Urban scene animated WIP

Started by Hannes, October 03, 2016, 09:17:09 AM

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Ariel DK

#60
Quote from: inkydigit on October 11, 2016, 08:05:05 AM
some more sunbathers would be enough to distract anyone from the ghost/bumpers!
I Follow both topic of Hannes in silence, but this... You are diabolic Inky  ;)

@Hannes Your work like always is inspiring, I almost lost this thread... keep going
Hmmm, what version of Terragen does God use?

Hannes


dorianvan

Quote from: Oshyan on October 08, 2016, 10:02:01 PM
Combine duplicate texture references

- Oshyan

What is meant by this? Something you do in Max before importing?
Also, did you create a ground "card" of the streets only? Then you just laid it down in place?
-Dorian

bobbystahr

Quote from: dorianvan on December 03, 2016, 11:53:56 AM
Quote from: Oshyan on October 08, 2016, 10:02:01 PM
Combine duplicate texture references

- Oshyan

What is meant by this? Something you do in Max before importing?
Also, did you create a ground "card" of the streets only? Then you just laid it down in place?

He's referring to a PoseRay trick where you find all the objects that use a particular texture, apply to the first one and Copy it. Then select all the rest of the items and, Apply to all selected items...saves a lot of time.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Oshyan

Yes, you can also do this in TG by creating (or using a pre-existing) single Image Map Shader, and then just referencing that one shader for any single objects or object parts that use it. So as an example let's say you have a huge single-object city model with 100 buildings, each of which uses a fairly generic "concrete" texture, but all are UV'd separately so you can retexture each model on its own if desired. You would probably have 100 references to a single texture. In many cases that would load into Terragen by default with 100 copies of the image! Which wastes a lot of memory. If you can spend the time to go through and re-reference each Part Shader's Default Shader to look at a single Image Map Shader for the color image info, that will save lots of memory. Granted that is a fairly extreme scenario I described, but I do know that some Poser models and other publicly available models do have some duplicate texture issues that can be solved in a similar way.

I should also say that this does point to something of a deficiency in how TG handles texture loading currently. In theory we should be able to detect duplicate references and only load one copy of the texture and handle that transparently instead of requiring all that rewiring of the node network by hand. But that would be something we'd have to implement in the future...

- Oshyan

bobbystahr

Quote from: Oshyan on December 03, 2016, 02:28:03 PM


I should also say that this does point to something of a deficiency in how TG handles texture loading currently. In theory we should be able to detect duplicate references and only load one copy of the texture and handle that transparently instead of requiring all that rewiring of the node network by hand. But that would be something we'd have to implement in the future...

- Oshyan


That would be a major improvement for sure.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

dorianvan

Well, you can certainly use the same material for many objects that you create in Max before importing to TG. I think that's about what you're talking about.
-Dorian

Dune

QuoteGranted that is a fairly extreme scenario I described
I did that with one of my city renders a few years back. Indeed probably a hundred objects or so that needed to be opened and all the default shaders being 'replaced' by a link to previously loaded generic textures. Would be great to have an automatic scan of previously loaded image files and links as soon as a new one is being loaded. You shouldn't however delete the initial object then, or you can start allover!!! Warning in place!

KyL

depending on the way you name things, you can always edit the .tgd in a text editor and replace all the duplicated shader with one instance using the default search & replace.

As shaders inside an object can have the same name, you can for example do search for "/duplicatedShader" (that would be inside an object) and replace it with "/shaders/masterShader" (that would be at a scene level)

But it all depends on the naming freedom you have within the application you export from!

Dune

You're right. I'm always very reluctant to rework a tgd in a text editor, as I like to see what I do, but if done careful should indeed work fine.