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Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2014 4:08 am
by bubs
Oscar J wrote:I PM:ed Ono:

I suppose a material file couldn't support scattering? Like you assign a grass material and grass is automatically scattered in the correct scale.

He answered:

Hi Oscar,
this is something I have thought about as well.
It's definitely possible, we have initial support for it.

Sounds like a plan to me. :shock:
Very Cool!

Here's some simple stuff from me... hope it's of some help

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2014 5:12 am
by OnoSendai
Looks pretty good, thanks bubs.
The geometry definitely works better than my grass.

A couple of things - I recommend using double-sided thin material. Should look more realistic.
The albedo on the plant seems a bit high.
Here's a render using your (unchanged) components:

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2014 6:12 am
by bubs
oh i never even checked any of that stuff, sorry.... This was stuff I did a long time ago. I actually use different grass now but I didn't model it and couldn't share for this...

Feel free to change whatever you want to those models, if you can make them better (which probably wouldn't be difficult!)

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2014 11:56 am
by ak-sam
Yep you can see why having a 1 square foot 'clump' would be problematic in a shot like this, youd have overhangs of 15cm.
This (attached) is a quick test of my grass + clover (5% clover is still too much!)
This scene has 400,000 instances, at a density of 2500 per sqm. It runs a little slowly, maybe 30mins to render to 50spp?

Would it be possible to add a sort of "vertical evenness" parameter, so that the grass can scale to be longer or shorter in some random clumpy areas?

For clump sizing it would be OK to use the small clumps for the "lawn" preset, and much larger clumps for the "meadow" and "pasture" presets, which are generally for larger scale scenes with few hard edges.

My usual (old) workflow is to add dummy grass on the lawn surface, but inset 5cm from every edge. Then I use a different "edgegrass" component in that 5cm border area (it's a smaller, shorter, droopy clump suited to edges).


By the way, I'm modelling New Zealand grass. It's the best grass in the world, or at least 1st equal with Irish grass. :P

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2014 11:01 pm
by bubs
OK, so I thought I could do better than my previous efforts above, so I modeled 20 different lovely little bending, twisting blades of grass, and then painstakingly UV mapped the textures until I was happy. Then I click render and my mapping goes all screwed up!?

I really don't remember this ever happening before, any suggestions welcome, as I am on the verge of throwing my toys out of the pram! :evil:

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2014 11:24 pm
by OnoSendai
Probably a skindigo issue, can you send the skp file?

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2014 11:32 pm
by bubs
Will do

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2014 3:31 pm
by ak-sam
Had a few issues with material names getting confused on export.
Also when indigo builds the model, it appears to stall for a while - I think once it reaches over 500,000 instances or thereabouts. Ive successfully exported a few million scattered instances and render time is actually ok - still working out the ideal balance of component number vs complexity. Also need to work out efficiencies around material types - double sided thin vs translucent or other effects.

This is my latest (single component) with 3% clovers, scattered at about 2500/m2.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 12:33 am
by OnoSendai
bubs wrote:OK, so I thought I could do better than my previous efforts above, so I modeled 20 different lovely little bending, twisting blades of grass, and then painstakingly UV mapped the textures until I was happy. Then I click render and my mapping goes all screwed up!?

I really don't remember this ever happening before, any suggestions welcome, as I am on the verge of throwing my toys out of the pram! :evil:
Hi bubs, I uploaded a new SkIndigo build that fixes the UV problem.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 3:29 am
by bubs
OnoSendai wrote:Hi bubs, I uploaded a new SkIndigo build that fixes the UV problem.
Thanks Ono!
I've e-mailed you a the SketchUp file for the below grass patch. Hopefully it will be of some help.

edit: I've used double sided thin for the material as you suggested.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 11:45 am
by ak-sam
Nice work Bubs!..looks quite tropical to me.

I worked around the UVW errors by using the same grass material on all blades, maybe not ideal. I thought that might also speed up render times? *shrug* I'll work on getting my poly count down a bit, too.

I've added a reduced poly dandelion with simple PNGs.
I'm still having issues with my clover leaves being too bright - is there an issue with component or material caching - maybe I need to clear mine again?

Tip: make the ground surface into a dead grass texture so that the brown bits will show through the gaps in your scattered grass. Dont be tempted to make it look like 'green grass'.

My density is at around 4500 per m2, but that's necessary when you're looking down on it from a higher angle.

Ono - couple of requests if you don't mind:
Can the scatters extend slightly outside the camera's view when "only in view" is ticked?
Can we have the option to select scattering by Percentage instead of 'weight' (sliders?) and the ability to select smaller increments, eg 0.1%. Even 1% dandelions is too many!

A preview render would be a nice touch, too :)

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 12:00 pm
by OnoSendai
Dandelions look great!
I'll think about those requests tomorrow.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:23 pm
by OnoSendai
ak-sam wrote: Can the scatters extend slightly outside the camera's view when "only in view" is ticked?
Done for next Indigo release.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:34 pm
by OnoSendai
ak-sam wrote:Can we have the option to select scattering by Percentage instead of 'weight' (sliders?) and the ability to select smaller increments, eg 0.1%. Even 1% dandelions is too many!
I've added more decimal points to the weight controls. (and other controls too)
They're not exactly percentages, because the weights have to be summed and normalised.

Re: Wanted: Scatter presets

Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:39 pm
by OnoSendai
ak-sam wrote: A preview render would be a nice touch, too :)
A preview would be cool indeed, it's quite a bit of work though, so I might come back to that.