Weird populator problem

[ejgodwin]

Relative newbie here. Having recently upgraded to TG3, I've had a problem with the populator that's been driving me nuts. When I add populations using the tgo reader, and click "populate now", it doesn't fill the area to its edges. It always populates only the lower left corner. It's also not proportional: if I reduce the area to say, 100x100, it doesn't create any instances at all.

The only way to make it fill the area is to uncheck the "sit on terrain" option, which of course defeats the whole purpose. (It's set to "Compute Terrain" and "Planet 01" like it should be.) There's no displacement or density shaders involved, and nothing else unusual except one thing: in the Elevation setting in the Planet 01 shader, I had to use a value of 270 to offset a problem caused by my external heightfield editor (the coasts were too low).

Anyone here seen the same thing or have a clue what's going on? I've searched the forums and the wiki to no avail. I never saw this problem in TG2, even with the same heightfield.

Just a note to say I've been lurking here for some time, and I've learned a lot from you guys. Hope to contribute someday. Thanks!

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[Dune]

Welcome to this forum as a participant. We need more participants!

It's best if you could post your tgd, then it's probably easily solved. But it looks like your area is indeed 4x5k, so I can't see the problem. What I did notice is the spacing; above 1 doesn't make a difference, at least not that I ever noticed. Play with values between 0-1.

[ejgodwin]

As an experiment I created a completely different project from scratch, recreated the heightfield load using the same source "ter" file, and the "populate now" behaved as expected, filling the area. When I compared the two projects, I noticed that the "Location" tab of the heightfield in the new project was "Position centre", while the project I'm having trouble with is "Position lower left". When I changed it to centre, the problem went away. But in the new project, when I changed it to lower left, the population button still filled the area as expected. I've added clips exported from the other project to try to find the culprit, but to no avail.

I don't really mind repositioning all the location-sensitive nodes in my project, but I'd like to know why this is happening. I'm happy to upload the tgd, but do I need to upload the heightfield file as well? It's huge, 15MB at 730x550 km.

[Dune]

So you're sure the population center is at the center of the heightfield? What I usually do is determine where my camera will be (for a still), then put the center of the population about halfway its length/width forward. No need to have a population behind you. I suggest fiddling some more, you'll find out. It's indeed a bit too much to upload the ter, I'm afraid.

[ejgodwin]

No, changing the coordinates of the population has no affect one way or the other for this problem. The only thing I can figure out is that this project was originally created in TG2, so perhaps some "conversion bug" in TG3's new populator is misinterpreting the 0,0 reference for the heightfield when it's at lower left. The test project that didn't have this problem was created from scratch in the new version.

I've already used the method you suggested, adjusting the position of the population to offset the problem. The only thing is I can't have a population too small, or else it will create zero instances. The lower-left heightfield setting is more of a convenience, as it keeps references to the externally created heightfield clearer in my head. But at this point it's the lesser evil.