Populator issue

Started by AP, July 24, 2017, 02:29:41 AM

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AP

The population is not sitting on the Fake stones, just everywhere else. Looking through the forums, nothing was found on this issue. Any help on this issue would be most welcome.

Dune

Did you populate on a shader after the fake stones? You should. And add a new compute terrain before it goes into the pop, and use a small patch.

AP

#2
Quote from: Dune on July 24, 2017, 04:44:52 AM
Did you populate on a shader after the fake stones? You should. And add a new compute terrain before it goes into the pop, and use a small patch.

Yes.

Where does the new Compute terrain go? After the shaders and connected to the Terrain input for the Populator?

Dune

Yes, that's it, but not to the planet.

AP

Quote from: Dune on July 24, 2017, 11:18:16 AM
Yes, that's it, but not to the planet.

That did not work and the Gradient patch size is set to 1.

Dune

That's weird. But if the stones are smaller than a meter, even patch of a meter wouldn't be really enough. Can you post a tgd? You're making me curious...

AP

Quote from: Dune on July 25, 2017, 02:34:42 AM
That's weird. But if the stones are smaller than a meter, even patch of a meter wouldn't be really enough. Can you post a tgd? You're making me curious...

Here is the tgd file and a low resolution 3d primitive object to test with.

KlausK

I guess that is not what you want and surely you tried this yourself but, anyways...
Object spacing is set to 0.25 / 0.25 and Gradient patch size to 0.01.

Render time did not change much - 15 seconds or so.
Looks like the Fake Stones get populated last.
Cheers, Klaus
/ ASUS WS Mainboard / Dual XEON E5-2640v3 / 64GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 TI / Win7 Ultimate . . . still (||-:-||)

Dune

Even with a larger patch or compute normal it works.

KlausK

I have noticed that the bounding box preview seems to show more objects than the renderer actually creates in the final picture (in my eyes).
The attached picture is rendered with a Gradient Patch Size of 1. As you can see something prevents the populator to create as many
pop-objects on the Fake Stones as on the terrain. Surely some obscure renderer math thing going on here... ;)
Cheers, Klaus
/ ASUS WS Mainboard / Dual XEON E5-2640v3 / 64GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 TI / Win7 Ultimate . . . still (||-:-||)

Oshyan

#10
It is usually extremely hard to judge how many instances have been populated just by looking at bounding boxes. If you are looking at the actual wireframes or smooth shaded, then that is different, and would potentially show a real discrepancy.

As for why it is more sparse on top of the rocks, it could be because it is calculating the spacing based on the original undisplaced planet's coordinates, and those coordinates have been "spaced out" (space between them increased, i.e. the area has been stretched) by displacement. I would think the Compute Normal/Terrain would fix this discrepancy, but I'm not sure.

- Oshyan

AP

#11
Quote from: KlausK on July 25, 2017, 08:24:30 AM
I guess that is not what you want and surely you tried this yourself but, anyways...
Object spacing is set to 0.25 / 0.25 and Gradient patch size to 0.01.

Render time did not change much - 15 seconds or so.
Looks like the Fake Stones get populated last.
Cheers, Klaus

Using the Compute normal, the Patch size is 0.01 and the Object spacing is 0.25.