Moving planet breaks displacement?

DutchDimension · June 08, 2020, 10:25:52 AM

Hi all,

I've got a relatively straightforward celestial setup. I've got a planet node mapped with a color and displacement texture of the moon. It's lit with several Sunlight nodes and the rendered frames looks nice and clean with no artifacts. At a certain point in the frame range I have to animate the Y-centre coordinate to make the moon change position in the frame. As soon as that happens, the displacement on the surface of the moon starts breaking/popping. It's very visible and somehow has to be resolved. Does anybody have a clue how to get rid of this? The attached .gif contains a 3 frame example of the issue.

Many thanks for your insights.

Tangled-Universe · June 08, 2020, 10:29:17 AM

Is "translate textures with planet" enabled in the planet node?

DutchDimension · June 08, 2020, 11:05:12 AM

Yep. Translate and Rotate.

Tangled-Universe · June 08, 2020, 11:16:34 AM

Did you animate the Y-position of the textures as well? (Supposing you use spherical projection with Y = planet node's Y)

Tangled-Universe · June 08, 2020, 11:32:07 AM

Yeah that seems to be it...at least, for me the following works:
1) set "translate textures with planet"
2) copy planet position animation to image map shaders

Counter-intuitive at least, if not paradoxical and/or wrong behavior...

Kadri · June 08, 2020, 12:48:06 PM

I had such a problem in the past. Looked like there is something wrong.
Since then i just translate all the displacement nodes as the same as the planet and-or just cheat- move only the camera and comp later.
But that depends on the scene of course.

DutchDimension · June 08, 2020, 06:18:41 PM

Thanks guys, I'll give that a try later today and report back with my findings.

DutchDimension · June 08, 2020, 11:26:24 PM

Hm.. so I tried it, but as I suspected, it is not the correct solution. Because what happens when you animate the position attributes of the Image map shader, is that the map then slides over the surface of the planet as the planet itself translates.

Kadri · June 09, 2020, 12:06:07 AM

Can you upload a basic TGD example here?

DutchDimension · June 09, 2020, 01:28:10 AM

Quote from: Kadri on June 09, 2020, 12:06:07 AMCan you upload a basic TGD example here?

I'm afraid not as it is unreleased commercial work.

I'm looking into the 'Stabilize Ray Detail in Motion' attribute right now. It seems to lessen the popping a bit.

Dune · June 09, 2020, 02:14:42 AM

How about when you do NOT set translate/rotate with planet, but do animate the spherical texture same as the planet? That seems the most logical to me, as they're independent then. The translate might be added to the texture translation somehow...

Kadri · June 09, 2020, 02:19:10 AM

Not sure if they could help but have a look at these links please.
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18917.msg184632.html#msg184632
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18917.msg184792.html#msg184792

Not sure but you problem kinda reminds me like my problem that you see in the last link above.

DutchDimension · June 09, 2020, 02:28:04 AM

Quote from: DutchDimension on June 09, 2020, 01:28:10 AMI'm looking into the 'Stabilize Ray Detail in Motion' attribute right now. It seems to lessen the popping a bit.

And that's a big fat nope. Made no difference at all.

Quote from: Dune on June 09, 2020, 02:14:42 AMHow about when you do NOT set translate/rotate with planet, but do animate the spherical texture same as the planet? That seems the most logical to me, as they're independent then. The translate might be added to the texture translation somehow...

Hi Dune, I tried that earlier. No dice. All it does is slide the textures over the surface of the planet.

Quote from: Kadri on June 09, 2020, 02:19:10 AMNot sure if they could help but have a look at these links please.
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18917.msg184632.html#msg184632
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18917.msg184792.html#msg184792

Not sure but you problem kinda reminds me like my problem that you see in the last link above.

Thank you Kadri. I'll try and find some time to dig through it. Unfortunately I'm quickly running out of time trying to get this simple shot to work. And this has been 'Terragen in production' in a nutshell for me over the years. Get somewhere 80-90% of the way only to come across a massive roadblock causing you to waste a full day (or more) trying (and often failing) to find a solution. So frustrating.

Dune · June 09, 2020, 02:31:51 AM

With atmopshere and clouds it used to be the case that you had to break a connection and relink to shift the textures to the new location. I have the impression that that has been solved, but maybe not entirely and there's a way to animate that; breaking and relinking for every frame. But I have no idea if that can be animated at all, the breaking.

Tangled-Universe · June 09, 2020, 03:01:43 AM

Danny, I'm surprised that it does not work, because it seems to work fine for me.

I have attached the .tgd of my attempt for you to inspect.
Only thing you need to do is load your texture into that one imagemap shader.

I'll see if I can encode the 120 frame animation I made using this .tgd, but Virtualdub is stubborn with codecs as for now...