Compute Terrain

[WAS]

Lately the Compute Terrain has been having issues, I'm not sure what version this came about, but it is no longer conveying correct texture coordinates, or positions for secondary displacement, and it no longer "Blocks" a smoothing effect of a surface layer. Before, you could have your small scale displacements after your Compute Terrain, and than use a Surface Layers "Smooth effect" to mask out those small scale displacements. However now it will smooth right on past that Compute Terrain.

To fix both texture coordinates and smoothing, and displacement alignments, I've had to add to my Default Project a Texture Coordinates from XYZ after the Computer Terrain.



Take this example. Here we have a river 30m wide river, with 1-5m main stones on some dirt... If I enable Smoothing effect to mask out the dirt/floor displacements, it masks out the entire river above the compute terrain in the main terrain displacement.

I've noticed I've needed to add a Texture Coordinates lately for textures, just didn't realize it ran so deep.

Discovery: I discovered this by opening a old underwater river scene in 4.4.44, to be greeted with no river! :O That was certainly not how it was saved or rendered originally.

[Dune]

Can you post a tgd? It might be that a mask for the river and stones is effected by the change in terrain, due to smoothing. Say it has a certain altitude restriction, local altitudes will change when smoothing terrain.

[WAS]

Can you post a tgd? It might be that a mask for the river and stones is effected by the change in terrain, due to smoothing. Say it has a certain altitude restriction, local altitudes will change when smoothing terrain.

I think there may be a max height on that stone complex to keep them in the river. I'll have to check.

When I played with this before with snow smoothing I did not notice any change in snow drift heights. As originally, the compute terrain would be sending along the texture coordinates in the past so you wouldn't need to drop a texture coordinates in just to fix the default scene.

Even needing a texture coordinates after a Compute Terrain is new behavior and seem contradictive of past conversations about compute terrains use. It seems to be restricted only to patch sizing and texture space is lost.

[WAS]

The altitude limit isn't the issue. It's simply fake stones being used without any Texture Coordinates, which is still wrong, and not how TG operated before. This functionality is breaking almost all my old projects looks. It will also break new projects for users relying on current information. A texture coordinates is required now. Additionally, without texture coordinates, almost all the stones lift on -X and sink on X on a perfectly flat planet.

Raised the stone tallness to accentuate the weird lean mostly one directional lean. I'm not using any redirection on these stone where I'd often see effects like this. Just very subtle disp.

[Matt]

Please post a TGD that we can test in different builds.

[WAS]

Here's an example of a PF over a computed terrain. Without texture coordinates it gets blobby and low quality looking despite 1 roughness and 5 colour noise all over the place. With texture coordinates, it follows the terrain.

Attached two TGDs, one of the river stones issues and them filling the river bed without texture coordinates, second is PF texture coordinates issue.

For the GIF image, the result with texture coordinates is how the file should look. This blobbyness, and lateral disp issues is the main diff in old scenes.

Interestingly, the blobbular effect isn't really scene up close. Only in distant geometry.