From: "Mark Heuymans" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > A small summary:
Whoa , Mark ! : Nice job to summarise the current state of affairs in so few paragraphs . Certainly not whining , but indeed , telling it as it is . Forgive my suedo-top posting , but I would have to agree with pretty much all your points (below) . Those have been the walls I ran into with V3.53/V4.5 and I would imagine V5.2 is similiar . However , as you say , maybe there are ways ! Anyway , my last link to this amazing Vue5 Infinte render was lost a couple of days ago in a deep mail , so I'll repost it , just to show what we may be striving for as far as instancing goes http://tinyurl.com/byjlt In a rare attempt to keep it short I shall bid "Adieu" & good luck. Garry Curtis http://www.niagara.com/~studio > 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? > 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
