Mask Issue with Populations and Fake Stones

[WAS]

I was wondering if someone could take a look at this? In my mask Preview, the rocks, and all the masking looks right, but when I render, grass is still growing under stones. It's confusing me.


Circled areas are rocks.

I figured out a nice way to group my population masks inside a Transform Shader, gives me good control over the mask shape if re-used. Just not sure why it looks right in the preview but doesn't render right.

The mask in question is attached to the grass clump population.

[WAS]

Well, sure a lot of downloads. I hope it helps people with grass.

I've dived a little further into the problem, and found that within the Population Mask shader the Surface Layer that is masked by the Fake Stones isn't fully masking. In fact it's like there is some opacity on the mask.



Update: I've fixed some noticeable errors after coming back to the project, but still, grass through the rocks persists.

Here is a comparison of the stone mask, and the final mask




It does vary slightly like the Surface Layer is not masking correctly by the Stone Mask.

Any ideas what's going on, or what I'm doing wrong trying to combine a PF mask with a Fake Stone Shader mask?

[bobbystahr]

It's all the noise from the PF likely, haven't looked at it yet. Will get back on this.

[bobbystahr]

Well for starters the grass clump size is so large it's bound to do that. In the revised one attached I shrank it's size to I think .5 and 500 blades(maybe too many still) and reorganized your masks to more like the way I do it. Hope this is helpful. Thr grass only popped through in that front stone and re seeding might take care of that. Also I used Clip to Camera on the populator in case there were lots of grass outside the fustrum(sp?) If you are going to be doing close ups it's often wise to size you population to fit within what the camera sees mainly, then Clip to Camera works even better.I just noticed I inverted the Distribution shader so maybe unclick that and re populate.
Also you can, in TG3, edit the population if there's just a few sticking through...The icon next to the Painted shader one opens it up.

[WAS]

Well for starters the grass clump size is so large it's bound to do that. In the revised one attached I shrank it's size to I think .5 and 500 blades(maybe too many still) and reorganized your masks to more like the way I do it. Hope this is helpful. Thr grass only popped through in that front stone and re seeding might take care of that. Also I used Clip to Camera on the populator in case there were lots of grass outside the fustrum(sp?) If you are going to be doing close ups it's often wise to size you population to fit within what the camera sees mainly, then Clip to Camera works even better.I just noticed I inverted the Distribution shader so maybe unclick that and re populate.
Also you can, in TG3, edit the population if there's just a few sticking through...The icon next to the Painted shader one opens it up.

Well, call me silly, but I totally spaced on checking out the internal object besides the population. Sure the parts. But not the individual objects being used and its settings.. -___- Shame.

I'll take a look. All I was intending was a way to blend masks for various purposes with easy plugs without all the editing (hence the transform shader) and the Fake Stone Plug as a optional input for well, if there is fake stones in my scenes. Also was intending to release this, so when I finish optimizing, and hopefully  getting it about exact, may I release it in the File Sharing forum for other users to evaluate? I'm all about helping people learn... I lost my friends along the way... mainly due to TG render restrictions but me and my friend offered to help render stuff for them, he has a computer like dedicated to several rendering applications including Maya.

Also, is there any reason why the colour adjust doesn't seem to be able to achieve full White with Gamma as I would assume it would through any gamma setting normally. Or does it just not look purely white?

[bobbystahr]

Yes please do release the final product. It is a valid method of learning. In fact I recommend opening all of the procedural settings in the free presets package and seeing how advanced users create stuff, most educational that Preset package.

You'll have to await someone like Oshyan et al to get a technical answer on stuff like the adjust...I only started using it with Fakestones when I started using them as masks and wanted crisp definition and Big Ben explained it to me I think.

[Oshyan]

If the color is not white to begin with, adjusting gamma won't bring it to white (at least when working properly with floating point color values as TG does; some image editors may round incorrectly and go from near-white to white). Unless you're looking at values in the rendered output, those may be affected by Soft Clip and possibly other post effects (on the Effects tab).

- Oshyan