Misty Valley

ares2101 · January 04, 2012, 10:52:08 PM

Inspired a bit by that recent Realism Test, I decided to try making a scene with some low-lying fog. There's one problem I see though. If you look at the near fog, you'll notice the trees don't seem to be rendered beneath it. You can tell from the shadows underneath that they aren't there and there's a weird quality in general.

Any idea what could be causing that? The clouds are based on those from the Golden Forest tutorial but with a feature scale of 25 instead.

ares2101 · January 05, 2012, 08:07:45 PM

Anybody?

yossam · January 05, 2012, 09:07:29 PM

Could you post the tgd.........it might be easier to troubleshoot.

ares2101 · January 06, 2012, 06:13:00 PM

Here's the TGD

Tangled-Universe · January 06, 2012, 06:59:59 PM

I'm sorry but I can't reproduce the problem.

Cheers,
Martin

ares2101 · January 06, 2012, 09:40:34 PM

Quote from: Tangled-Universe on January 06, 2012, 06:59:59 PM
I'm sorry but I can't reproduce the problem.

Cheers,
Martin

You can render it without the problem? Weird, assuming you changed nothing, something must be wrong on my end. Could it have something to do with my system (see below)? Normally I consider it to be pretty good, though with the great amount of instances in this TGD taught me it's limits (I was just barely moving along with it merely open).

My System
AMD Phenom II X4 AM3 3.4 Ghz Quad-Core Processor
CORSAIR XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM
CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1 GB Video Card
ASUS M4A78T-E AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
Windows 7 Home Edition

yossam · January 07, 2012, 02:11:05 PM

I have a question about the populations in the scene. Did you use the default settings for scale (i.e. 1 minimum and 1 maximum) for all the plants? I tried to render the file and although the populations were showing in the preview window, they did not show up in the render. None of them. And by the way, one of your populations was not enabled.

ares2101 · January 07, 2012, 07:11:24 PM

Quote from: yossam on January 07, 2012, 02:11:05 PM
I have a question about the populations in the scene. Did you use the default settings for scale (i.e. 1 minimum and 1 maximum) for all the plants? I tried to render the file and although the populations were showing in the preview window, they did not show up in the render. None of them. And by the way, one of your populations was not enabled.

Yes, everything is at default scale and I disabled that population to check something, it doesn't need to even be there anymore.

As for why the populations don't show up, are you getting an error about not finding stuff? Populations and their textures are not stored inside a TGO, if you don't have them in the same places nothing will show up.

yossam · January 07, 2012, 10:11:01 PM

I forget to change the location for the tgo. I changed the textures but forgot to change the location for the populations. It rendered fine after that. I disabled the grass objects and the cloud layer to check it and all the trees are there. I really don't know what to tell you. What kind of error, if any, did you get?

ares2101 · January 08, 2012, 09:41:05 PM

Quote from: yossam on January 07, 2012, 10:11:01 PM
I forget to change the location for the tgo. I changed the textures but forgot to change the location for the populations. It rendered fine after that. I disabled the grass objects and the cloud layer to check it and all the trees are there. I really don't know what to tell you. What kind of error, if any, did you get?

I don't remember any error message, just that it rendered funny. I'll try rendering it again in the morning. It sounds like TU was unable to reproduce the problem, so maybe it was a fluke.

Tangled-Universe · January 09, 2012, 03:54:27 AM

Since I (think I) didn't have the population in question I replaced them with another TGO, but did use the exact same settings for the populator.

ares2101 · January 09, 2012, 11:43:53 AM

Yeah, tried rendering it again, this time with the settings set higher in the hopes that higher quality would fix it, the problem still happened. I think I'm going to scrap this one, my PC barely handles having it open and I don't see much I can do.

cyphyr · January 09, 2012, 12:01:28 PM

Are you using just one population covering the whole area (Or several pops of differing trees but still all covering the same large area). Just checked and effectively you are.
If so conceder making smaller populations only covering the areas that you can see. All those trees loaded behind the hill take up memory and this may be one reason TG is refusing to finish the population on your system but works fine on TU's computer. Your system looks fine to me but this method will reduce total memory load. You can have several (a great many actually) populations all referencing the same object. The object is only loaded once but is used separately in each population.
cheers
Richard