The Path

[MooseDog]

Hi.  First image posted here .  Overall, I'm kinda pleased.  I say kinda as I understand I've got a lllooonnnggg way to go vis-a-vis most of the art I see 'round here.

Image was rendered out of TG2 in .exr, so I could do some exposure/curves/color correction in Photoshop.

Pleased also because I learned quite a bit about instancing populations mainly.  Take a look at the attached screenshot, I managed to place just enough grass instances to produce a "lush" image w/o killing the scene with too many and making things too heavy, both to render and navigate.  Very useful.

From an animation standpoint though, I have a question:  is it planned to have some basic parenting capabilities so that, for instance, the population field could move around and down a twisting path in tandem with the Camera?  I'm inferring yes from the "Populate with Every Frame" checkbox.  This would be super! useful.

As for the texturing, ah my weak point.  Mainly done by reverse-engineering the clip files that have been generously shared.  kudos and thx! and I'm off to learn more 

[dhavalmistry]

the render looks kinda odd...did you use image maps for grass or is the render a low quality??

[rcallicotte]

Yeah, did you use low quality?  Looks blurred.

Cool idea with the paths.

[MooseDog]

jpeg compression, coupled with the 800x500 render limit and 3aa limit.  sorry

grass is instanced geometry with some displacement,  textured with a front-projected image.

[overlordchuck]

Hmm...looks odd, sorry, but it's a really cool idea.

[Saurav]

The path looks natural, and the overall scene has a nice balance. However the tree in my opinion looks a little odd, maybe it's the size.

[Mr_Lamppost]

From an animation standpoint though, I have a question:  is it planned to have some basic parenting capabilities so that, for instance, the population field could move around and down a twisting path in tandem with the Camera?  I'm inferring yes from the "Populate with Every Frame" checkbox.  This would be super! useful.

From what I have seen elsewhere the up coming initial release will have only limited animation capabilities; there are indications that the animation system will receive attention after the launch.  I had a similar idea of moving the populated area with the camera a while ago and made several tests, I moved and created the animation path for the populated area manually.  The general principal works fine but as soon as I checked the Populate Every Frame option TG crashed at the start of the second frame.  There have been several posts reporting similar results and the responses indicate that this is a known problem with memory allocation for populations. 

The path works well but I have to agree that there is something not quite right about the scene as a whole; Either the scale of the tree or is the flat blue in the sky throwing the scale of everything off?

[MooseDog]

i think you guys are right:  there seems to be issues of scale, thus believability.  with a better eye and maybe more reference points, this side of things could be improved.  thx!

bummer to read about your experience with a moving population field.  i respect planetside's niche and mission, but this seems a bit suspect for an animation package.  may i ask how big was your population?  the one for the grass above only created around 40k instances of the grass, which strikes me as pretty light as these things go. yet still managed to create the ground cover i was looking for:  light and effective strikes me as a reasonable goal for tg2's use.

[Cyber-Angel]

The flatness of the sky is a small part of the balance issue with this work, the perceived space between the tree and the clouds is in conflict and is affecting the balance of the work.  In art as in photography you learn that to strong elements can lessen both of them, that is to say a dramatic sky should be featured where possible over a pleasing yet simple landscape and the inverse is true.

The image is trying to place weight on both the left and right sides of the work and it is hard to know which is the dominate side of the work and thusly where the eye should go, the eye should be led to where it is needed and there are many techniques for doing this, the use of line and shadow are examples and I would recommend looking at the photography of German Photographer August Sander and if possible look at his landscape works.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel