Middle Earth DEM Project

[monks]

Ohh yes - chewy. So will be able to put the grass in underneath or vary the tree size and do all that lovelyness too ?

yes all that eezypeezy!

Wow - combined with our vegmaps these terrains will look sooo coool. Ohh presumably with the different soil types and veg types from the Fonstad maps we could get some terrific images ! Exciting again huh ?


hehe- yeh, if you look back at our work, it is cool I have to say lol. I've got lots of good plant models.

I tried a render last night with trees and grass but when I checked this morning, it had crashed to desktop ,bummer.


So the basic idea is still to get GTS to gen up some basic vegetation quantity and then combine it with the lower res Fonstad & whatever else maps we can get our hands on.

Yes.

Then in TG2 there is a fixed shader setup where we can rename all the maps to generic tile index types like Fonstad_Conif_73_22.png -> Fonstad_Conif.png and have a directory full of them and then render out tile 73,22. Then bin all the temporary masks ready for the next one and start all over again until we have the whole place covered.

Ok, sounds good.

There was some consideration that the makefile & perl was going to write the XML TG2 scene setup but when I looked at it a few months back now I got the heebie jeebies. It was too darn complicated. Do you think this might still be realistic or can you do it by swapping in different tile masks into one scene and rerunning it for each tile. I think this would be easier and more manageable but what do you think ?


Well see how you feel Robes. A lot of the difficulty is with sustaining enthusiasm and seeing rewards for work. The ratio has been rather towards the work I think! I would prefer more automation, but swapping out manually would be pretty straightforward for the image maps anyway. It would require that I write a check list, and go through them at each tile methodically so that I don't miss anything.
I think if we were to automate the xml write, opening a thread on the TG boards at some point would be a good idea. Might raise the profile of GTS as well.

monks

[Redrobes]

I would prefer more automation, but swapping out manually would be pretty straightforward for the image maps anyway. It would require that I write a check list, and go through them at each tile methodically so that I don't miss anything.
I think if we were to automate the xml write, opening a thread on the TG boards at some point would be a good idea. Might raise the profile of GTS as well.

Oh god no we will definitely automate it. Osh said that TG2 had a command line option to run a scene. I dont know what scene files there are in TG2 but I hope that its all wrapped up into one big file - text based preferably - xml ideally - which is how I believe it is.

We can either use the makefiles to copy in the masks and rename them and rerun the command line version, wait for the result and copy that generic render.png to render_73_22.png etc or we can write out thousands of xml files for each tile scene based on a master one which you set up and then run them all like compiling loads of files. Either way is the same kind of thing.

Either way I wouldnt expect anyone to run the program by hand 6400 times - or even 400 times if were doing a 4x4 set per run. The render times is a bit of a worry as well as it continuously crashing too. The crashing less so because we can just rerun the script and it will pick up where it left off providing it crashes cleanly. Could even provide a monitor program in the background to re-kick the script off if its not going etc.

[monks]

Oh god no we will definitely automate it. Osh said that TG2 had a command line option to run a scene.

Yes that's right; command line.

I think the automation would help sell GTS as well. Image maps have their naysayers (vs TG innate procedurals), but hooked up into a workflow like this, well we'll see. I think getting a procedurally noised (enhanced) image maps setup would be ideal. Not tried that yet...

Either way I wouldnt expect anyone to run the program by hand 6400 times - or even 400 times if were doing a 4x4 set per run. The render times is a bit of a worry as well as it continuously crashing too. The crashing less so because we can just rerun the script and it will pick up where it left off providing it crashes cleanly. Could even provide a monitor program in the background to re-kick the script off if its not going etc.

I'd be crazy enough lol! I've been running tests all day. Got 3 crashes in a row. But I've just had the first successful one. So I'm going to scale this up now. I think there was a problem with the subdivision cache- not quite sure how that works, but my latest change has solved it it seems. Trying a larger more demanding render overnight.

http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...on test_14.png

monks

[monks]

This is without the total grass cover. Everything looks a bit flat, but at east we have a render.


http://www.skindustry.net/medem/file...iontest_16.png

I'm going to try this with higher detail settings now.

monks