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Support => Terragen Support => Topic started by: WAS on February 13, 2020, 11:27:32 PM

Title: Rock Shdow Issue
Post by: WAS on February 13, 2020, 11:27:32 PM
Seems when you up the faces, the visible geometry gets smooth, but the shadows remain as if it's still low faces.

From 512 faces to 2041 (typo from 2048 ) there seems to be no change to the shadows.

Also wondering if there is area for improvement with these rocks. It's sure slow, for sub-par results. Even at a distance these hard terminators are visible.
Title: Re: Rock Shdow Issue
Post by: Matt on February 14, 2020, 05:26:36 PM
The Rock object is not good at creating smooth surfaces, but it wasn't really designed to. The Rock object generates angular shapes, and it does this using boolean intersection of a relatively small number of planes (e.g. 20). From this base shape you can subdivide it (on the Mesh tab) to create a detailed triangle mesh which can be deformed with displacement shaders. The algorithm has O(N^2) complexity so it may be slow if you try to use it with thousands of faces, especially if you also generate a large number of "unique variations".

If your goal is to converge on a smooth shape, it's better to use an imported sphere, or the Poly Sphere object which will be released in an update this year. Imported spheres can be deformed using mesh deformation just like the Rock object can (in the Professional edition). However, one of the advantages of the Rock object over an imported model is that it can generate "unique variations" which are useful in a population. I may be able to add that capability to the Poly Sphere.
Title: Re: Rock Shdow Issue
Post by: WAS on February 14, 2020, 07:37:22 PM
Quote from: Matt on February 14, 2020, 05:26:36 PMThe Rock object is not good at creating smooth surfaces, but it wasn't really designed to. The Rock object generates angular shapes, and it does this using boolean intersection of a relatively small number of planes (e.g. 20). From this base shape you can subdivide it (on the Mesh tab) to create a detailed triangle mesh which can be deformed with displacement shaders. The algorithm has O(N^2) complexity so it may be slow if you try to use it with thousands of faces, especially if you also generate a large number of "unique variations".

If your goal is to converge on a smooth shape, it's better to use an imported sphere, or the Poly Sphere object which will be released in an update this year. Imported spheres can be deformed using mesh deformation just like the Rock object can (in the Professional edition). However, one of the advantages of the Rock object over an imported model is that it can generate "unique variations" which are useful in a population. I may be able to add that capability to the Poly Sphere.

Oh alright, that makes sense. So this populator was more designed to create jagged, angular type rocks, like freshly broken ones (hence fracture feature)? That gives me some pretty good ideas where it would shine, that I hadn't thought of.

Poly Sphere sounds interesting. Would love to know more.

Does the mesh displacer for displaceable objects (like a imported sphere) make it's calculations in final space? I immediately thought of using a PF to variate the stones across the geometry space, but with your note I wonder if that's even possible. That would make a cool feature. Like a checkbox to sample the mesh displacer at its location or final.
Title: Re: Rock Shdow Issue
Post by: Matt on February 14, 2020, 09:22:07 PM
Mesh displacement happens in object space. World space per instance would be great but that isn't possible yet.