Terrible problems with Lake

[pedrovilar]

Hi.
I'm experiencing serious problems with the lake . It works well when placed at the north pole but near the equator I suffer agonies because of the constant crashes of the program. If I place the camera near the equator and I try to drag the lake to this position, for example, copying the coordinates and pasting them into the lake coordinates, it crashes immediately. If I place a rock and repeat the operation, more of the same! If I try to drag it straight by the arrows, at one stages the lake cannot be dragged further away. Does anybody know how to place a lake far away from the north pole?

[Dune]

Try a sphere with the same radius as the planet, uncheck shadows. To raise or lower level, use a surface shader's offset. No color of course, add water shader as child. Maybe that's working better, though I never venture near the equator, so I'm not sure.

[pedrovilar]

OK, thank you very much. I will try this.

[Oshyan]

I can reproduce this issue and I have created a bug report for it in our issue tracker. We'll address it in a future update. In the meantime I'd suggest working closer to the "pole" if possible. The north pole is the coordinate origin point for the entire scene and things are more accurate and more predictable there in general.

- Oshyan

[pedrovilar]

Thank you for reporting this bug. When the radius of the lake is too big the program crashes too (this already happened with Terragen 2). The use of the sphere can fix the problem but I think that the bugs of the lake should be fixed, and if Terragen can generate an entire planet, the entire surface should be used (I think so), not just the north pole.

[Oshyan]

The entire surface is used (and usable), some non-procedural functions are just more difficult when further away from the coordinate origin. It's something we intend to improve in the future as well.


But even if the large lake problem were resolved I would strongly recommend against using a Lake object that large. There's really fairly little reason to do so, at that point simply using a water shader on the planet, or a separate sphere, makes more sense. The Lake is a plane that needs to be curved to conform to the planet, whereas a 2nd planet with a water shader just simply works. I agree this may not be entirely intuitive, but think of the Lake object as literally that - a "Lake" - once you get to a certain size/scale, a "lake" is no longer a lake, it's a sea.

- Oshyan

[pedrovilar]

Yes, thank you. The sphere works very good.