I really struggle sometimes getting populations to sit on terrains and not sit underneath them. I assume the sit on terrain feature is broken at the moment but is there anyway to work around it?
In this example I've kept it really simple, I've added a terrain and then added a population of grass (internal) and told it to sit on the Computer Terrain. Thats all I've done, there's no massive displacements, no shaders at all, yet it doesn't work. You can see in the preview window how the grass appears to sit on the terrain ok but as soon as I render it I can see the grass getting drawn but then the terrain covers it. Can you see in the nodes screenshots anything I might have done wrong? Maybe the sit on terrain feature isn't broken and it's something I need to do different.
I've added the tgd file.
Interesting. When I had such trouble with this it turned out that the amount of displacement on the terrain seemed to be the issue. The displacement was negative and the plants appeared above the surface; here the displacement is positive and the plants are below the surface.
One thing Oshyan suggested I try, although it didn't seem an adequate solution in my case: use the y translation setting of the individual /member of the population' object to compensate for the error. It will be applied to all members. I had limited success with it - I was never able to get all the objects, the surface, and their shadows to appear correctly at the same time.
I've had abit of success raising the elevation in the Angular Position Tab of the object being populated...
Robert..
Hi.
Harvey I used to try altering the Y translation on the object but I never got good results with it. When I increase the Y value the grass does start to show through the terrrain and in some areas it appears to sit but in other areas it's still partially under the terrain with only the tips showing through and in other areas the grass is floating, so I don't use that trick any more.
Garcia i've never tried this before. Do you mean increase the Elevation value under Angular Position for the object? I've dragged the slider all the way to the right but the grass still doesn't show.
Thanks for the feedback.
QuoteGarcia i've never tried this before. Do you mean increase the Elevation value under Angular Position for the object?
yes thats the one,it might have be that it helped in my case because my population was partly visible (it was rendering on a flat plane)but your answer to Harvey seems to rule out my solution as you got it to partly show up..
Hopefully someone will come up with an answer that works..
Robert..
Reck,you might find the answer to your question here: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1346.msg13522#msg13522
Thanks Robert i'll take a look.