Rule of 3rds overlay view

[Dune]

Mmm, very interesting.

[Hetzen]

That's interesting Kadri. When I've exported obj's, the back of stuff is usually occluded. But then admittedly I've always rendered obj from ground camera positions not top down. I've always used HFs for larger vistas.

Even so, the process of optimising dense meshes takes time to weld and smooth, the result is usually quite un-weildly in 3d apps, as well as having problematic areas to deal with.

[Kadri]

Yeah optimizing takes too long time. That's when i see the 32 GB RAM in full use mostly and want more.
Manually fixing the problematic parts isn't fun either.
I hope Matt makes an optimised version of the micro exporter. With texture support it would be so great
Even the small decrease that you get by not exporting the normals (wasn't aware at all...duh) that Matt mentioned lately made me happy.

[Hetzen]

I hope Matt makes an optimised version of the micro exporter. With texture support it would be so great

He's done most of the leg work. For camera projection you may have to get a bit savvy with generating normal 2d passes to blend a start and end point on a texture projection to get the blend right without smearing on larger camera moves. It really does come down to the scene. A 500 pixel micro export does a reasonable job with a higher resolution projection.

[Kadri]

He's done most of the leg work.
...

Sweet.

... For camera projection you may have to get a bit savvy with generating normal 2d passes to blend a start and end point on a texture projection to get the blend right without smearing on larger camera moves. It really does come down to the scene. A 500 pixel micro export does a reasonable job with a higher resolution projection.

Thanks for the info

[Hetzen]

He's done most of the leg work.
...

Sweet.

It's what's there already mate. Nothing new. 

[Kadri]

 

[Ashley]

I'd have to agree to completely disagree with you Hetzen on all counts, sorry if I misunderstand what you say but from what it sounds like, how I am interpreting what your saying, your info just doesn't ring true to my experience 

Every obj I export represents the terrain 1 to 1, hence why the high rez output. What I see in TG is what I get as obj.
I never get the holes you speak of. Even on really vertical parts I still get polys, not sure what the "holes" issue is maybe upload a tgd.

Exporting Heightfields I reserve for moving to WM. As final output they don't give me as much detail as obj.
Try lowering your resolution to something like 128 x 128 pixels but up the quality to say 5 and move a top down camera to an altitude above your terrain. You'll get a high resolution mesh, which I have found is faster than baking HF when trying to match quality.

With Texturing, I re-project my renders. When you say blend or avoid smearing I assume you are referring to the projection stretching which is common when projecting from a static camera. This is solved by rendering out a sequence, re-project and paint masks. This will get you 90 to 95% of the way there then of course you need a bit of manual painting for the final look development. Basically consider your TG procedural shaders (RGB) more as masks rather than finsihed textures.

Not sure how other users "clean" geometry post TG, I know obj verts are un-welded which can take ages to weld in say maya.
So I use Zbrush, and retopo instad of fix, its really fast. I get all the detail and have the tools to generate a clean subdivided mesh as well as split the geo into managable sections depending on what app the final render will take place.

As far as optimizing scenes, once I have my clean mesh I then can decide at render time which sections receive more or less subdivision and disp quality. This has worked so far with Mantra, Vray, and Clarisse. All of which handle larger terrains differently.

One thing however that is really tricky to replicate in other renders is the outstanding quality of a TG render, and its atmosphere.

Sorry for the epic sized post, but I hope it clears things up. 

[Hetzen]

That's alright Ashley. Thanks for spending the time to describe the workflow you're using. I was merely pointing out another way of getting TG terrain out into other apps and pointing out some of the pitfalls with obj export.

For example I needed a tank track plugin to interact with terrain produced in TG. Because the dirt road in TG had quite a lot of detail in the displacements, the exported mesh had to be welded together in 3D Max and there were a few gaps left where fake stones were used. This caused havoc with the plugin, causing the tank to fall through the ground. The solution was to export a Heightfield and use Groundwiz to create a quad mesh from the .ter which worked like a charm.

We have a similar approach to using WM. In the attached image we had to produce an animation and 7k print images for American Airlines livery launch. Like you, I was having difficulty getting the resolution in and out of TG and WM to generate erosion masks that held up. In the end I split the hero part of the scene into a 3x3 grid of heightfields, eroded each in WM then blended back in TG. It worked out that WM would run out of ram exporting 8k tiles if I tried to do it all in one go, hence tiling the scene in TG. Heightfields are slow to export admittedly as they only use one CPU thread to process. You can run multiple instances of TG to output in parallel.

I've had some thoughts on trying to blend projections onto obj meshes that use the normal pass to separate out different static camera positions, which would free up a re-render if the animation changes, but I've not delved too deeply into that process.

At then end of the day, it's horses for courses and always informative on how others approach things.

[bobbystahr]

PoseRay has a very nice Weld command...very fast as well

[Ashley]

I was merely pointing out another way of getting TG terrain out into other apps and pointing out some of the pitfalls with obj export.

That's cool, I overlook that not everyone uses Zbrush. Most of what you, and others, describe as pitfalls are avoided with the tools in Zbrush. Gotta have the right tools in production :-)

Erosion in WM tends to knock out the details from TG or for that matter heightfields in general. So I use a lower resolution and simply export higher out of WM. (The more tiles the less ram needed for export ;-).

Get use to handling the micro exporter, as it will help you with exporting geometry for re-projecting.

Its good to see more support for an automated / batch export process. Be it for obj or height field.
Seems to be the peeps in production that require this feature more than others.

Cheers

[Matt]

That is one hell of an image, Jon

Matt

[Hetzen]

Thanks Matt. There's a few improvements I'd want to throw at it these days. They were happy with it back then so that's what it is. 

Ashley, looks like I'm going to have to master Zbrush now. 

[AP]

Zbrush is just neat. I have a keen interest in that software.

[Ashley]

And looks like I'm going to have to learn Houdini now :-)