly... the book's just about ready to go, and the only thing holding it now is the lack of a cover.)

Thanks to you & everybody else for the help so far. I'll put up the book cover when it's ready in a couple of days.

Best!  D.

[cyphyr]

Hi
Try this to be going on with. They're 1m x 1.5m and UV mapped but you'll have to find your own images. Change the scale and image to your needs.
Hope its helpful.
Richard

[dduane]

Hi
Try this to be going on with. They're 1m x 1.5m and UV mapped but you'll have to find your own images. Change the scale and image to your needs.
Hope its helpful.

Thanks so much for this! It's kind of you to take the time.

Images aren't an issue, fortunately -- I'm going to be slapping a reflective shader on these (I'm looking for a hall-of-mirrors effect).

More shortly as I get this thing sorted out.  Thanks again!

Best -- D.