Switch a DEM terrain to an OBJ?

Started by yesmine, June 19, 2014, 01:45:17 PM

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yesmine

I have a scene fairly complete with trees and grass all populating on a DEM as the terrain. Unfortunately, I have another bit of Terrain saved as an object (OBJ) from Maya, that I'd really like to insert into the Terragen scene and basically switch the DEM terrain with my OBJ. Of course I need to have the plant populations sitting on the OBJ just as they are now on the DEM. (The DEM is different enough from the OBJ terrain that they don't align perfectly or I'd try to fake it.)

Is there a non-painful way, perhaps reattaching the nodes, to have my existing surface and vegetation populate on the OBJ terrain. Perhaps I can hook the OBJ into some sort of surface shader that I can then hook into where the DEM loads now?

To add a little to the above: I've tried changing the Anchor for the plant population to "Sit on object", and then selecting the imported OBJ I want as the terrain. I thought that might work, and the boundary for the population seems to be inline with the OBJ itself, but the plants do not show up when I repopulate. If I set them back to sit on the original DEM, the population shows up as expected again, so I cannot understand why they will not appear when "sitting on" the OBJ.

Any help will be great.
Thanks

Oshyan

Hmm, it should work as simply as you assumed. Provided the population area is positioned correctly relative to the object (remember that it projects perpendicular to the plane of the population bounding box), then it should work to simply change the Anchor. Note that you should view the alignment from an above view to ensure it is correct as Perspective view can be misleading in this case (unless the population has a really large area that should easily encompass the object).

- Oshyan