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General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: PG on October 20, 2008, 08:47:10 PM

Title: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: PG on October 20, 2008, 08:47:10 PM
Well Matt has just released new info on the beta. Definately some great new additions, I especially like the mask painter. What do you guys think of the additions, heard or unheard of before? I'm interested to see how the painter shader works, like the terrain sculpt tool in 0.9?
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: jo on October 20, 2008, 09:03:51 PM
Hi,

Attached is an image showing the Painted Shader in use as a density shader for a population. I painted my name ( I'm so creative ;-) in the shader preview, but could also have done it in the 3D Preview. It's not a tremendously exciting example, but it gives an indication of the possibilities.

Regards,

Jo
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: lightning on October 20, 2008, 09:07:24 PM
so this is just like painted eco systems in vue thats awesome!
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: dandelO on October 20, 2008, 09:09:30 PM
Fantastic, this is very exciting now!
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: freelancah on October 20, 2008, 09:20:07 PM
Looks delicious ! :=)
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: lightning on October 20, 2008, 09:20:19 PM
YEAH GREAT NEWS! can you paint in the big preview window?

edit sorry you already said that :P thats awesome this is really going improve terragens workflow are you taking the limit of 16 shaders per object?
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: buzzzzz1 on October 20, 2008, 09:35:50 PM
Sweet! Thanks for the info Matt and Jo.
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: Mandrake on October 20, 2008, 10:07:52 PM
Awesome!!
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: cyphyr on October 21, 2008, 04:13:29 AM
Great news, looking forward to it :)

Just a few thoughts as I drink my morning coffee ...

Painter Shader looks cool, especially since it looks to work in camera view.
Undo and Undo History, wow now this really is going to change how we work in TG.
Rock Object, thought it was gona' be dumped, never really used it (was way too buggy), looking forward to giving it a go.
Cloud Layer V2 improvements, looking for ward to checkin this out, faster better clouds is always a god thing.
AA filters and Bloom, both much needed and very welcome.
Enable test colour, looks useful although I think I kinda use shaders that way anyway (stick a really bright colour in to test placement/distribution).
Most of the rest seem like bug squashing and as such are very welcome.

Richard
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: dandelO on October 21, 2008, 05:30:14 AM
QuoteFixed a bug where using custom input presets stopped shift-click multiple selection working in the network view.

This was a problem I couldn't get around with custom bindings, I'm glad it's fixed.

Is there a 'redo' function to accompany the 'undo'? i.e: undo=ctrl+z, redo=ctrl+y(or other such key). And, is there a limit to redoing undo's if this is a supported function?

Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: jo on October 21, 2008, 07:47:52 AM
Hi Dandelo,

Currently Redo is not supported but it will be in the future. Supporting undo was quite a lot of work in and of itself. I was going to do undo and redo at the same time but decided to just get undo working first up. When redo is supported it should have the same limits as undo, which is currently only limited by available memory and in the future may become unlimited.

Regards,

Jo
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: reck on October 21, 2008, 07:49:52 AM
Oh this is all very exciting  :D

QuoteFixed a problem with the finish and display of renders:

I'm really glad this one has been fixed. I'd really started to notice this when doing a lot of fast test renders.

QuoteRock object improvements

Yeah so we can use the rock object now. I think this has been broken from day one, so it's good to see it's finally been fixed.

Quote"Microvertex jittering" option in the renderer

I'm rendering an image right now where I can see parallel lines in the subdivision pattern so hopefully this fix will reduce/get rid of it.

Also the undo and painter shader are the big headline features. Look forward to trying these out.
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: Mohawk20 on October 21, 2008, 11:02:56 AM
Just: YAY!!!

Can't wait to try the painting tool and Rock object!!
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: sonshine777 on October 21, 2008, 11:04:11 AM
Sounds Awesome!!! I guess I will have to start saving up for a better machine so I can take advantage of all the new goodies. :)
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: reck on October 21, 2008, 11:14:47 AM
Quote from: sonshine777 on October 21, 2008, 11:04:11 AM
Sounds Awesome!!! I guess I will have to start saving up for a better machine so I can take advantage of all the new goodies. :)

How about a core i7
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: sonshine777 on October 21, 2008, 11:28:16 AM
Quote from: reck on October 21, 2008, 11:14:47 AM
Quote from: sonshine777 on October 21, 2008, 11:04:11 AM
Sounds Awesome!!! I guess I will have to start saving up for a better machine so I can take advantage of all the new goodies. :)

How about a core i7

I've been salivating over some of the stuff in this thread:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4981.0

It's just a matter of time/money. :)
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: sjefen on October 21, 2008, 01:55:12 PM
This is great news.
I'm really looking forward to the painting tool and the rock object.

- Terje
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: PorcupineFloyd on October 21, 2008, 02:19:30 PM
Multi-threaded cloud speed optimizations, that's always good ;-)
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: gregsandor on October 21, 2008, 08:14:02 PM
Great news.  I'm really looking forward to the painting tool. 

Have you added a mask channel for object specularity?
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: Matt on October 21, 2008, 10:41:43 PM
Quote from: gregsandor on October 21, 2008, 08:14:02 PM
Have you added a mask channel for object specularity?

Not yet, sorry.

Matt
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: monks on October 22, 2008, 06:16:56 AM
Been using TG a fair bit of late -this is great news!  :)

monks
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: Oshyan on October 23, 2008, 01:33:02 AM
Quote from: lightning on October 20, 2008, 09:07:24 PM
so this is just like painted eco systems in vue thats awesome!
It has a similar functionality, but I believe it is generally more versatile in that it can be used to mask or apply color to any surface, as well as populations.

Unfortunately the 16 shader material limit for objects remains. That will likely be fixed in an update following release.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: jo on October 23, 2008, 03:28:07 AM
Hi,

With Vue you end up painting individual instances, whereas with the painted shader you're effectively painting the density mask for the population, and the populator still places the instances as before. You can get a similar effect to Vue's ecosystems by creating a number of populators with different models and using the same painted shader as the density mask for each. With the painted shader you can currently paint in the 3D Preview at any angle, wheres with Vue you only seem to able to paint in a plan view. It's still early days with the painted shader though and we may need to change the way it works in the future. It's not especially refined right now, but you can do some cool stuff with it nevertheless.

Regards,

Jo
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: gregsandor on October 23, 2008, 04:10:59 AM
Will we be able to export that painted density mask?
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: lightning on October 23, 2008, 04:21:38 AM
Quote from: jo on October 23, 2008, 03:28:07 AM
Hi,

With Vue you end up painting individual instances, whereas with the painted shader you're effectively painting the density mask for the population, and the populator still places the instances as before. You can get a similar effect to Vue's ecosystems by creating a number of populators with different models and using the same painted shader as the density mask for each. With the painted shader you can currently paint in the 3D Preview at any angle, wheres with Vue you only seem to able to paint in a plan view. It's still early days with the painted shader though and we may need to change the way it works in the future. It's not especially refined right now, but you can do some cool stuff with it nevertheless.

Regards,

Jo
um this actually sounds better than the eco system :)
its really going to cut down recorces as well because you will be able to paint your mask only where the camera is pointed which is great!
Also are you going to add more options to the object preview? i think bounding boxes are very crude and thus not very accurate :( what i would like is just a very simple openglbillboard option  (like vues) with a simple click i would be able to see exactly where i have placed each of my plants without having to render every 2 minutes to see if everything looks ok will this be added in future releases?
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: lightning on October 23, 2008, 04:23:22 AM
Quote from: gregsandor on October 23, 2008, 04:10:59 AM
Will we be able to export that painted density mask?
yes this would be good if you would want to edit your mask in PS or something :)
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: rcallicotte on October 23, 2008, 02:52:38 PM
Wow.  It took me a while to get to this.  Awesome!
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: Matt on October 23, 2008, 07:38:56 PM
Quote from: gregsandor on October 23, 2008, 04:10:59 AM
Will we be able to export that painted density mask?

Not yet, but it's on the to-do list.

Matt
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: Oshyan on October 24, 2008, 01:24:58 AM
We probably won't be able to make any significant improvements to object previews before release, but we definitely want to in the future. We recognize it's difficult to work with objects right now partly because of that.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: Mohawk20 on October 24, 2008, 04:33:07 AM
That's good to know Oshyan  ;)

Oh, and nice logo Lighting, you're really getting that site on the road!
Title: Re: Terragen 2 Beta Discussion
Post by: freelancah on October 24, 2008, 05:40:12 AM
One tiny suggestion: Make the error tab have timestamps on  the errors and the possibility to clear them. I know it's not the most important thing but still I think it would be helpfull.