Pretty damn exciting (in a landscape way) ... attacking a mesh with VSL !
Garry Curtis
LOL, yes VSL is a killer tool ;)
A small summary:
So far, I find working with hi-res meshes the most promising way. I've
worked with 1024x1024 meshes but only in phong-shaded poly mode. Setting
Undo levels to 0 helps in managing these big meshes.
Smooth mode is out of the question here, which rules out displacement. The
polys show up especially near the shadows if you get too close. Special
landscape software can suffer from this too but they have ways to hide it.
Perhaps if we could displace meshes in poly mode...
Theoretically, you could use a low-res smooth mesh that represents large
scale features and displace this with a hires mapping, generated from the
same landscape. This should superimpose small-scale details on the rough
mesh without huge displacement values. I haven't got convincing results
yet... YET.
I did manage to displace a flat mesh with a hires HDR file but how to edit
displacement-based landscape scenes if you don't see the surface in
realtime. And displacement falls apart if you get too close - a typical
landscape problem. Very useful for high altitude and space shots though.
OK, I'm stumbling on a few bottlenecks in RS landscapes.
- vegetation. We now have instances, the Interpolator, raytraced curves etc
which is great. However, a few reasonably detailed trees are enough to
choke RS, both in editing and rendering. I don't know how other programs
manage this, probably some kind of distance-dependant mesh complexity.
- artifacts can pop up in both poly and displacement rendering.
- getting close is another issue. It's hard to get 'into' the landscape.
All this doesn't mean I'm whining about RS; most of these issues are also
present to a degree in other software. RS is an ultimate allround 3d tool
and I don't blame it for having some trouble with very specialistic stuff.
Maybe with a few extra features and/or optimizations it could make a big
jump ahead!
One little idea imitate Vue's brilliant 'Ecosystems' by distributing
instances of plants, rocks etc over a surface, according to VSL channels
(depending on height and slope, or even WM erosion flowmaps). Or is that
already possible... I'll have to check that out. Scripting?
More to follow,
Mark H
