Roads not repelling foliage

#1 Yea... it doesn't do that.

Its a complex issue as having it do this calculation at runtime adds to the foliage generation time... but it could be fixed.

We'll think about it some here and see what we can do.

#2 Ah ok , I just assumed it worked as it did in Lara's video tutorial on roads and I think in your South pacific demo . no worries at least we have enough texture availability to fake it as I mentioned

PS just sent you an e-mail to your sickhead account marked important

#3 In the South Pacific demo we painted out the foliage in those areas... same thing in Lara's tutorial video.

#4 Ah ok ,my mistake...sorry

#5 I,m sure I also saw that happening in the videos, in the part where the road was edited for width, the foilage "pushed back".

#6 I'm sure you didn't see that in the videos... but you might have thought you did. ;)

#7 I thought i saw a Leprechaun in that video, but was not sure i should mention it.

#8 yes, my bad, it doesn't, it lays textures over, gave the impression of pushing back the foilage.
sorry. I hate mosquitoes.

#9 @deepscratch: Your saying im a mosquito and you hate me? Thats to bad, because i love you, but i love everybody so dont get to attached.

I only mention because the person who have been swamping my email with very unhappy(yet highly amusing) messages and judgments about my 'momma' used similar metaphor. Could it be???

#10 @Caylo,
no, I just hate mosquitoes, didnt sleep well last night because of their constant biting my feet!!!

Quote:dont get to attached

does this mean we're breaking up?

#11 heh. clever funny.

#12

Quote:Its a complex issue as having it do this calculation at runtime adds to the foliage generation time... but it could be fixed.

It actually must be fixed, otherwise the ground cover is near worthless as massive bushes in a road would be a major visual issue :)
If it isn't fixed, then the replicators need to be refreshed instead.

#13 @Marc: Another solution is to paint a terrain layer underneath your roads which doesn't have any groundcover associated with it. That's how we're doing it at the moment. It's a pain to do if you have a long road, but it works.

#14 Thats a work around, no solution, and a bad one as it is highly dependent on your terrain size and road width if it works at all.
Definitely no solution nor acceptable to me.

Ground cover was one of the mentioned great new things in T3D
As it stands right now, it is mainly a greatly broken thing, but thats what the beta is for, finding broken things and make them better.
The Ground cover definitely needs quite a bit of work.
Not only on this specific thing, but there are is also a large amount of control missing that makes it near impossible to use it in a real environment, as a ground cover might not needfully be meant to cover the whole terrain but only a local area where the specific texture is beeing used, which isn't possible at the time.
Painting foliage, as it is common in todays and yesterdays technologies, isn't possible at all without buying an addon. Depending on Forest Kit, which solves this technical shortcomming / outdatedness from T3D, can boomerang as a deal breaker for many if standard foliage handling mechanisms aren't refined to the point where they can be used much better than now.

#15 Actually... Id like to see this as an option for roads rather than a blanket clearance, Ive set up 2 kinds of road, a tarmac road with very clear edges that need to have no foliage, and a dirt track where the overgrwn verges look far mopre organic using the alternate terrain texture workaround.

As a slight side point however, its possible to use the same terrain texture more than once, ive used this to great advantage both in clearing areas of foliage and setting special areas with specific foliage, so i do believe that this 'workaround' has many benefits and shouldnt be simply disabled.

#16 @Marc

Quote:Painting foliage, as it is common in todays and yesterdays technologies, isn't possible at all without buying an addon.

That is wrong.

Add a GroundCover object with a type that covers the entire terrain. Edit the 'layer' field for that type to be 1. Now where ever you paint the 2nd terrain material that type will appear letting you paint in foliage.

fxFoliageReplicator isn't ment to be painted... and won't ever be. If i had my wish we would remove the fxFoliage/ShapeReplicators from the engine.

Like Crysis you should use multiple techniques. Use procedural foliage tied to terrain materials for the bulk of it and use hand placed foliage blobs in areas to fill things out.

#17 Now I feel bad starting this post , I honestly thought It was meant to repel , but the fact it doesnt , doesnt matter at all , it's a huge thing to have roads at all... Sop what if we have to paint out foliage . its not a big job really on the scale of things,I have a road in one of our levels that is 24km long it took only 2 hrs to paint out.
Keep up the Great work Tom

#18 Naw... its a good post.

If we can find some time we'll look to see if we can get GroundCover to work against decal roads without incuring a huge raycast cost.

#19

Quote:Add a GroundCover object with a type that covers the entire terrain. Edit the 'layer' field for that type to be 1. Now where ever you paint the 2nd terrain material that type will appear letting you paint in foliage.

Thats exactly the problem.
Whereever that material is.
Requires cloning the same texture just to have areas where the vegetation is spreading and where it isn't spreading, for example in the case where we want dense gras & flowers on the grass area outside the town but not inside the town ...

Another problem is the massive amount of cover instances needed to create any kind of dense foliage ( at 200k & 200 radius, probability 1 you get a somewhere dense vegetation against layer 3 in the warrior camp mission )


Its not like I want to avoid simplicity, I like anything that saves me time and in its basics, the system is really nice :)

My problem is the lack of explicit control.
The material painting based approach basically would be nice but the new terrain system fights actively against it as we have lost explicit blend control. Not only that but the automagic blend actually does not create the data thats used by the ground cover algorithm ( 2 of the 4 directions of transition are not covered by ground cover )
The other major problem is what I mentioned at the beginning.

This restricted precision is what requires the roads to repell foliage (through an optional flag to cover both cases optimally)