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General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: hvdosten on July 18, 2019, 11:40:46 AM

Title: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 18, 2019, 11:40:46 AM
Hi out there,

I am working on this situation:

[attach=1]

and would like to have a realistic population of bushes/trees, based on the aerial picture.

But, you know, the editing window is like this:

[attach=2]


Is there a way to see this aerial picture also in the editing window? This would make editing the population much easier...


Thanks a lot,
Harry

Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: Oshyan on July 18, 2019, 03:48:28 PM
The "editing window" should just be the normal 3D preview, unless you are using some other preview. The regular 3D preview has controls for what aspects of rendering are enabled, Shaders (green ball), Atmosphere (blue outline of a cloud), and lighting (a yellow sun outline). Enable Shaders and you should see your image.

Hand-editing all the instances to conform to an image map may not be the best approach though, or at least not the fastest. If you can make a mask based on the satellite image, where white indicates where you want the trees to be, and black indicates where you don't, then you can simply use that as a population mask and get trees where you want them much faster. You can then edit specific trees only within the areas you wanted them in. You should be able to create such an image fairly easily in a basic image editor.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 18, 2019, 03:53:08 PM
thanks, Oshyan for this hint. I will do this tomorrow

Harry

Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: WAS on July 18, 2019, 04:59:23 PM
To elaborate on this image based masking process, you can use GIMP or Photoshop, and change the image to grayscale, than you can use the Levels function to define lights and dark areas. You may need to invert the image if the trees appear very dark in the satellite image over the ground.

You can also do this in TG with the image map shader, convert to grayscale, complement colour, and the colour adjust shader.
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 01:32:19 AM
Thank you for your help. That's exactly what I will do.
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 03:49:18 AM
again, thanks a lot for your help:


[attach=1]
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: WAS on July 19, 2019, 03:57:30 AM
Glad you got it figured out. That looks much better assuming that gray region is the focus area.
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 01:26:39 PM
Sorry ... it's me again ...

This morning I had saved everything and then updated Terragen 4.3.18 to 4.3.23. A few hours later, I started Terragen again and can not edit any of the trees in the population, they are no longer visible in the rendered image, and in Edit mode in the render image also not clickable:


[attach=1]

I get the same result, even if I create a new population (same density shader, anchor: sit on terrain ...).

after some attempts, I am now with my Latin at the end ...
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: WAS on July 19, 2019, 01:32:52 PM
Quote from: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 01:26:39 PM
Sorry ... it's me again ...

This morning I had saved everything and then updated Terragen 4.3.18 to 4.3.23. A few hours later, I started Terragen again and can not edit any of the trees in the population, they are no longer visible in the rendered image, and in Edit mode in the render image also not clickable:


[attach=1]

I get the same result, even if I create a new population (same density shader, anchor: sit on terrain ...).

after some attempts, I am now with my Latin at the end ...
I have encountered this sometimes where a pop won't create any instances despite it just working previously. Usually to fix it I just have to make a new population. Weird its not working for you. I'm not sure what that's about without seeing how the population is setup, it's location etc vs density masking.
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: Oshyan on July 19, 2019, 02:29:18 PM
Very strange. You are not using a population cache, are you? I don't think we've seen this problem before. If you can provide the scene file(s) to reproduce it that would be really helpful. You can email them to support AT planetside.co.uk. If you are using a licensed version you can use Export Gathered Project from the file menu to easily gather all necessary files together and zip them in an archive.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 02:54:41 PM
I don't think so. Here are my settings:

[attach=1]


and


[attach=2]


Sorry, something went wrong in my last reply. Here is the screenshot I obviously forgot to upload:

[attach=3]

Do you need some more information on my settings before I send all the stuff to you?

Thanks a lot
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: Oshyan on July 19, 2019, 03:00:07 PM
Not that it is necessarily related, but why do you have "repopulate on every frame" enabled?

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: WAS on July 19, 2019, 03:03:16 PM
Quote from: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 02:54:41 PM
I don't think so. Here are my settings:

[attach=1]


and


[attach=2]


Sorry, something went wrong in my last reply. Here is the screenshot I obviously forgot to upload:

[attach=3]

Do you need some more information on my settings before I send all the stuff to you?

Thanks a lot

Everything *looks* alright from what I can see without looking at the desnity shader. So I would gather the project and send it off to support. It may be something simple.

Additionally if you are on freeware, you can create a folder, save your project in it, than create a Project Assets folder and move all your stuff into it that's loaded into TG externally, and than when you open the files from project assets folder TG will assign local paths that will be compatible with other systems when you zip up the whole containing folder with the project TGD
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 04:16:26 PM
because the gathered project exceeds 25 MB, I am sending the data to you via wetransfer, right now.

Another problem....occurred since I upgraded. Some of the text in the menu disappeared / the contrast is not so good....

[attach=1]

[attach=2]


I work with an iMac...

Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: Oshyan on July 19, 2019, 04:17:49 PM
That is especially strange and seems to indicate something more serious is going wrong than just the project (potentially). Does the Default scene look OK? Did you change anything else on your Mac, e.g. upgrade the operating system as well?

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: WAS on July 19, 2019, 04:18:08 PM
Quote from: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 04:16:26 PM
because the gathered project exceeds 25 MB, I am sending the data to you via wetransfer, right now.

Another problem....occurred since I upgraded. Some of the text in the menu disappeared....

[attach=1]

[attach=2]


I am working with an iMac...

Could this be related to theme being used? I noticed your TG GUI is dark, which I don't believe it's originally setup to view under. Missing text altogether is strange too... font issue?
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 04:24:23 PM
the OS is up to date...

[attach=1]


and the default scene is looking like this:

[attach=2]

Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: WAS on July 19, 2019, 04:30:34 PM
Quote from: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 04:24:23 PM
the OS is up to date...

[attach=1]


and the default scene is looking like this:

[attach=2]

Huh, so that project XML may be messed up. They'll be able to diagnose this at support.
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: Oshyan on July 19, 2019, 04:37:38 PM
OK, your project loads alright here. The missing node names appear to just be related to the zoom level. Zoom in and they should appear. There are a lot of disconnected nodes in the Shaders area and I am not sure if they are supposed to be that way, or if the project got corrupted.

As far as the population issue, I see two problems, and I am not sure if they are due to something you accidentally did, or some kind of odd project corruption.

First, the populator had no object connected to it as the "Object maker". Usually this is an object inside the Populator node and connected to its "Object maker" node input. You had an object in this scene that is *outside* the Populator, and again not connected to the Object maker input of the Populator. So that's problem 1.

Second, if I connect the only object in the scene to the Populator Object Maker input, it doesn't work because the object is moved away from the 0,0,0 coordinate origin. This is a problem for the populator. Moving that object back to 0,0,0 seems to fix it all for me (once it is connected to the Object Maker input on the Populator, of course). However I am unsure if A: this is actually the object you intended to use for the populator and B: whether you moved the object out of the Populator node for some reason, and C: whether you moved the object's physical location from 0,0,0 and if so why.

Also would be good to know, as I mentioned previously, why you had "Repopulate on every frame" enabled.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 04:46:18 PM
thanks a lot for checking this project. I will have a very close look at it, based on your comments, tomorrow when my brain is full of power again...  :-)

Concerning your last question... I enabled 'Repopulate on every frame' in my desperation when I had that problem, hoping that this could help... and forgot to disable it again. Sorry...

Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: Oshyan on July 19, 2019, 04:58:30 PM
Ah, no problem. Just good to eliminate all unnecessary settings. :)

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: hvdosten on July 19, 2019, 05:04:28 PM
well...I tried it again....and now it works again...

[attach=1]

and I hope that tomorrow I will understand what I have done wrong, following your second last reply...

thanks again, Oshyan

Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: Dune on July 20, 2019, 02:08:06 AM
Well, it showed from your initial screenshot that no 'object maker' object was selected, so that was obviously the main problem.
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: Oshyan on July 20, 2019, 02:14:05 PM
True, I just didn't notice at that time.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: Population editing
Post by: WAS on July 20, 2019, 02:43:21 PM
Quote from: Oshyan on July 20, 2019, 02:14:05 PM
True, I just didn't notice at that time.

- Oshyan

Same. Though seems painfully obvious now. The GUI theme really threw me off looking at stuff in general though.