screwing around with architecture

[TheBadger]

Maybe you should set the displacement to a negative to have it explode less, or use an offset, so it averages the displacement. As a bypass, I mean.

But I really don't think its exploding!
See here, I turned up the displacement real high, and the corners are holding just fine.

[Dune]

OK, so it's working fine.

[TheBadger]

lol, but what about that line?... we do not have enough emoji here. I need one where the little face is animated and pulling out his hair.

Sorry Ulco, hope I did not come off wrong, just confused is all. Here is a close up from TG
[attachimg=1]     
I am rendering a even much closer test now, I can already see something funny is going on

[TheBadger]

Here is the closer shot.
Can anyone explain this?
[attachimg=1]
All I did was zoom in.

[Kadri]

This is your original file Michael:


[attachimg=1]


And this after smoothing in Poseray:


[attachimg=2]

But there are still problematic parts. At some edges like on the lower right side.
I would try to get rid of the double surfaces near the edges of the stones and would try to see how a more basic cube with only one inset would look.
If that makes sense. Just as a test. Make a render were you see this and just change that part.

[Kadri]

The last one was with less displacement.This is the same as the first render but with Poseray smoothing.


[attachimg=1]

[Kadri]

By the way there are Non Planar surfaces  in the object that are mostly problematic too.

[Kadri]

Have to sleep See you later 

[TheBadger]

I am just going to rebuild the damn thing! The walls part I mean, the rest of it looks fine to me.

Thanks Kadri, let me know what else you learn.

[Dune]

In LW I occasionally get double surfaces, especially when hitting 'e' and pulling out edges, points or polys for extensions. They cause problems, and I wouldn't know how to find them easily. Also, same technique often gives inverted polys when extending surfaces. So when I first saw your black corner, I though that poly could be inverted. If you then add displacement/bump in TG it renders very dark. Did you check the normals?
Kadri's renders look fine, don't they?

[Clay]

Not sure in LW, never used it much, but in Maya you can do a poly clean up which gets rid of extras etc and then you can do an auto stitch and it will run over the mesh and close all the seams .

[TheBadger]

@Dune,
Yeah, it is easy to break things in Maya too. But also, Maya has a lot of bugs. You probably don't remember, but before when I was working on this, the reason I quit it, was Maya destroyed all my UVs when I used an auto function called "layout". I spent so much time doing the UVs (making every stone have its own UV space so every stone would look different in TG) and when Maya broke it I went temporarily insane. PArt of my problem is I modeled every stone out of one larger part using edge loops, as I rebuild it I will make all the stones on their own.

@clay
Are you talking about the "clean up" tools, or something else? If you are talking about something else, please give instructions.

My normals are all fine. They all face out as they should. I know how to model. The reset of the structure is fine, its just that interior structure (the walls). I also had to redo the floors and steps twice because "layout" destroyed them. I quit because of the walls, but I have the energy to redo them now.. Like I said, I'll just model them easier way so Maya wont break it.

It would indeed be easier to model a new building rather than a ruin. But even then, I would want every stone to have its own UV space for difference. So almost the same amount of work.

Anyway, I will wait to hear from Kadri, and J about what they find. I still want to redo it for some unrelated reasons, but I should make sure what the darn problem is.

@ Kadri & J
THe reason it is so troublesome is that all of those edges were added by hand, one at a time, with the edge loop tool. I wont do it that way again, ever what a pain!

THANKS AGAIN EVERYONE! I have many other /greek/roman models that are not finished. I would very much like to fully understand the problem here before I finish those.

...
@ Matt Osh and Jo
Would you guys like to have this model to see if there is any improvement that can be done to TG to make importing from Maya better? I remember that Jo fixed a problem with Maya models not coming in with the image maps attached. Even now I still have to go in manually and turn up the color image to 100% from zero, but that is better than when I had to re link every image map by hand! Maybe there is something? Who knows?

[Kadri]

Even an addition to Terragen to change the normal angles for imported objects would be great.
Would like to hear from Matt how easy-hard it is to implement?

[Kadri]

Your object renders fine in Lightwave. The main problem is to get it work better in Terragen with displacements and ray trace off .
Maybe you could try vector displacement or small real displacements if nothing works.

[TheBadger]

MODO would work too based on paq's post in the other thread. So everything works right out of the box but not Maya. THere must be a setting some place that I don't know about.

Maya forums? I would spit, but I am in my house

Would like to hear some input from matt too, on this thread!