Forest drive

[Dune]

Very good update, super realistic! Coming back to your heather: where did you get those? They may be very useful in my scenes too.

[digitalguru]

Thanks Dune, it's getting there, just some simulated mud left to do. Haven't rendered a sequence yet, I'm sure there'll be some surprises to fix when I do

The heather (shrubs) are from Plant Factory, it's a free download now, so grab it from the website while it's still up if you haven't already:
https://www.bentley.com/software/e-on-software-downloads/

Grab all the libraries (forget how how big it was, probably about 20gb)

Mainly used:
Erica carnea
Vaccinium myrtillus

PF has presets for each plant based on age and season so it's easy to make variations. I made 12 for the Erica and 6 for the myrtillus.

It's a shame you can't add variations for a population in Terragen (you would need to make a separate pop for each variation), so I used Mash in Maya to populate the scene.
Plus once I'd populated the scene I could then move individual plants around.

I use the Plant Factory plugin in Maya to import and edit the model and it drops right in with Arnold shaders which saves a lot of work. It exports to a lot of apps, so you might find one that's compatible with Terragen if you're not using a DCC.

Since Plant Factory also does wind animation, I might make some animated plants to use in the f.g.

[sboerner]

Very good update, super realistic!

Can't agree more!

I wonder if Planetside assumes that high-end commercial users of Terragen will follow the process you are using here: terrain and sky in Terragen, objects and other details comped in.

It's working beautifully. Looking forward to seeing more frames and sequences (yes, in due time).

[Dune]

Thanks!

[digitalguru]

Very good update, super realistic!

Can't agree more!

I wonder if Planetside assumes that high-end commercial users of Terragen will follow the process you are using here: terrain and sky in Terragen, objects and other details comped in.

It's working beautifully. Looking forward to seeing more frames and sequences (yes, in due time).

Actually, it's just the terrain

Original plan was to do the terrain, sky and foliage in TGD and comp the car into it. But...

Bottom line is for my car geo, I'm using UDIMs and will obviously motion blur the car for animation, both not possible in TGD a.t.m.

Then I need to cast shadows and reflections etc from the trees onto the car, so that means populations in Maya. I made a previous animation where the car was driving out in the open, so I could get away with populations and lighting in TGD.

I've written a lot of custom scripts to get this working and approaching it from a VFX point of view - i.e. using the best tool for each job and pipe lining them all together.

I did consider trying to recreate the TGD terrain in Maya, but it was nowhere near as good in comparison. Terragen is still the best for it's terrain workflow and the detail you can get out it.

And to be honest, if TGD did include UDIMs and object motion blur, I'd still render in another package (like Maya/Arnold) I think TGD should stick to what it does best - terrain generation and not be an all sing all dancing app, though some things would be useful like being able to output deep EXRs from TGD for comp.

[Kevin Kipper]

Bottom line is for my car geo, I'm using UDIMs and will obviously motion blur the car for animation, both not possible in TGD a.t.m.

Here's an example of how Bastien used UDIMs in Terragen.  The Image Map shader's "X" Position value serves as the offset.

[digitalguru]

Interesting, not sure I'd want to tackle that with the 60+ udims on the car though. Could be a job for RPC?

[Kevin Kipper]

RPC could definitely handle changing the Position parameter value for selected nodes, or specific node types like the image map shader.  It could also be used to generate the node structure from scratch, i.e. add an image map shader node, set its parameters like "main input", "position" and "image filename".  This might be a fun script to tackle.

[Dune]

This is interesting, if I understand it well. Not for animations in my case, but for stills. Would it somehow work to import a UVmap where a number of (in my case) fire images would sit in a row (with number 3 in the central 0-1 range), then assigning this to one population of cards? I thought UVmaps were by definition repeated, and if so that wouldn't work - and importing more UVmaps is needed. Some fractal in world space may need to be used to help distribute the UV ranges over the instances. Just thinking out loud..... I may miss the idea completely (just awake).

[digitalguru]

Not sure what you're trying to achieve there, but it wouldn't work with cards I don't think. For udims you need to move the UV's outside the usual 0-1 uv space per texture tile and you'd have to do that at the geometry level outside TGD. You can then map separate images to each "block" of uv space using the method Kevin showed to use multiple texture maps on a single object.
Example - UV editor screengrab for a plane 30x10 units - each unit of 10 (width) is mapped with it's own udim:



And the render in Terragen with the setup Kevin mentioned:

 

See attached Terragen project (you'll have to remap the image maps to your own path on disk)

[Dune]

Thanks. I'll check out if it works on cards. I was later thinking it is just as easy to import several maps that only use 0-1 space. It's actually the distribution or masking of those maps in world space that 'haunts' me. And your post made me think of it again. Hard distinctions would be needed, so one cow has red patches, the next of the same pop black, not half red, half black if the fractal is just in a gradient.

[Kevin Kipper]

Okay, I took the bait. 

I've been thinking about digitalguru's question about using RPC to automate the setup of shaders and nodes for a udim mapped object.

The script is almost ready to be released but I would love to test it out on some objects, and that's where you guys come in. 

Does anyone have any assets they can share with udim texture coordinates?  I'd like to see a bigger picture of how these assets are being exported from a 3D package and their material assignments, etc.  Feel free to upload them to the File Sharing > Objects forum category or email them to support@planetside.co.uk

Here's a screengrab example showing the results of the script.  I simply selected a bunch of nodes Default shader nodes and ran the script.  The script added new nodes for Groups and Image Map shaders, and updated the appropriate parameters for each node including the connections between nodes and their default shader.  I've tested it on udim mapped assets with 100 images in the sequence.



Thanks for sharing any assets you're able to, and I hope to be able to get this script released shortly.

[digitalguru]

Hey Kevin, looks interesting, here's a test object I use:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g5yrxx728xjlm96silq15/udim_test_object.rar?rlkey=yivl5ek9kw18f65n8rpwsaciw&st=dk5pinlc&dl=0

Textures should be OCIO compliant.

Did your script layout the TG nodes nicely as is your screengrab? Maybe, as an option, the Image maps could be nested inside each group?

[Kevin Kipper]

Thanks for the test object, I'll check it out asap.

Currently the script lays out all the groups with their image map shaders in a horizontal row, all nice and neat.  I selected the groups corresponding to each default shader via a drag-select bounding box and then moved them closer to their default shaders.  I'm still experimenting with how the nodes are laid out.

Right now there is no UI for the script; just select some default shader nodes and run the script, but if we make a UI version we could definitely add an option to place the image map shaders in the internal node network of each group.  Great ideas!!