Population editing

[hvdosten]

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

[Oshyan]

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

[hvdosten]

thanks, Oshyan for this hint. I will do this tomorrow

Harry

[WAS]

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.

[hvdosten]

Thank you for your help. That's exactly what I will do.

[hvdosten]

again, thanks a lot for your help:


[attach=1]

[WAS]

Glad you got it figured out. That looks much better assuming that gray region is the focus area.

[hvdosten]

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 ...

[WAS]

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.

[Oshyan]

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

[hvdosten]

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

[Oshyan]

Not that it is necessarily related, but why do you have "repopulate on every frame" enabled?

- Oshyan

[WAS]

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

[hvdosten]

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...

[Oshyan]

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