Hi !
How can i control the scale of distributed instances with not only build-in random function, but with the shader, or image, or with the paint ?
I found strange that: you can control density in Populator v4 using shaders, but you can't control sizes using maps ! :)
If i'm wrong, show me please the example, how can i control sizes of instances with image map, or with paint map, or with the procedural shader ?
Thanks!
You can't (yet). For different sizes, you can only use several pops of the same species, differently sized, masked by whatever mask is needed.
Quote from: Dune on January 04, 2015, 11:37:44 AM
You can't (yet). For different sizes, you can only use several pops of the same species, differently sized, masked by whatever mask is needed.
Thanks. Interesting limit, anyway :) I can map color to instances, i can map density, but not scale.
Thanks for answer, has no questions anymore.
You can scale individual population instances manually in all current versions of TG. If that's any help for selective scaling.
www.planetside.co.uk/products/tg3-product-comparison
www.planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Population_Instance_Editing
Quote from: roman4ez on January 04, 2015, 12:38:14 PM
Quote from: Dune on January 04, 2015, 11:37:44 AM
You can't (yet). For different sizes, you can only use several pops of the same species, differently sized, masked by whatever mask is needed.
Thanks. Interesting limit, anyway :) I can map color to instances, i can map density, but not size.
Thanks for answer, has no questions anymore.
I'm guessing you noticed the Scale tab in the populator? You can get a wide range of sizes easily that way.
I don't think randomness is what he meant, but it's good you mentioned it. It would indeed be handy to have something like a height influence on the tallness of trees, or making trees bigger inside patches of distribution (white distribution), and smaller on the verges (greyer). And doing that by hand is an awful job, only to be survived for a few instances.
Thanks, but Dune is right - i not mean just randomness. I try to explain:
My primary software is Side FX Houdini. I can do anything with geometry or points attributes. For example, i can scale instances by image map, by 4D noise, by sound, by attribute from another geometry, or by anything what you can imagine - is simplest thing that you can do. But why i start to learn terragen3 now ? This is because i'm here: because Terragen is landscape/nature oriented software. It has a lot of features especially for creating rocks, grounds, clouds. And the thing that i can't do in Houdini - realistic lighting, atmosphere, hase, and clouds. Also Terragen has a nice memory management.
But i'm confused sometimes with things like scale by shader. This is so strange :) When you can map color to instances, when you can map density, or luminance. But NOT scale!
Look to some my old unfinished "work in progress" Houdini pix. This is a points for trees instances. The bigger trees has a greater distance between points than smaller. This is because red color mapped to points density:
(http://i.imgur.com/GQjhqd1.jpg)
Red points color also linked to scale of trees (image show bound boxes):
(http://i.imgur.com/nBJ2UxM.jpg)
This pictures is not for discussion, just example what i mean when say "scale by shader".
Thanks to all.
Mmmmmmmmm...size map. You just blew my mind. And, actually, a little surprising it hasn't come up before.
Quote from: Dune on January 05, 2015, 03:24:58 AM
I don't think randomness is what he meant, but it's good you mentioned it. It would indeed be handy to have something like a height influence on the tallness of trees, or making trees bigger inside patches of distribution (white distribution), and smaller on the verges (greyer). And doing that by hand is an awful job, only to be survived for a few instances.
This is what i mean. Thanks.
Quote from: Upon Infinity on January 07, 2015, 01:36:09 PM
Mmmmmmmmm...size map. You just blew my mind. And, actually, a little surprising it hasn't come up before.
an aha moment for me as well. also surprised it hasn't even entered my mind.....maybe Matt's though...one hopes....
Quote from: Dune on January 04, 2015, 11:37:44 AM
You can't (yet). For different sizes, you can only use several pops of the same species, differently sized, masked by whatever mask is needed.
I think, this is the a most full answer. Thanks.
We are certainly aware of these kinds of ideas and capabilities. Matt is a fan of Houdini, and though I've never used it, I know it is fantastically powerful and flexible. Hopefully we can make TG a lot more flexible in the future too. But there are always trade-offs. Flexibility often comes at a performance cost, for example. And of course there is always development time to consider. Terragen as it exists now is a product of specific decisions to balance many possible factors, including flexibility and render time, as well as many others. Over time we can find new ways to improve things, adding features while optimizing performance for example. But it takes time.
In fact the list of potential features to add is quite long, mostly because there are a lot of potentially useful features, and this is probably true for every major application out there. I haven't seen a feature suggestion that we haven't thought of (or hasn't already been mentioned) in at least a year, probably longer. Not to say we don't want to know what is desired by users, of course, just that there are few really new ideas. And since it's our job to keep our product competitive, you can bet we do our best to keep on top of the possibilities that exist and try to determine the best things to add and improve for future updates. :)
- Oshyan
Thanks for reply, Oshyan ! Of course, my first impressions sounds strange, because i'm "just from Houdini" user. But i really feel Terragen very useful software for nature environments creation. For example, in Houdini you can build yours own set of same tools, but you spend a lot of time before you get a good tools.
Because before you get, you need to learn many things: how the sun light scattered in clouds (and use PBR render with volume bounces, or MIE Phase Phunction described here http://mattebb.com/weblog/category/houdini/ (http://mattebb.com/weblog/category/houdini/) , or learn rules how to trees grow on surface. Many many things. This is a really long way, before you can get a nice looking landscape. You spend a lot of time, for building own fractals, that you can use as terrain generators. Houdini has a huge procedural textures, this is cool, but this is a problem, also.
All of this tools ready up in TG3.
Also i see nice TG3 memory management on render time. TG3 can render a lot of hi poly trees and fit that process in 4 GB of memory. This is win.
Finally, thanks you for your work. I continue to learn TG.
We definitely appreciate the feedback and it's good to hear that Terragen's built-in tools save you time and energy when building and rendering environments. That's exactly what Terragen is for. :)
- Oshyan
Just to add my 2 cents, hope it's not considered as hijacking the thread.
The workflow in Houdini described above applies to most 3d apps. For example, 3ds max has built-in and 3rd party tools that allow to scatter objects or several objects within a group conveniently, with a lot of possibilities to scale, rotate, tilt, tint objects etc. Many other apps have this either built in or available as a 3rd party plugin, too.
Since the Populator node is certainly one of the most important tools in TG to produce realistic landscapes its improvement should be high on the list of features to implement imho. There are various additions I would find useful (and overdue, considering how easy it is to achieve this in 3d apps in general):
- Populate objects within a group: Let's say you can load 10 different trees and assign a percentage to each of them which defines how often it'll be present in the whole population node.
- Populator nodes whould be aware of each other so they don't share the same coordinates for the population. Right now, the workaround is to mask each population so they don't overlap, unfortunately, this is the most complicated way to solve the issue of intersections. This could be done way easier by 'locking' coordinates that have already been taken by a present Populator node.
- A way to control control scatter amount, scatter density, object size, rotation, tilt angle, tilt amount and color by terrain properties (like height, slope, terrain normal) and maps. This will make populating much more powerful.
I know the list of feature requests is long but please put the Populator node somewhere in the top 5 ;)
Quote from: pokoy on January 08, 2015, 05:05:00 AM
I know the list of feature requests is long but please put the Populator node somewhere in the top 5 ;)
It is thankfully, I've noticed improvement in it in every update so far.