Intersect Under laying

[Henry Blewer]

I have been trying the intersect under laying function of the surface shader. It's quite effective until I add a population to cover it. The population does not appear in the render. There should be a way to make the population sit onto the terrain, but it seems to be calculated without the intersect under laying function, hiding the objects. Any ideas of how to get around this?

[dandelO]

Try adding a compute terrain, or a compute normal, after the intersected layer and plug that into the population node as 'terrain shader'. You wouldn't even need to connect that compute normal to the planet(I don't think). I haven't tested this before. I'll give it a quick bash after I make something to eat, I finished work at 2:30 and I'm still not even fed at 8:30! My eldest is 11 today, it's been hectic, not to mention she split her tooth in half swimming and needed an emergency dental appointment after school! Non bloody stop.

It's MY time soon!

[Tangled-Universe]

Try adding a compute terrain, or a compute normal, after the intersected layer and plug that into the population node as 'terrain shader'. You wouldn't even need to connect that compute normal to the planet(I don't think). I haven't tested this before. I'll give it a quick bash after I make something to eat, I finished work at 2:30 and I'm still not even fed at 8:30! My eldest is 11 today, it's been hectic, not to mention she split her tooth in half swimming and needed an emergency dental appointment after school! Non bloody stop.

It's MY time soon!

Haha, wow...pity you I hope she's fine now though!

Creating a seperate compute terrain (you need normals for slope and texture coordinates for height, so a compute terrain should work best here) should work and indeed doesn't necessarily have to be connected to a planet. Choosing this compute terrain as "sit on" shader might solve it.

I use intersect underlying often and barely have problems. I virtually always use the last shader in the chain. You might consider changing the patch-size of the laste compute node and see if that works.

Cheers,
Martin

[Henry Blewer]

I had tried a Compute Terrain input into the Blend By Shader. Thanks guys. I'll give it a try.

[Henry Blewer]

I connected the Compute Terrain function at the end of the shader node chain. Then fed this into the planet and the population nodes. This worked. It did not help when I just had it fed into the population input.

Thanks for the solution!