Ivy Generator + Terragen2 information dump

[TheBadger]

In 2.4, you just hit the N key to bring up with the Quick Node Palette and start typing Also I think the normal Node Palettes remember if they were open when you close Terragen and automatically reopen next time you start Terragen.

Matt

Ahhhh, 2.4? Am I missing something here? 2.4 perhaps?

[TheBadger]

Hi again,

So I have done everything as discussed in the previous posts, and I repeated the process just to feel more comfortable with it. I can get my terrain into IvyGen each time, and am able to find the point of view I am interested in. The model has great detail and looks nice.

However,

1) My terrain .obJ that I bring into IvyGen is 1.5G, is this normal?

2) My terrain always appears flipped or inverted. That is, looking at the terrain in IvyGen, everything is where it should be, only reversed (what should be screen right is now screen left and visa versa). Is this normal, and what should I do about it?

3) My terrain alway appears a good distance beneath the floor in IvyGen, making the plants grow like they are on LSD (no it doesn't look cool, and its not fun to watch) I think this may have something to do with my Transform shader and render camera, and the fact that my terrain falls below "0" anyway. What to do

[Tangled-Universe]

1) My terrain .obJ that I bring into IvyGen is 1.5G, is this normal?

Being in a mood for silly jokes I'd say "yes that's normal"
The reason it is so big is because you exported your terrain at quite a high detail level I suppose or you have exported a very large junk, or perhaps both.

In the micro exporter you'll see two parameters controlling the clipping distance of the exporter. By default it is 1+06 metres (if I'm correct), which is 1000km. You need to determine the maximum distance required:

So make a separate camera and position it nearby your region of interest and make sure your region of interest is in the render view.
Then set the distance of the micro-exporter to the distance from your region of interest to your camera + 5-10% to make sure it will be exported.
You can measure the distance by moving your camera up and have it face down upon itself...you can do this because you did NOT update the coordinates for the camera, so that's why you can have the camera look at itself in the preview. Let the preview finish and use the measure tool to measure the distance from your camera to your region of interest and put that value + 5-10% into the max distance setting in the micro exporter.

Then render out your terrain using a detail value of ~0.25. The higher the detail the more polygons there will be exported.

You should now have a much smaller obj file. Mostly <100MB.

2) My terrain always appears flipped or inverted. That is, looking at the terrain in IvyGen, everything is where it should be, only reversed (what should be screen right is now screen left and visa versa). Is this normal, and what should I do about it?

I noticed that too, so it seems that didn't change I flipped it with Poseray I believe. Not sure anymore, sorry.

3) My terrain alway appears a good distance beneath the floor in IvyGen, making the plants grow like they are on LSD (no it doesn't look cool, and its not fun to watch) I think this may have something to do with my Transform shader and render camera, and the fact that my terrain falls below "0" anyway. What to do

It's still possible your region of interest is at the 0,0 coordinates for X and Z, but still is -Y metres in Y.
There might also be a unit conversion issue in Ivy Generator where 1m in TG2 = 10m in Ivy Gen.

I'd actually need to go through this entire process again to see how it precisely works nowadays.

[rcallicotte]

Good thread and good information.  Looking forward to 2.4.

[jo]

Hi Martin,

However, without the possibility of docking/fixing the node palette somewhere in the UI (and have it there by default) I think I'll never get accustomed to using it.

You can't dock it as such but you don't really need to. The normal node palettes (not the Quick Node Palette) will stay where they're put and any palettes that are open when you quit are recreated next time you start TG2. If this isn't happening for you go to the General prefs panel and make sure that "Restore Node Palette windows at startup" is checked.

Regards,

Jo

[TheBadger]

Good thread and good information...

Thanks calico,
I always think my threads are not useful to anyone else. Its good to know others get something out of it, don't feel like I'm just taking up space then.

[TheBadger]

Then render out your terrain using a detail value of ~0.25. The higher the detail the more polygons there will be exported.

Thanks T-U. I read on the forums that .5 detail is the highest I should go, so I just went with .5. Obvious now I could have just lowered it, but when Im just starting to get to grips with something I usually wait to deviate until I feel like I really got it.

As to the rest of what you wrote, I will happily design a tutorial, lay it out in in-design and give you full credit. If you can teach me we can teach everyone.

[TheBadger]

Update

Ok, so I was able to get my terrain into IvyGen above "0" by making "Y"="0", and rendering with a different camera... Just as T-U described, however Y must = 0!

The terrain then took the Ivy which grew properly (I think).

I was able to save out the Ivy and import it into TG2 where the Ivy automatically showed up in the correct place (I think), this is with the transform shader still hooked up. The fact that everything is reversed in IvyGen does not seem to matter. It was fist good result, so ill try again to see if its really working or I just got a random result.

However I got some errors relating to the Ivy (See attachment) Where do I go in TG to show it where the files are now?

[Dune]

You have to import the files inside the object(s) node.

[TheBadger]

However,

1) My terrain .obJ that I bring into IvyGen is 1.5G, is this normal?

2) My terrain always appears flipped or inverted. That is, looking at the terrain in IvyGen, everything is where it should be, only reversed (what should be screen right is now screen left and visa versa). Is this normal, and what should I do about it?

3) My terrain alway appears a good distance beneath the floor in IvyGen, making the plants grow like they are on LSD (no it doesn't look cool, and its not fun to watch) I think this may have something to do with my Transform shader and render camera, and the fact that my terrain falls below "0" anyway. What to do

Ok, some new information based on more tests attempts:

1) This problem is fixed as T-U posted.

2) The terrain will always appear as a mirror image, but it does not matter at all. When you import the ivy into TG2 it appears just as it should in the correct place. Attempting to reverse the image in another program so it appears correctly in IvyGen is not necessary unless, perhaps, your scene is so complex in the fist place that you cant tell what your looking at.

3)It seams that it is not necessary to use a transform shader at all. The fact that the terrain falls below the floor in IvyGen does not matter. The problems I described before about plant growth were related to a difference in the controls for the PC version and mac version. I was using a tutorial for a pc version but working on a mac. The sliders both appear differently and work differently between a PC an mac (but not by much).
However, I am not yet sure that, if without the transform shader, the Ivy will be placed in the correct spot upon import.
It looks like that whatever is in the render camera view (or the camera your exporter is working through) will appear in the center of the IvyGen work space regardless of how far away from 0,0,0 the scene is in TG2. More conformation on this would be nice.

[TheBadger]

Was able to attach textures to the Ivy, however now there are new problems. There is a post by andy in this thread that seems to be about the same thing? Not sure how to fix it though.
T-U answered that thread but the work was done in privet.

hereis the thread: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4420.0


EDIT in

I have redone everything to see for sure how everything works.

Transform shaders are not necessary!
As T-U said, the smaller the terrain.obj the better! I cannot stress this enough, make it as small a file size as possible. Ivy grows much much better.
Still getting the white blotches. But as you can see they do not cover everything.

If anyone can explain the white blotches please do.

[Tangled-Universe]

That looks like a texture issue to me, but also it seems that AA-bloom is enabled in the renderer and that a lot of bloom is applied, further suggesting that some textures use high reflectivity values.
So first disable reflectivity in shaders and render again. Still white? Texture problem.

I think in one of my first posts I pointed to the necessity to convert the .tiff files which come along with Ivy Gen need to be saved as bmp files (both diffuse and alpha).

[AndyWelder]

Badger, I got them looking OK by using the .png images that are in the textures directory that came with IvyGen (or was that a separate download...? I can't remember.) Anyway, I did NOT convert the images. What I did do though was flip some of the texture images so the leaves were all pointing the same way.
The settings for the leaf shaders can be seen at the first image, the second image shows how the image directory looks like on my system.

[dandelO]

I thought I'd already posted about this before here but I must have decided against hitting the 'post' button, I do remember writing it recently, though. Probably too many sheets-to-the-wind and lost myself in my own blethering somewhere and so thought better!
Do as Martin suggests, I found that as soon as converting the default 'efeu' images I lost these white areas, either change them to a .tif with opacity channel saved for TG to use or, make a set of alpha images to go with them and save the colour images as .jpg for a smaller file.

* I never did try Andy's simple flip the image idea, probably that's all that was needed!
Anyway, it's not uncommon that I regularly tend to take the long way around to get to a shortcut! I keep myself amused on the way there, though, so don't worry for me, I beg you!

[TheBadger]

That looks like a texture issue to me, but also it seems that AA-bloom is enabled in the renderer and that a lot of bloom is applied, further suggesting that some textures use high reflectivity values.
So first disable reflectivity in shaders and render again. Still white? Texture problem.
I think in one of my first posts I pointed to the necessity to convert the .tiff files which come along with Ivy Gen need to be saved as bmp files (both diffuse and alpha).

I thought I'd already posted about this before here but I must have decided against hitting the 'post' button, I do remember writing it recently, though. Probably too many sheets-to-the-wind and lost myself in my own blethering somewhere and so thought better!
Do as Martin suggests, I found that as soon as converting the default 'efeu' images I lost these white areas, either change them to a .tif with opacity channel saved for TG to use or, make a set of alpha images to go with them and save the colour images as .jpg for a smaller file.

* I never did try Andy's simple flip the image idea, probably that's all that was needed!
Anyway, it's not uncommon that I regularly tend to take the long way around to get to a shortcut! I keep myself amused on the way there, though, so don't worry for me, I beg you!

Badger, I got them looking OK by using the .png images that are in the textures directory that came with IvyGen (or was that a separate download...? I can't remember.) Anyway, I did NOT convert the images. What I did do though was flip some of the texture images so the leaves were all pointing the same way.
The settings for the leaf shaders can be seen at the first image, the second image shows how the image directory looks like on my system.

The files I have are all .jpg or .png no .tif(s). Some of the information above conflicts, and I am quite far out of my depth with this stuff anyway. I am using textures from the IvyGen website, but not the ones that come in the software, the ones that are additional. Here is the link: http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/#download
If anyone could fix them for use in TG2 and post them here for everyone to use that would be so great. There are 3 leafs young, old and dead. I think that everything you need is there. But Im not the person to say.

*
After searching the net I found that others using Modo have similar problems. It sounds like the alpha channel is bad and they say that it just needs to be replaced re-saved. Here is the thread: http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=16856
It is short. But all of this is new to me. could some one help me understand this aspect of things?