New User...Vegetation is Killing Me!

[tommygdawg]

Hello all,

So, I just took the plunge and picked up TG3 Professional because I have a film I'm working on that needs some high detail CG landscapes. I'm a 3DS Max poweruser, so this CG stuff is not new to me. But man, getting good vegetation in TG3.1 is making my life a pain. I've got a terrain I'm quite happy with, so it's vegetation time. The problem is, how do I do it without crashing TG3?

My terrain area is large, so to cover it with vegetation requires a huge population area, which means I have to have hundreds of thousands of instances. On top of that, can you really only put one type of object in a population? That seems like a huge oversight and is very annoying.

Anywho, some tips on how to cover large areas with vegetation would be very helpful.

Thanks!
- Tommy

[zaxxon]

Terragen is a real powerhouse at handling massive numbers of instances given enough RAM. As an example this image used 23 gigs of RAM at render, it includes numerous populations (over 50) and the process on my 6 core i7/32 gigs was very stable: http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18273.msg177261.html#msg177261 (sorry, not a self-promo, just an example that I know all the details of).  I assume you have a robust machine for this task?  Terragen demands all system resources and at 100% cpu capacity really 'heats' a machine up, so RAM and a liquid cooler (IMO) are necessary for ambitious projects. If your machine (render farm?) is solid, then the crashes are less explainable. The issue of the one object type to one population is referenced in the forum archives numerous times and the ability to use multiple objects a frequent update request, we can only hope this feature is added sometime soon.  Once again the 'Search' function of the forum as well as the Terragen Wiki can help with the various strategies to distribute multiple objects using numerous distributed populations. Don't know if this helps, but it's always good to see another Max guy working with Terragen, good luck!

[tommygdawg]

Thanks for the thoughts, Zaxxon.

I have a pretty powerful machine. Dual Xeon 6 core processors, 64gb RAM, 15 terabyte RAID array with apps and OS on an SSD RAID. So, it's definitely not the system that's causing it to crash. I'm really thinking about trying to get a refund and going with Vue, which at least has Max integration. But I don't know.

[zaxxon]

That is indeed a powerful setup, so not the hardware in your case.  Still, having come from Vue xstream 9.5 a couple of years ago to Terragen I can attest that in my experience Terragen is by far the more stable, especially when it comes to dense terrains and large populations (the reason I rarely use Vue at this point). Not to put down Vue, it's success and the beautiful images produced are undeniable. Perhaps you could post a scene file (without any commercial objects) to let the resident guru's have a look at possible issues? This software comes with an extraordinary bunch of users on this forum who are a great resource for problem solving. Hope you stick around.

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Tommy,

Welcome to the forums

Like Zaxxon says TG can handle massive numbers of instances.
I can tell you 1 thing up front now...Vue can't come even close to what TG can handle

Despite TG's capabilities there are, as always with any software, limitations.
What population area/size and what are the spacing settings in combination with size of the objects? With the latter I mean that I remember posts of people who accidentally spaced trees 0.1 metres apart which will of course cause problems.

So I'd like to know a bit more specifics of what you tried and how.
What are those settings and what do you want to do with your scene? Still rendering or animation?
For example; there's no point in covering a >1 square kilometer area with dense grass populations, simply because you'd require billions which takes massive amounts of time to place on the surface (populating) and not to even mention that you won't be able to notice them at all in the render.

Even if you feel you need really large populations then you can for example restrict the instances of each population to the camera (clip to camera).

On top of that, can you really only put one type of object in a population? That seems like a huge oversight and is very annoying.

Ha! You're already my friend now at first sight/reading this
I'm requesting and pushing for this for a long time already!

Cheers,
Martin

[tommygdawg]

Thanks again, both Zaxxon and Tangled. Indeed, the users so far have been great

This is all coming from a noob to terrain-rendering of course. I'm quite experienced with 3DS Max, but it's typically things like space ships and such.

The final output will be for a film, so the shots definitely have to have moving camera, which is why it's not feasible to just cover a small area. The shots will range from wide landscape shots to much closer shots. I've tried a spacing of 10 and upwards. I usually wind up setting a minimum scale on the trees to at least 5-10 because otherwise they're almost non-existent. I'm using the Xfrog trees, by the way.

Also, while I have you all...how do you go about texturing your terrains? I've been using image maps but it just seems so clunky to use them. I've attached my TGD file, sans image maps.

[N810]

Have you checked out the recently reopened NWDA store http://store.nwdastore.com/ 

[Tangled-Universe]

I have opened your file and I have no problems populating the scene and rendering it.

Did this crash on your system?

I'm more than willing to help, but I need more info.

I do have some general tips though:

To avoid needing fancy scale settings for your objects it's better to try to design your terrain in rather real world scales.
This way also the atmosphere model holds up better, since it's designed to emulate the atmosphere as physically accurate as possible.
At the moment this terrain is huge'ish, while in the meantime you envision it as being of smaller scale, which in turns leads you to blowing up your trees to 5-10 times their normal size.
I rendered your image and it is very hazy, because there's so much atmosphere between the camera and the factual distant mountains (which are meant to look rather up close).

For texturing I generally advise against image maps, since they don't map very nicely on terrains. TG's mapping modes are rather simplistic, but despite that you can get them to work nicely if you know your way with how to mix and merge them guided by a fractal.
That's a rather advanced way of doing it and something I wouldn't advise for you to try at this stage of experience with TG you're in now.
So better stick to the powerfractals (base colours node is also a powerfractal) and surface layers.

At this point it's difficult to help you.
I'd like to suggest to first get the terrain up and running at more correct scales.
Then animate your camera to figure out where you need your trees and thus how large the area for the population needs to be.
After that we can focus on the issues which may arise when dealing with large populations.
I won't be even surprised things will get easier if you have layed/planned out your scene more carefully, but let's see.

Cheers,
Martin

[tommygdawg]

It just crashed again, while trying to save the scene. Sometimes it crashes on the painted color shader, often times it crashes on vegetation, etc. etc.

It is supposed to be a rather large mountain but I can certainly try it going smaller. I'll give it a shot and let you know how it goes. Thanks for the feedback

[Tangled-Universe]

It's a mystery to me why it crashes and especially the frequency of crashes.
Mine virtually never crashes and when it does it's practically always because I move nodes too quickly after copying/duplicating them.

What OS are you using?

[Kadri]

You said "So, it's definitely not the system that's causing it to crash."
Your computer can be the best, fastest, etc. but for example a problem with a graphics driver could be a problem too.
If your driver is old upgrade it.
I don't tried your scene because i haven't the objects .
But just that Martin could test the scene without a problem it makes it looks more like a isolated problem on your side.
Would be good if others could test it too of course.
Some other OS related problem like Martin asked about your OS might be a problem too.

The things i wrote above are obvious things for you maybe but i have seen many things
that were related to hardware-driver-bad ram issues in the end anyway...

It could be Terragen itself too of course.

Not sure how you use the 3D preview but try to hide the objects in it see if it helps.
Not sure how stable the painted shader is now but in the past it had its problems. Test the scene with disabling them.
A more general approach might be by disabling some big groups of nodes
and testing the scene one by one for finding if one of the nodes are causing it.

[Oshyan]

Hello Tommy, sorry for the trouble you've been encountering. From what it sounds like, what you're experiencing is not normal or expected. Terragen is, in general, quite stable, even with large numbers of objects. The biggest obstacle you run into with big populations is memory, but it sounds like you've got plenty. So something is definitely wrong. Perhaps, as others suggested, it is graphics card/driver related. This is still a problem on occasion, even with newer cards, and sometimes actually the latest drivers are more problematic than older ones. In general it's more likely to be graphics system-related if it crashes *not* when rendering but instead when doing anything with the UI, especially interacting with the 3D preview, or adding things that significantly change what it is displaying, including objects/populations. So that would be my guess as to what may be happening here. Some things you can try, to troubleshoot further:

When you open Terragen, immediately close the 3D preview window. Then attempt the same things you were trying before, large populations, renders, etc.

If necessary, you can start TG with a -no3dpreview option to disable the 3d preview on startup. You can also consider closing the node network view, which also uses OpenGL.

Finally, you may try finding the graphics card Acceleration setting and turning it down. If you can't find that, you can consider rolling back to older graphics card drivers, at least as a test.

Let us know if any of that helps.

- Oshyan

[zaxxon]

The scene file loads and runs fine on my machine as well. Kadri and Oshyan both have valid points, one of which might bear out, hope so. There are some nice shapes going on in your terrain, very nice. I did a bit of messing around and put together a very basic surface shader set up in your scene as I was 'exploring', might prove useful in getting a handle on texturing in Terragen. Lots of tutorials available via the 'search' function in this forum. Hope you sort out the glitch.

[tommygdawg]

Thanks all, I appreciate the feedback Sorry for my delay too, been very busy and haven't even had a chance to open up TG today.

I'll look into drivers, I updated not too long ago. Perhaps I'll try reverting to see if that will help. It's quite a difficult thing to trouble shoot since it doesn't seem to be happening just on vegetation. Turns out it seems quite random. Sometimes while moving nodes, other times while just saving the scene, sometimes while populating vegetation, but I'm sure I'll get it figured out and most importantly if I save often it's not a huge deal.

Zaxxon, I really appreciate your feedback on the terrain and the basic shaders. It's very helpful! Texturing in TG certainly is different than expected, but I'm getting used to it. Again your examples are very helpful!

[Oshyan]

If it's happening when moving nodes and stuff, it sounds even more like a graphics card issue as the node UI is OpenGL-based too. I know these seem like simple operations, but for some reason various graphics driver updates and changes can just cause instability. It's quite frustrating since it works great most of the time and the changes seem to be on the part of the driver providers. Hopefully you can sort it out in software...

- Oshyan