Dogs of War *Finished*!

[Mohawk20]

I have a problem you can probably help me with...

I had an idea for an animation when hearing a song (Pink Floyd - Dogs of War), and it involved having an army and battlefield.
So I got to work in Poser to make me some knights.

Here comes the problem: the population is too random, there's no order in the ranks. Besides that, instead of only using 1 knight 3000 times, I made 5 different ones. All knights have 34 materials, so I cut them in 3 pieces. For every knight population, I have to create 3 pops. For the whole army I would need 15 populations... my system doesn't handle that all to well, so I brought it down to 3 knight, or 9 populations.

How can I randomly place 9 different populations in a nice orderly grid without overlapping?


Initial discussion and renders are found here: http://www.ashundar.com/index.php?topic=4293.0


Thanks very much for any input...

[rcallicotte]

Have you seen this? - http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3733.0

[Mohawk20]

There are some references to those node systems in the ashundar thread... it is very conveniant, and I will certainly use it.

The main problem is how to get 3 to 5 different populations in the same area without overlapping, but together filling up the whole grid.

[rcallicotte]

I haven't tried this, Mohawk.  Experimentation might be the best way, unless someone who has tried that can join in here.

[gregsandor]

Multiple populations, masked to keep them all on the road.  You can also mask individual populations to order by types of soldier. 

[rcallicotte]

Pretty cool.  Did you use that link (above) to get started or come up with another solution?

[gregsandor]

I rendered it about a year ago, with masked populations.

[Mohawk20]

What kind of masks did you use?

[gregsandor]

Each type is a population set to use Compute Terrain so it stands on the ground.  The pupulations all are constrained by dimensions and then further by a mask to keep them where I want them -- there is some randomness within the constraints.

[Mohawk20]

I managed to get the pops not overlapping by using a different pop seed alongside the different densityshader seeds.
http://www.ashundar.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-5184

Still only 3 figures in total 9 populations...
I had to drasticly resize a lot of the textures and save them at lower quality, because in previous renders the bumpmaps were not used. These maps were quite large around 1500x1500... The biggest problem is that every figure has the same textures, so every texmap has to be loaded atleast trice, but in some cases multiple material groups use the same texture, so some texturemaps have to be loaded 12 times.

My question: why not load a map once in the program and apply it to all objects that need them, instead of loading the same map so many times, clogging the renderbucket?

[gregsandor]

I managed to get the pops not overlapping by using a different pop seed alongside the different densityshader seeds.
http://www.ashundar.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-5184

Still only 3 figures in total 9 populations...
I had to drasticly resize a lot of the textures and save them at lower quality, because in previous renders the bumpmaps were not used. These maps were quite large around 1500x1500... The biggest problem is that every figure has the same textures, so every texmap has to be loaded atleast trice, but in some cases multiple material groups use the same texture, so some texturemaps have to be loaded 12 times.

My question: why not load a map once in the program and apply it to all objects that need them, instead of loading the same map so many times, clogging the renderbucket?

Look closeley at the node setup I posted.  All of the Aztecs share textures (of course your models must be properly mapped to be able to do this).  After you load the models, go into the model and remove the shaders and rest them to use the same external shaders.  The maps I use on the figures are 1024x.  There is no need to reload the same texture multiple times.

[rcallicotte]

This would work for Poser figures, then.  Correct?  Instead of loading Hip, Abdomen, Chest maps...I could just load the torso.  Is this what you're saying? 

...go into the model and remove the shaders and rest them to use the same external shaders.  The maps I use on the figures are 1024x.  There is no need to reload the same texture multiple times.

[gregsandor]

This would work for Poser figures, then.  Correct?  Instead of loading Hip, Abdomen, Chest maps...I could just load the torso.  Is this what you're saying? 

...go into the model and remove the shaders and rest them to use the same external shaders.  The maps I use on the figures are 1024x.  There is no need to reload the same texture multiple times.

Those are all Poser figures from http://www.3dcommune.com/3d/store/display.mv?vs_mura_pcloth , posed and exported as single objects.

[rcallicotte]

Cool. So am I correct in understanding what you're saying about just loading the head map once and the torso map once, rather than all of the various sub-mappings which use the same head map and same torso map?

[gregsandor]

If I understand you, yes.  Theres no reason to have fifteen different copies of the same shader.  Plug all the refs into it once.  Why duplicate it?