How would I go about creating very large populations of plants on the ground so I could make a movie? Is there an easier way than making grass object spacing 1 with an area of 10000 by 10000? This takes a while to calculate.
Hi,
My guess would be you need to find some way to limit the population using the density shader param of the populator. An example might be to use a distance shader to limit how far from the camera instances appear. You might also use a painted shader to paint out parts of your terrain which never get seen during the animation ( back sides of mountains etc. ). You'll need to invert it because normally the areas you painted would be the ones populated. You can use a distribution shader to avoid places grass might not grow. Depending on your scene you may need a more or less sophisticated approach, but I'd say the density shader is where you need to start.
Depending on your scene and animation if may be quicker just to do the populating up front and not worry about limiting it. If you use any of the stuff I've mentioned above, aside from painting out where the camera never sees, you'll need to turn on "Repopulate every frame" and the time to repopulate each frame might add up to be more than if you just did it once. On the other hand :-), doing the population every frame could save you some memory because less instances would be created.
In the next release there will probably be a "Clip to camera" param to limit population to the area inside the camera frustum, but that's not going to be much help to you now.
Regards,
Jo
I'll just have to make do until the new release. Is there a limit on how many objects there are in a population? Also, will the program crash if the population gets too high?
There is no set limit on population size, but if you make one too large and run out of memory TG2 is likely to crash. I've gone up to somewhere around 16 million instances on a system with 6GB of RAM (64 bit OS), so that's around where the max is for a single population.
- Oshyan
Another question regarding popuations. If I decided to move a population at a large scale like to the other side of globe, would tg2 value in the curvature of planet?
I just click on a point in the terrain in the new location, and copy coordinates. Then paste them into the populations translate input.
TG2 can run into problems with coordinates when you are far from the coordinate origin (0,0,0). But planet curvature is taken into account with populations so it should work in theory.
- Oshyan
I can't think of a time when I ventured very far. The random function works for altering location very well.