Hi Badger,
Quote from: TheBadger on March 26, 2012, 03:17:18 PM
On the issue of repeating textures... Is there a thread that talks about how I may set this up correctly in the first place? You have said that fixing it now would be a ton of work, implying that I may have been able to do it from the beginning. If so, how?
I don't think there is any way to set this up in the best way easily. Basically you have a bunch of models that all use the same images for textures. When TG2 loads each model it creates a set of default shaders which each load their own copy of the image. For example with 270 ivy models with 3 texture and 2 alpha images each you end up with 1350 images loaded. The ideal situation would be that only 5 images were loaded.
Unfortunately there isn't a way for you to set this up in TG2 so that only the 5 images are used, unless you did a lot of work editing nodes.
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I dont think there would be any problem making changes to the maze, jo. Although I'm not entirely sure of what you mean, I will live with whatever you guys conclude on this.
Your maze is created by displacing the maze image map. The image map is basically 9 separate sections - 3 rows and 3 columns. All of the outer sections look like they're the same. The centre section is different. What I was thinking is that you could build up the maze using two images. One would be just one of the "edge" sections, the top left one for example. You would use this to create a base map that tiles across the whole scene as the maze image does now. The other image would be the centre section. You could place that in the middle of your scene so you still get the difference there.
I wonder if it would be worth using a distance shader to limit the image map to the visible part of the scene. Just far enough so you still get maze along the horizons.
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Can you elaborate on your text editing?
I'm not sure what more I can say than I did already. The project file is XML and can therefore be opened in a text editor and edited. I opened the file, copied the default shaders from the first ivy models and pasted them so they were outside the objects, kind of at the top level of the file. I then used regular expressions to do a find and replace on all the shader params of the Object Part nodes so they pointed to the default shaders I copied. I used regular expressions because the shader lines weren't all the same as they had names with various numbers of "_1" appended (we need to make that better!).
I then used regular expressions to do a find and replace on all the unused default shaders. I just replaced them with blank space to delete them.
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Is this something I should know?
Hard to say :-). Project files are XML and can be edited in a text editor or processed by other tools which can read XML. For example if I were more of a scripting guy I could have made these changes with a Perl or Python script etc. Project files aren't especially complex so if you're used to working with this sort of stuff they're not too difficult to modify. For example I'm comfortable editing them partly because I've done a lot of HTML editing in the past.
I don't think we'd officially support editing the files as in provide any sort of guidance how to do it but we'd answer questions if they came up I guess.
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Does it apply to what I asked Oshyan about repeating textures.
Yes. I edited the file so it reduced the number of images loaded from 1300 odd to 5. I also took out the painted shaders as it seemed from what you said that it was ok to do. The original file took 9.52 GB when loaded, the edited one took "only" 6.43 GB. I will send you a copy of the edited file.
Anyway, it's an impressive scene. Do you mind if we hang on to it for testing purposes? There's a bunch of things I can think of that we could try out with it. Not so much to make it render faster for you anytime soon, but in terms of loading lots of models at once, optimising texture use, memory use during rendering, that sort of thing. Test cases like this are difficult to come up with ourselves, it's great to be able to work with "real life" projects.
Regards,
Jo
