#@$%$% grass clumps...

Started by Harvey Birdman, March 18, 2007, 08:53:45 AM

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Harvey Birdman

Does anyone have a step by step explanation of how to use grass/grass clumps? I've repeatedly searched the forums and have found any number of people struggling with this, but I have yet to find a definitive explanation on how to implement this that actually seems to work.

I've set the group bounding box about the region I want to populate, given the default shader a color (red! you'd think that would show up against a green surface shader...), enabled both the individual clump and the population, checked 'sit on terrain', etc,  played with number of blades, blade length, clump size, and absolutely nothing shows up.

child@play

hey,

do you have a lot of shaders attached to your terrain? sometimes i had problems placing objects on heavy displaced terrain, when you add a 'compute terrain' as very last node in the shaders group, the problem should be solved


cheers...
perfection is not when there's nothing more to add, it's reached when nothing more can be left out


rcallicotte

Harvey, this is a useful link and it includes a very useful ZIP file - http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=933.0
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Harvey Birdman

Thanks for the quick replies, folks. I'll see what I can do. I'm getting a little frustrated -  spent half the night screwing with this.

Harvey Birdman

Well, that didn't take long to get to a dead end.

>:(

child@play - just how do I add a 'compute terrain' as the last item in the shader list?

child@play

just right click the shader group in the node-network-view.

then, create shader -> other shader -> compute normal

then, plug the output of the last shader into that 'compute terrain', and this output goes into 'planet' and the grass clumps
perfection is not when there's nothing more to add, it's reached when nothing more can be left out


Costaud

I'm not very familar with Terragen grass clump (I use obj grass) but did you play with the scale in the transform window of grass itself not the Populator?

Harvey Birdman

#7
Sorry for the delay - I needed to get a bit of sleep.

Costaud - I just tried increasing the scale an order of magnitude on each axis (all at the same time), creating a bounding box with 1000 time the volume of the default. Still don't see a bloody thing.
>:(

I'm going to try child@play's suggestion next; failing that, I'll look at BigBen's sample tgo (thanks for the link, calico).

So is it just me or does this feature require a bit more engineering? Yeah, I know it's a tech preview and all, but based on the volume of forum content on this subject, I'd suggest that the UI for placing/populating groups of objects is in need of some serious redesign.


Harvey Birdman

#9
Thanks, Buzzz, but I've read it.

This is absolute bull%$Y. I've followed the tutorials; bounding boxes are in the right places and appear to be the right size; I'm using a canned object/population, not some weird thing I've imported, and yet they seem endowed with some mystical quality that makes them invisible. Gosh, that's useful.

<edit>

My apologies for my rant(although I stand by my criticism). I have no idea what was wrong, but I just deleted the object and population I'd been struggling with and created a new, single clump, which appeared before the camera without a problem.

???

I swear I didn't mess with any opacity settings or anything like that - I was very careful to work with the default objects with their default settings (except location).

I think I'll go work in the yard for a while.  :-X

</edit>

Buzzzzz

Quote from: Harvey Birdman on March 18, 2007, 02:10:23 PM
Thanks, Buzzz, but I've read it.

This is absolute bull%$Y. I've followed the tutorials; bounding boxes are in the right places and appear to be the right size; I'm using a canned object/population, not some weird thing I've imported, and yet they seem endowed with some mystical quality that makes them invisible. Gosh, that's useful.

OK, now that that's cleared up. I have ran into this problem where there seems to be a bug where displacements cover the grass pops. Do you have extreme displacements in your tgd? If not keep @%$$^&*%^(*&^%#$ because I don't know what to tell you unless you post the tgd for us to look at?

Harvey Birdman

#11
I was just thinking the same thing (about posting the file). Unfortunately at about that time I tried to change blade length on the one clump I was playing with. I used the slider instead of the text box; TG apparently gagged on it's attempt to repeatedly recalculate the model parameters, totally hung, and in the end I had to reboot. The only thing missing since the last save was the clump of grass, so I've put it back in front of the camera like it was just before it crashed. I haven't changed the color or anything; I did increase the y scale by a factor of 10 (seemed safer than trying to change blade length again).

So is there something exceptionally weird about this terrain?


Buzzzzz

Great, I'll take a look as soon as this little patch of water finishes. Don't know if I will be of much help but I'll surely try. I'm sure others with more knowledge than myself will tackle it also. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this thorn in your side.  :)

Harvey Birdman

Cool... thanks. Sorry if I became a little abrasive. I was up most of the night trying to get this to work. It doesn't seem as if it should be that difficult, but I had no luck at all. Fact is I love the product - this is the first bad experience I've had with it.

Costaud

I don't know if it's the effect you're looking for but I just increased the scale of the clump and the grass apperared (even in the water).