Trying to get Reflections to work properly ~ ideas?

[cyphyr]

Hi gang
Well I'm back online again now and I had hopped to post some renders I have been working on during my down time. I have been trying to get my model to render with nice reflective surfaces but to no avail. If I have just one or two surfaces with a nice glossy reflection then I get a good render as you can see in the images below but when I add a third or fourth reflective surface then the render just stalls at the point where it first starts to render the object. On trying to abort the render Terragen just continues to stall saying "Aborting Render" until I force it to close down through Task Manager>End Process. Ram is never more than 50% used up, I have tried rendering on 4, 3, 2 and 1 core, I have set the Subdivision cache to 400, 800 and 7000 MB. I can complete a render but only if I drop my output settings to something unusable (low res, low detail etc.)
Any ideas greatly appreciated, thanks
Richard

[inkydigit]

I cant help you with the shaders unfortunately, but I can congratulate you on a fab looking wip...I hope you get this sorted.(is there any way, as a work around you could do some crop renders to isolate the surfaces with reflective shaders, then change them around???

[reck]

Hi Cyphyr, I can't help with the problem but i've made a post in the tech support section because i'm having a similar problem as well. Maybe this is a bug that Matt has fixed in an internal version.

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Richard,

Is the 2nd image a comp of 2 different renders? Because you can always consider to render the reflective surfaces separately and then comp them in photoshop for example.

Cool model by the way I hope you're going to work on the bigger stones to make them look equally good as the rest

Martin

[ZStar]

Since TG is a WIP, I wonder if this is a problem with rays being reflected and re-reflected off of too many surfaces.  It may be getting into an infinite loop (or a nearly infinite loop) as it tries to trace some of the rays.  I have worked with Bryce which has a user definable setting to limit the number of reflections a ray can trace to avoid situation like I am describing. 

I may be wrong but it might be something for Matt to look into if he has not already implemented some kind of arbitrary reflection limit in his code.

BTW the jet car looks great!  It would fit right in at the pod races.  Although, I would hate to see that clean shiny surface get dinged up.   

[Tangled-Universe]

Since TG is a WIP, I wonder if this is a problem with rays being reflected and re-reflected off of too many surfaces.  It may be getting into an infinite loop (or a nearly infinite loop) as it tries to trace some of the rays.  I have worked with Bryce which has a user definable setting to limit the number of reflections a ray can trace to avoid situation like I am describing. 

I may be wrong but it might be something for Matt to look into if he has not already implemented some kind of arbitrary reflection limit in his code.

BTW the jet car looks great!  It would fit right in at the pod races.  Although, I would hate to see that clean shiny surface get dinged up.   

Isn't this a monte-carlo like raytracer you're describing?
I thought that TG raytraces the primary and secondary bounces of the rays, not the tertiary or more...but I might be terribly mistaking
But yes, it sounds quite logical what you're saying.

If so, you could try rendering it without GI. Set GI to 0/0 and disable the enviro light completely (the latter is often forgotten).

Martin

[DeathTwister]

Hi guys,

  Well I must say that is one awesome Wip /smiles... and other then myself and Bobbystar and a few others not many have I seen trying to get our models into tg2.  First off, how the frack did you get all those pieces in? I think there is a 32 mesh piece limit in tg2, or so it seemed to me up to the last build anyway.  Also there is that fracking 16 texture limit.  So I have been doing is Bringing in my models in pieces and then put them together in TG2.  And I am feeling a bit stupid, I had no idea you could do that with shaders, which tripped me right out.  Really awesome work and workaround's so far Bro.  But I also see you are having trouble with your mapping and I am thinking you may have reached your 32 piece mesh limit or some such bug. I know I have been tearing my hair out trying to get this all done.  I have not brought any of my modeling in as there are just to many pieces for me to get in, so I make 1-16 texture and meshes and try and keep them simple until PS get there chit together and fixes and helps us artists in this very area.  To me this area is so weak as to be totally broken and sure wish they would fix at the least some of the things they do have in the Texturing/modeling editor.  We can only hope.  But dang bro this is so awesome and this gives me heart that one day this app can be maybe one of the most awesome pieces of software ever made for artists.  But Planet side needs to understand our Artist needs and soon, I hope. HAh now you going to make me play with these shaders as this is way to cool not to play with thanks for this post bro, it was well needed and I hope Matt does see this post and gets to work /smiles

[inkydigit]

Hi Richard,

Is the 2nd image a comp of 2 different renders? Because you can always consider to render the reflective surfaces separately and then comp them in photoshop for example.

Cool model by the way I hope you're going to work on the bigger stones to make them look equally good as the rest

Martin

thats what I was getting at!

[cyphyr]

Thanks for the feedback guys and the positive comments

Since TG is a WIP, I wonder if this is a problem with rays being reflected and re-reflected off of too many surfaces.  It may be getting into an infinite loop (or a nearly infinite loop) as it tries to trace some of the rays.

I think you may be right here, theres definitely a correlation between multiple different reflective surfaces and high detail settings/high pixel dimensions.

Hi Richard,

Is the 2nd image a comp of 2 different renders? Because you can always consider to render the reflective surfaces separately and then comp them in photoshop for example.

What do you mean? Do you mean to render out a reflection/light map of some sort, render the vehicle in LightWave and comp the foreground and background layers back together in PhotoShop? I had considered this and I am by no means a purist in that I certainly don't mind mixing my apps to get the result I want. Its just that in this case I'm not confident I could get a similar lighting model to run in LightWave so the final comp would really match up. If I can get everything rendered at once I will. I do intend to render the final version with both AO and GI lighting

Isn't this a monte-carlo like raytracer you're describing?
I thought that TG raytraces the primary and secondary bounces of the rays, not the tertiary or more...but I might be terribly mistaking
But yes, it sounds quite logical what you're saying.

If so, you could try rendering it without GI. Set GI to 0/0 and disable the enviro light completely (the latter is often forgotten).

Martin

Thanks for the tip, tried it, Didn't work. Chunked to a halt in exactly the same way as before.

Hi guys,

  Well I must say that is one awesome Wip /smiles... and other then myself and Bobbystar and a few others not many have I seen trying to get our models into tg2.  First off, how the frack did you get all those pieces in? I think there is a 32 mesh piece limit in tg2, or so it seemed to me up to the last build anyway.  Also there is that fracking 16 texture limit.  So I have been doing is Bringing in my models in pieces and then put them together in TG2.  And I am feeling a bit stupid, I had no idea you could do that with shaders, which tripped me right out.  Really awesome work and workaround's so far Bro.  But I also see you are having trouble with your mapping and I am thinking you may have reached your 32 piece mesh limit or some such bug. I know I have been tearing my hair out trying to get this all done.  I have not brought any of my modeling in as there are just to many pieces for me to get in, so I make 1-16 texture and meshes and try and keep them simple until PS get there chit together and fixes and helps us artists in this very area.  To me this area is so weak as to be totally broken and sure wish they would fix at the least some of the things they do have in the Texturing/modeling editor.  We can only hope.  But dang bro this is so awesome and this gives me heart that one day this app can be maybe one of the most awesome pieces of software ever made for artists.  But Planet side needs to understand our Artist needs and soon, I hope. HAh now you going to make me play with these shaders as this is way to cool not to play with thanks for this post bro, it was well needed and I hope Matt does see this post and gets to work /smiles

Hehe BSG so rocks !! The model is actually three models, Body, Engine and Cockpit. It was easier to model it that way but even so I don't think theres over 16 textures there anyway. What do you mean by the "32 piece mesh limit", I haven't come across this one before. Also what do you mean by "having trouble with your mapping"? I'm using no imagemap shaders at all.

Heres hoping then, I got a few ideas but maybe I just need to redesign the vehicle from the ground up.

Thanks

Richard

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Richard,

By comp I meant you rendered two or more versions of your image with each 2 or 3 reflective shaders rendered.
Then blend all the images together to get all the reflective shaders.
So you could only render the exhausts' reflectivity separately for example and also the other parts and then combine the renders in photoshop.

[moodflow]

Pretty sweet WIP!  I can't wait to see the final.   

[DeathTwister]

Hi there,

  Humm well if you are only having 3 basic Meshes and 3 textures or 3 shaders to that model, then that should not be an issue i guess.  But I bring in models from my own models, to say Daz/poser models like the Daz dragons and so on and I export them out in 3 or more groupings (3 .obj's 3 .mtl's), then edit the .mtl file to take anything out that would mess with the basic 16 texture limit per model that tg2 has right now.

   But I have also been noticing in the last few builds, that build 3 in particular, there seems to be a limit as to how many seperate meshes one can have in any given scene it looks like as after a while the textures stop, even if you have them all there right.  I could be wrong, as I have not talked to many people of late about this, in fact I just found it last week, but have had no time to post on it with work and being sick and all, has been keeping me busy, and that may have been tried by other people to get more then 32 meshes/textures in at any given scene.  Some of my ship models and other models have upwards of a hundred or more pieces to them, so I am not even trying other then simple things for now till they get it shook out a bit better.
  Example: when I get a model that is say has 38 mesh parts to the model even though I break it down some parts will not map, The textures just are npot all there even though they are all there in the .mtl files.  So I was wondering since it looks like you had way more then 16 mesh parts to the model that that might be messing with the model in some way in conjunction to the reflection shaders somehow as I think it all adds up and after a while breaks under load so to speak.  But your trouble may have nothing to do with it and I know in the next 2 years they say they will work on those issues about modeling/import and support just wish it would and could be sooner.

I have bug shots, I have just not posted them yet, but going to soon as I study it a bit more.  Again getting the time is the key 4 me.  I would call what you have going a bug myself and report it so as what you are doing should work like a charm I would think and quite Ingenius.

DT

[jo]

Hi,

To me, this seems like the sort of object which should probably be rendered in a general purpose renderer and composited with TG's output, doing something along the lines of creating an environment map in TG2 to get a good lighting match in the other renderer. Not really my field of expertise though, I must say. TG2 has never been intended to be a general purpose renderer, and we've always been up front about that, and so the development effort with objects has largely been aimed at getting plants and such looking good. That's not to say capabilities won't improve in the future, and we definitely need to remove texture mapping limits for example, but I'm not sure there'll be any radical improvements to general object handling prior to the final release. There may be some issues with the reflective shader which needs to be cleared up though.

Regards,

Jo

[cyphyr]

I know I'm pushing the limits here with what Terragen is capable of. Its just that I really like Its lighting model, the objects "sit" so well in a scene, if only the texturing could be done to a similar level of perfection I'd be a very happy man
Another reason I wanted to steer away from image mapped lighting techniques is I would need a huge image to accurately light and reflect in my scene. There was a very good image a few months back of a mars lander rendered in Maya I think using an environment map created within Terragen. Very impressive but the reflections were blurry (in that scene it worked) but to create good chrome or car paint a much finer level of detail is needed and so a very much bigger environment map would be needed.
I think there are issues with the reflection shader as applied to imported objects and their shadows (soft), if you look at the lower image you can see small black flakes on the front of the engines forward chrome intakes.
Richard

[DeathTwister]

Hay,

That's not to say capabilities won't improve in the future, and we definitely need to remove texture mapping limits for example, but I'm not sure there'll be any radical improvements to general object handling prior to the final release.

Oh yes please at least remove texture mapping limits for example as that in a major way is a pain in the U know where lolol.  Most of us that have bought the deep version are I would imagine all Modelers and frankly is and will be your main base so I would hope that PS would listen to us, even though it was not what you intended, but is a very important part to this software weather you guys realize it or not. As for the work around you suggested? well I know that is possible, but what a pain in the Zud bro /smiles...., now if we could take everything, terrain, inviro and shaders and all in Max, LW, XSI then that would not be so bad, but Wooo to much work, mush easier to just drop the models in and render, right? Smiles...But I understand what you are saying, just hope you all are listen to us end users and planning accordingly /bows

Here is a render I did of a dragon, that is in 3 parts and is just under 32 mesh parts, and I have made models that are upwards to 100 mesh parts and more on my Sailing ships that fly through the sky.



Now to me add that to your scene and you have the beginnings of a work of art /smiles....I bet once they take those limits off that you will be able to get your wonderful model into this App.

Thanks for the Input Jo.
PS: How do I make those little pictures that are thumbs?

DT