Ground Cover Question

#1 Steve, can you give some advice on how you got your ground cover to work? I still havent been able to get mine to work properly yet.

#2 @Donald
Here's a tip which initially confused me.
Stick your billboard texture in general ---> nothing happens
Open up Types[0], and turn probability to 1 -> billboards appear

#3 I believe there is a setting for distance for the objects and one for the billboards. Need to adjust the the one for the objects as well otherwise they will only show up so far.

#4 Increasing shapecullradius will determine visible distance for groundcover I believe. I turned mine to 250, now they don't disappear at all. I'm sure this will impact performance along the way though.

#5 Radius is in metres/units, rather depends on how far you can see as to whether there is a noticeable effect.

I don't see any changes with shapeCullRadius, nor dissolveRadius.

GroundCover doesn't appear to have the fade in/out features that foliageReplicator had. Pop-up is done by terrain square, and gets culled/rendered dependant on distance from that square based on radius value.

#6 Strange, I just tested it again shapecullraidus under groundcover general does increase/decrease the distance for me. Note though I'm using dea shapes. With 250 radius, I rarely see groundcover bushes pop-up, they remain there all the time.

#7 shape cull radius, does work, thanks Penbit.

@Steve -- there are 2 things you can "plant" using GroundCover, I believe. Both, billboards and .dts'es. I haven't tried anything with billboards, but I just tested shape cull radius on .dts'es and it does the trick.

@Donald -- I am going to look and then post the links to the forum posts that helped me get it working. If that doesn't help you, I'll write it up myself. Should be up here in a few minutes.

#8
Here they are , Donald. Please let us know if you still need help:

www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/103275

And:

www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/90599

#9 Ah right, I was just throwing in a quick test with billboards, rather than the DTS.

#10 @Steve(both) thanks a lot!

I now have clutter showing just have to play with the settings to get what I like

#11 okay, quick question, on the ground clutter, there are multiple types you can have, I set it up so that I have shrubs in type(0), stumps in Type(1), and use type(2) and (3) for some other things like flower and weeds.

The problem I have is that I only see one setting for the amount of clutter and its under the general tab, so if I have my bilboard textur as my grass, and put the nuber up to say 10k to make the grass the way I want it it also turns up the number of flowers, stumps shrubs and things as well. And I dont want that.

So, is there a way to reduce the number of iterations on the Types or do I have to create a new clutter for each different amount I want?

#12 You can use multiple ground covers for that.

A single groudn cover is best used with variations of the same thing / variations over different ground texture layers, but not for distinct things

#13 Rehashing an old topic here but GroundCover does not appear to be functioning in my version of Torque 3D 2009 Pro 1.1 Alpha.

I have followed the steps outlined in this thread as well as those suggested by various posters. Specifically I cannot get either a shape or a billboard texture to appear in my level

I have tried the following tactics:

1. pointing the GroundCover General Material to various materials;
the materials have used both .dds and .png files with lerp
alpha transparency enabled and disabled

2. pointing Types [0] shapeFilename to various .dts objects

3. creating ground cover with just the GroundCover General
Material mapped, with just the shapeFilename mapped, with both
mapped.

I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong. Any thoughts? Is there any specific information/screen shots I can provide that would be helpful to discussing my problem?

Thanks,
Ken

#14 Works fine for me. You did check post #2?

#15 Further delving (and vigorous fist shaking towards computer-related deities) has given me properly functioning GroundCover.

For future users.....the secret came to me when I created a simple, blank world and loaded the GroundCover into it. Specifically I had my GroundCover General attributes set so that my sculpted terrain and associated objects obscured the sparsely populated GroundCover.

Follow the advice in this thread (and monkey around with the General settings) and GroundCover should work like a champ.