QuoteIt would be much better to my mind if you just add new replies, it doesn't look impatient, we know what you intend. Otherwise it gets confusing if you change a post I later replied to, just to add new information that my reply does not reflect.
OK, good to know - I'll stop trying to confuse you...........
QuoteFirst, the clipping issue (left/right bracket keys, i.e. [ ], where right bracket *increases* the clipping plane distance). The reason this is useful/important is because Terragen portrays a *tremendous* range of scales, thousands or even millions of kilometers, all the way down to centimeter/millimeter scale. This requires high numerical precision to represent accurately and so requires lots of digits, i.e. 32 bit (or greater) precision. The problem is that the OpenGL z-buffer (depth buffer) has more limited precision, or at least historically has (I'm not sure if they improved it), and so when we display *in the 3D preview* (which uses OpenGL, while the main renderer does not), we are limited by that lesser precision and must specify a *range* of our total distances to represent in the 3D preview (i.e. the entire range cannot be accurately represented with the number of digits provided by a typical graphics card z-buffer, so we show a portion). The clipping plane adjustment settings change the bias of that range, either closer (so that you see lots of small stuff, accurately, but it clips stuff really far away), or further (so that you see really, really far, but it clips stuff closer to the camera). By default we have it set to what seems to be a reasonable range.
Wow; thanks for that comprehensive explanation; amazingly, I understand perfectly (and that's pretty unusual for me; good teacher, crappy learner).
QuotePlants *on* the surface: you need to make sure the anchor point for your object is at the point of your object that you want to be on the ground. TG has no other way of determining the boundaries of your object.
For what they cost, you'd reckon Xfrog could place the anchor point in the right place to start with, wouldn't you?
Makes sense though; I know Vue .veg format plant generally have the anchor points for the leaves in the wrong spot; at one stage, I spent 2 days editing all of Vue's inclusive plants - only to find they're mostly crap anyway (unless viewed from a distance - and with that condition, we can all model plants...).
Looks like there's some more editing to be done in Xfrog (and then export to obj, import into Terragen, save as tgo....).
QuoteIt's a shame that the Xfrog library models are not the same as what Xfrog software outputs in terms of default scale,
Now that's just bloody stupid, isn't it?.............
QuoteI would guess maybe they're less popular because of the potential confusion between decimetres and decametres. Who needs them anyway?
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It's kinda funny that we rarely use a decimetre when we use the decimal system...............
Because of that omission, I've always found it difficult to teach the decimal system to kids (and children too..
); the decimal system is meant to work in units that increase by a power of 10 from one unit to the next:
10mm = 1cm, 10cm = 1dm, 10dm = 1m, etc......
With the decimetre missing in the kids' knowledge base, it doesn't make as much sense..........
QuoteIn the early days of TG development I was working with a company that had standardised much of their pipeline around decimetres, but they were working in Maya with Maya's units set to centimetres. So Maya would call something a centimetre but the artists were building things at the scale where it was a decimetre. This is where the bug originated in Terragen. I thought I was scaling to centimetres, but accidentally scaled by 0.1 and never spotted my error because it just worked. At that point I hadn't twigged that the pipeline was treating centimetres as decimetres and that my code wasn't doing what it said it was. Later on when I added support for XfrogPlants OBJs, the incorrectly named "Source in cm" seemed to work correctly, again simply by accident.
It all looks so reasonable when you look back on it; "Why did I miss such a basic error?" - but when you've "lived it" for a while, we all can be convinced that white is black and vice-versa.......
QuoteDeciliters though is very common as a regular bottle of beer contains 3 dL
So is that 300mL? BTW; good to see you're using the correct symbols.............
In Australia, it's millilitres or litres; nothing else (at least wrt volume).....
Oh look at us; geeking out over units in the decimal system............
Time to get a life..........