Sandstorm Arch - Finished

[old_blaggard]

Ah, I see . I never really played with that. I did a quick test with some minuscule birch trees, and I didn't have huge troubles with it - I'm treating the arch just like a normal bit of terrain and things are populating as expected. What kind of issues are you running into, specifically?

[Tangled-Universe]

Well I treated it exactly the same way as you, but if I want to populate the arch I have to set the density very very low to get a couple to appear on the arch while tons are on the flat surface. Somehow TG doesn't recognise the surface correctly it seems?

[old_blaggard]

Ah, yes, that happened to me, too. I just used a distribution shader to restrict it based on altitude. Here's what I think is happening: when it's calculating the distribution of the plants, the populator is looking at the original coordinates, which means that the arch is just a unit circle (in the distributor's eyes). The populator matches the objects to the terrain, though, after computing the arch's displacement. This means that the arch, whose surface area has grown several times over, only has one unit circle's worth of plants on it. The solution would be to force the distribution function of the populator to look at the final terrain output for its coordinates, but there's no way to do that right now.

[j meyer]

Hi,
nice arch!
You said earlier:"I was going to just post my project file, ..." and i wonder
if you would still do so,because i for one would like to see the unaltered
file rather than the cleaned up version Martin does.(to me it's less confusing)
Regards,J.

[Tangled-Universe]

I have made a small (but long!) render showing the arch in a slightly different way, will post the link within an hour...

Hi,
nice arch!
You said earlier:"I was going to just post my project file, ..." and i wonder
if you would still do so,because i for one would like to see the unaltered
file rather than the cleaned up version Martin does.(to me it's less confusing)
Regards,J.

I can assure you, it will be more clear
Nodes which haven't been used or lead to a dead unused end are removed and I have retopologized things from bottom to top, because some connections were going all over the place. But if you insist

[j meyer]

I do ,but of course it's up to ob if and what he likes to share.

[old_blaggard]

Here's the plan - I'll probably post the basic .tgd tonight or tomorrow morning, and then I'm planning on releasing the cleaned-up version and an in-depth explanation of how to use it and the logic behind the nodes through NWDA.

Thanks again for all of your comments, folks!