Scaling Entire TG Scene

Started by gregtee, February 19, 2014, 01:33:47 AM

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gregtee

Is this possible?  I've made a scene and while in the process of making it I wasn't paying much attention to scale.  Now that I've got something I like I've noticed that everything in it is off by a factor of at least ten.  I was told some time back that I could simply attach a transform merge shader to the node(s) I want to scale, which in this case is everything, and that should do it.  As near as I can tell nothing is happening.  I've got the transform merge shader at the bottom of my tree before it all plugs into the planet and no matter what values I type into it my scene won't scale. 

Is what I'm trying to do even possible?  Am I missing something?

Thanks

-greg

Supervisor, Computer Graphics
D I G I T A L  D O M A I N

Hetzen

Not easily is the short answer as far as I'm aware. The transform shader works on colour space only. It won't affect displacement. You'll more than likely have to go back into each PF and setting and re-adjust.

You could scale an imported camera.

jaf

I really should get back to a project I was working on a couple years ago.  I wrote a tgd parser with the intent of doing things like global resizing, position transforms (relative to different objects), etc.  I tested it with a global object enable/disable and it worked well (it wasn't interactive -- I had to write out a new tgd and reload, but found it was still faster than making the individual changes if there were a lot of objects.  Maybe I should get on this again.
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gregtee

Something like that would be great.  In general I've found that just diving in and working with what I see and not worrying about scale is quickest, but the penalty is huge if your work can't be resized easily after the fact, at which point you might as well bite the bullet and just do things at correct scale to begin with. 

The problem for me is that oftentimes I'm going into TG with one intent and then by happenstance something I hadn't planned on doing presents itself and the opportunity to explore that further is too hard to resist.  I then wind up with something that I really like that wasn't my original intention but only then discover that my scale is way, way off.  Trying to go back and duplicate what was done to achieve the same look at correct scales proves to be more challenging than building the original scene to begin with and takes a lot of the joy out of working with the created landscape.  There's got to be some way to just globally scale everything easily, or at the very least scale your terrain displacements. 

Supervisor, Computer Graphics
D I G I T A L  D O M A I N

Oshyan

What's your goal in rescaling things? To match up with another program? I mean, if you like the result you got, why rescale?

- Oshyan

Hannes

Atmosphere is something that doesn't match to the rest of the scene when everything is too small for example. You can't get this distant blueish haze in the background of a hopefully epic picture when the background is actually only twenty meters away from the camera.

gregtee

Mostly because the scale of a scene has a lot to do with how the haze works, how imported plants sit in relation to everything else, even seeing the curvature of the earth from a viewing angle that works for the shot.  I have a scene now with all these problems because I wasn't paying attention to scale when I first made it.  If I could multiply the scale of everything in the scene by .1 it would be perfect. 

Here's an example of what I'm working with-

[attach=1]

Those tumble weeds are about 30+ feet tall.  There's way too much haze in the scene in spite of my post color treatments.  You can see the curvature of the earth.  I'd love to be able to scale this whole scene to something more realistic before I spend anymore time on it.  I'm already rebuilding it in a more realistic scale but the rocks don't have the character that these do yet, so I'm having trouble getting there at this point which makes me wish there was a global scale option. 

Apologies for posting an image in the General section, but i wasn't sure how else to illustrate the problem I'm having.

-Greg

Supervisor, Computer Graphics
D I G I T A L  D O M A I N

Hannes

Nonetheless this looks awesome, Greg!!!

Hetzen

It does look really good. I can see why you'd want to carry on. You could scale the planet? Offset the origin by the new radius multiplied by 10 or 100. The atmosphere may dial back in. I've not tried it, but maybe a quick fix. Although clouds will get expensive.

Sometimes lod hits small scale fractals, so working large can bring back detail on mid ground objects. Seth plays around with scale very effectively.

Oshyan

Yeah, I was thinking of doing the opposite of your plan, scale the planet and adjust atmosphere hazes to compensate.  Not to say there isn't a way to scale everything else (I don't know, certainly not the plants along with the terrain without adjusting each separately), but it may just be easier to adjust the rest if you like the main parts of the scene...

- Oshyan

gregtee

I could try scaling the planet if that'll work.  It seems that it's sort of the same thing I gather?  I guess I'd have to just adjust the atmosphere accordingly but that seems much easier than trying to retool all the shaders. 
Supervisor, Computer Graphics
D I G I T A L  D O M A I N

Oshyan

According to Matt, rescaling all shaders with e.g. a Transform Shader would require lots of changes (internally, in code) to each individual shader. I.E. It's not currently possible. So hopefully the planet+atmo rescaling worked.

- Oshyan

TheBadger

Man those rocks look pretty! I almost feel glad your running into issues  ;)
It has been eaten.