Is it a bug or is it me? now floaters

[cyphyr]

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong.
A 500m x 500m plane 250m above the ground, masked with a BW image. The masks works perfectly on the plane but the shadow is still of the complete plane.
If it is a bug is it on the fix list?
Richard

[cyphyr]

OK since no one has answered this I guess its not seen as relevant (or its just seen as Richard ranting again)

Well to continue the rant:

What I am trying to do is recreate some of the stunning imagery seen in AVATAR. To do this I ned to create floating mountains with populations.
This runs into a whole stack of problems that I have been working through over the past 6 weeks, its slowly driving me over the edge.

Here goes:

To create a floating mountain (capable of supporting a population) I need to use two displaced planes. One plane is displaced positively and one negitavely. Fair enough, not a great problem you might say. I can do this in two ways either with an image map or with a .ter file. Using the .ter file is more accurate but the negatively displaced ter is inside out, the normals are facing inwards (actually this is entirely as it should be, just not how I want it). Using an image map is less accurate (I can derrive an exr image from a .ter displacement and convert it to a tiff for greater accuracy but its not as good as the orrigonal .ter) but the trouble here is that for some reason I cant fathom the masking of an image mapped plave dose not mask its shadow casting. It will self shadow but not cast a shadow onto itself with out casting the entire square planes shadow.

So either this is a problem that cant be solved, a bug, or I am simply approaching this wrong.

So is there a solution or should I just give up (please no, I have invested far too much time in this to just walk away)?
Is there some function trickery that will turn the normals round in the .ter?
Have I simply missed some obvious point?

Heres hoping for a solution.

Richard

[Henry Blewer]

Richard, I have no clue to what you are doing from the screenshot. I understand the floating mountains. I would try small planets with heavy displacements. Kind of like the image Wetbananna (?) posted which used metablobs (small planets).

[cyphyr]

Thanks for answering.
The screenshot is mearly an illustration showing how a masked plane still casts an unmasked shadow. The shadow should be of the bug.
I have considered using small planets however they wont work as their displacements come from the centre of the planet outwards, hence no strata, no horizontal textures and basically the wrong look. This is true weather I use "Along normal", "Lateral only" or "Vertical only" (see attached)
So small planets is not the way to go.

I'm starting to think this is nearly impossible but I'm not ready to give up yet.

Cheers

Richard

ps I really like Wetbannanas images

[cyphyr]

Here are the basic images and files I'm working on (have been for 6 weeks) I really must be insane!!!

In trying to achieve the AVATAR floating rocks idea I have gone down two roads, Image mapped displacements and .ter mapped displacements, Images balow as well as supporting files. As shown above the small planet (meta blobs) whilst good don't work in this instance.

Apologies for the low quality, I'm on the laptop and cant access my files or render to a high quality.

As you can see the images where the planes shadow casting has been enabled are casting a square shadow. In the image with the ter as the displacement the lower plane has its normals reversed (expected but annoying) The discontinuity in the first two images is mearly due to poor masking on my part.

So anybody, Planetside staff, beta testers, general geniuses like to suggest a way forward?

Thanks in advance

Richard

ps do a google search for "AVATAR mountains", the first image is seriously embarrassing ... .. . we can do so much better

[cyphyr]

supporting files 1

[Thelby]

So it looks like TG2 recognizes the bounding box terrain boarders and creates a shadow from that rather than from what you see. Is that your assumption? That's what it looks like by the square shadow!

[cyphyr]

Suppporting files 2

[cyphyr]

In all cases the displacement is "on" a plane object, not the terrain itself. This allows the object to be moved independently of the surface of the planet. It happens both with the .ter displacements and the image mapped displacements so I think the shadow is just of the plane rather than the bounding box. The same effect can be seen in the image at the top of the page where there is no displacement, no terrain, just a simple masking image on a plane.
Richard

[dandelO]

I have had this problem before, Richard. I was making billboard trees. I got around it, I'll dig out my 2d tree objects and report back. I had proper cast shadows from them in the end. Hopefully it's the same for this version of TG.

[cyphyr]

Thankyou so much

[Oshyan]

Richard, sorry for the late reply. We're not ignoring you.

It is indeed a bug, so unfortunately you can't fix it yourself. But we will do so on our end and can hopefully include a fix in the next update (of course no ETA on that at the moment).

As for the rest of your project, I'm afraid I don't have any genius ideas, but it's definitely interesting and worth pursuing. I'm not sure what would be the best way to go about it, but perhaps Matt would have some ideas...

- Oshyan

[Jack]

Thanks for answering.
The screenshot is mearly an illustration showing how a masked plane still casts an unmasked shadow. The shadow should be of the bug.
I have considered using small planets however they wont work as their displacements come from the centre of the planet outwards, hence no strata, no horizontal textures and basically the wrong look. This is true weather I use "Along normal", "Lateral only" or "Vertical only" (see attached)
So small planets is not the way to go.

I'm starting to think this is nearly impossible but I'm not ready to give up yet.

Cheers

Richard

ps I really like Wetbannanas images

hehe dont worry I am not offended they are in the rough stages at the moment im working on getting strata to work

[cyphyr]

 
Thanks guys, felt out on a limb there for a bit, back on earth now
Richard

[dandelO]

Oops, your insect is a TG plane, eh?

My trees are imported plane.obj with opacity images, that'll be why I managed the shadows correctly.

Sorry, had to clarify this after reading Oshyan's post that it couldn't be fixed.