Itoo Software Forum
Forest Pack => Forest Pro (*) => Topic started by: Ken Turner on May 20, 2021, 05:30:07 PM
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Forest pack uses random cameras when previewing 'Limit to visibility' in the viewport.
Without a way to 'fix' the camera being used in the forest pack UI its impossible to diagnose.
The workaround seems to be to render a single frame but this is annoying and slow ( if it works )
Assuming you do get forest pack to look at the correct camera Forest pack doesn't update 'Limit to visibility' when using Animated cameras >:(
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I am having the same issue - I was told that updating to Forest Pro 7.1.0 would fix the issue but it's still happening. I'm not sure why this was changed since it always worked in older versions, before we updated.
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I am sorry to hear that this issue is still not resolved for You.
Would You please tell us how to reproduce "random" camera limits? Best if You could attach Your scene as well- so we could see what exact max, renderer, forestPack versions are You using.
We can solve it only if You help us.
I just checked limits behavior and it seems to work as expected:
(https://i.imgur.com/AKhByf8.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/6TwJy9S.gif)
Thank You for Your collaboration.
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just a thought and maybe i am not understanding your issue ...but if you select the viewport of the camera you want to use, then open the forest lister and click "generate" does that update it?
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its definitelly not working here too
for me no matter what i do the scatter is always presend on the whole object disragarding the cam angle for both render and for viewport.
in 7.1.1 there is no option to manually select the camera to perform the cliping as it used to be before.
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Hi. I am sorry to hear that.
Would You please share an illustrated example why do You think it does not work. Now it does work differently from FP6 and we had modified how throughout some iterations.
It would help if You could specify more details- ie: what Your settings are, and how do they not work for You.
(https://i.imgur.com/DRsIBf5.png)
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Hi Rokas,
ill try to be more concrete.
Basically the way i was used to working with the camera clipping was that i locked to the camera in the camera rollout and automatically got a preview in the viewport.
Now, i can only see clipped FP objects after i have rendered once from that particular camera.
There is no realtime update in my scene. Unsure why.
M
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There is no realtime update in my scene. Unsure why.
ok, that is not expected. what renderer are You using? maybe You could create simplified example max file?
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i meant visible update of scattered objects in viewport (not in vrayIPR).
i need to be able to see the cone of the scatter "cast" by the camera and view that for example from perspacive view.
It used to work like this before.
So i asume its no longer supported right?
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What You seem to be wanting is this setting:
(https://i.imgur.com/cUfQlEG.png)
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thanks i will check this on monday and send a quick video how it works.
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ples have a look at attached, Rokas.
I have selected the CAMERAS option but still the viewport displays what shoudl have been hidden. I need it only to display what happend within the camera cone.
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would You please send (https://forum.itoosoft.com/faq/how-to-send-a-file-to-itoo-software/) us Your max file so we can check it?
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sure, on it now
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scene sent :)
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I can confirm this issue as well. Viewport should show the result of limit visibility. Seems the latest version has broken this feature.
UPDATE: After rendering my scene once, it now shows the limited visibility.
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I think I have not explained one aspect how it works in FP7 - You need to specify which camera You want to target.
You do that by switching to that view (temporarily in same viewport or in another viewport):
Illustration:
(https://i.imgur.com/nTbK945.gif)
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Personally, I also preferred the behaviour in FP6. Now you cannot see the clipping in the active "Top view" interactively when the camera moves. :-(
In addition, when animating cameras, clipping is very good at orienting and giving you an idea of what the camera sees. Now it is no longer possible.
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Correct. Now You can get top view feedback only when some camera is active and sending those updates:
(https://i.imgur.com/KTOHnAt.gif)
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Any chance of a solution in the future? Something of "Lock on last camera for virewport"?
Thanks!
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I think I have not explained one aspect how it works in FP7 - You need to specify which camera You want to target.
You do that by switching to that view (temporarily in same viewport or in another viewport):
i just update FP yesterday and it seems to be working. at first i covers my entire area, but then i tick-on the "enable on Viewport/IR" option with "cameras and perspec" selected from the drop-down list. my active viewport was the camera view. so is that what you are saying above? - make the camera view active viewport and then tick that box and choose camera/prespec?
anyway - so you just got rid of the "auto-assign camera" and ability to manually assign a camera? like others, i've liked how that used to work in older versions.
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edit.
yeah i definitely prefer the old way of auto-assign or manually assign a camera.
1. when i go into IPR rendering with vray, i get all objects showing up in the 4 visible viewports i have, but it does render correctly.
2. if i click in my top viewport, (the IPR is closed at this point) i get all objects visible in the 4 viewports - so i don't know how to get the feedback as shown in previous post.
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i just update FP yesterday and it seems to be working. at first i covers my entire area, but then i tick-on the "enable on Viewport/IR" option with "cameras and perspec" selected from the drop-down list. my active viewport was the camera view. so is that what you are saying above? - make the camera view active viewport and then tick that box and choose camera/prespec?
No. The "Enable on Viewport/IR" just defines for what views Forest will use clipping. Usually you want to set "Camera" or "Camera/Viewport".
Once set, when the ACTIVE view is of this type, Forest updates clipping for that view.
For example, if you want to preview clipping for "Camera01":
a) Set "Enable on Viewport/IR" to "Camera" or "Camera/Viewport".
b) Set "Camera01" as active view.
c) Clipping is assigned and updated for "Camera01", and result is displayed in all viewports.
You can modify or animate the camera, but not change the active view. If you swith to "Camera02", clipping is updated for that camera.
anyway - so you just got rid of the "auto-assign camera" and ability to manually assign a camera? like others, i've liked how that used to work in older versions.
We switched to this method and removed the old "Camera" parameter for several reasons:
a) It was causing a performance hit, because once "Camera" is assigned, any change on the camera object triggers a Forest rebuild, even if clipping or viewport preview is disabled.
b) "Auto assign to active view" was not working well with some render modes. This feature was introduced on the initial Forest versions, but Max (and renderers) changed a lot since then, and it was not reliable anymore.
Now clipping values for render are not taken from the active view or camera (that's used only for viewport preview). It uses a different approach which works perfectly with all render modes.
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thank you thank you... ok so i got it now. i can set my active viewport to camera, with it set to "cameras" it updates the visibility and now i can go into other viewports and see it even orbit around in those views. then "camera/perscpec." it updates if you are in perspective view! kind of cool. ok so my big thing then is to pretty much not use "all views" and just use "camera" like you said. thanks!
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hello. i regret to say that yes, this limit to visibility is now useless to me in a couple of ways.
1. i use it to determine what is visible or not visible to my camera
2. determine fall off by density and scale
3. determine ultimate fall off
4. determine how many objects are in the forest object using the forest lister which displays roughly the # of objects - i always see maximum amount
how i use forest pack - i will setup my camera, setup the forest object(s), then use top vieport and/or ortho or perspective views to spin around and make adjustments to distribution object surfaces or splines as well as the above 4 things to optimize for my camera view. i will also mostly use vray IPR to fine-tune. in any situation now, i rarely get a viewport preview in anything.
i just simply need to be able to preview everything in any or all of my viewports whether i am using vray IPR or no rendering, or whether the viewports are maximized or in quads.
this is a problem right now on one of 2nd project using the latest version of forest pro. sorry.
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For viewport, although Forest uses the latest camera selected, i just noticed it doesn't update moving the camera in other view (as top). We'll try to fix it.
According to my tests, Forest Lister and other features work well, but only when Forest is updated. Probably your issue is caused by the limitation described above.
Please, try selecting a camera view and modifying it. Forest should update correctly.
Regarding IPR, if you set render view to a Camera and lock it, Forest uses always that camera, regardless what view is selected on viewport.
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+1 on this issue, I find the new method really counterintuative in comparison to FP6. Most of my Forest Pack work is done in the top viewport. All you've done is added extra unecessary steps in my opinion for the sake of a performance hit that 99% of us will barely recognise. If anything FP7 is probably more unresponsive performance wise than FP6.
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Also it seems as though there's a bit of a bug with orthographic views. Sometimes the Limit to Visibility resets in the viewport when orbiting an orthographic view, and the only way to bring it back is to go back to camera view, then back into a top view, then orbit into ortho again, but then the same thing may/may not happen again - painful
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Wow, the more I try to use it the worse it gets, I'm spending most of my time waiting for Interactive Rendering to catch up because it's reset the limit to visibility in the orthographic view. Sorry guys, deal breaker for me this, rolling back to FP6. This is the second time I've upgraded to FP7, but back again we go
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Yes, still not working for me on FP7 and no matter what I do, I cant get it to limit visibility now. It seems like its just getting more broken as the versions progress. I cant tell if its actually limiting the visibility for render anymore. I look for an instance number change when activating it and I dont see a change. This might be why scene compilation takes so long now.
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Yep it's painfully slow and massively decreasing my productivity today.
Go Into Camera View
Switch to Top View (Limit to Visibility is previewed in the viewport)
Start IR
Limit to Visibility is correct
Orbit to Ortho view (Limit to Visibility is still correct)
Adjust a setting i.e. Global Density Falloff
The entire thing falls to pieces, takes an age to update IR, and when it finally updates, the Limit to Visibility is broken and it's just covered the entire surface again.
It really wasn't broken previously, I know the devs have mentioned why it was changed - performance hits etc, but changes should improve User Experience in my opinion, this has made it worse. The old method (including performance hits) is more user friendly AND intuative than the current method
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Ok. From your comments, i assume you want to lock clipping to a specific camera, but use IPR from any view.
I'm discussing it with our team. We're considering to come back the old "Camera" parameter. It should work in the following way:
- If "Camera" is not assigned (default behaviour), everything will work as now. "Limit to Visibility" and "Distance Falloff" will try to use the selected view.
- When a Camera is (manually) assigned, it will be always used for Clipping/Falloff, until you assign other or clear it.
Please note it will not be any option to assign the "Camera" parameter automatically to the active view, as it was in FP6.
That caused many problems in the past, which is what we're trying to avoid in FP7.
Please tell me your feedback about this possible change. Thanks.
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Hello,
If there was no parameter for automatic camera assignment it would be completely unusable e.g. for animations. We would have to assign all FPs to new cameras for animations every time. So for sure the automatic assignment feature MUST remain. Entering renders over the network would become hell.
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If there was no parameter for automatic camera assignment it would be completely unusable e.g. for animations. We would have to assign all FPs to new cameras for animations every time. So for sure the automatic assignment feature MUST remain. Entering renders over the network would become hell.
In that case, just clear the "Camera" parameter, and leave the automatic mode as now. It should work perfectly fine for standard rendering.
What cause problems are IPR and other hybrid "render/viewport" modes.
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Thank you, it was just a matter of making sure that in a future version something that is absolutely essential is not lost. Thank you!
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Ok. From your comments, i assume you want to lock clipping to a specific camera, but use IPR from any view.
I'm discussing it with our team. We're considering to come back the old "Camera" parameter. It should work in the following way:
- If "Camera" is not assigned (default behaviour), everything will work as now. "Limit to Visibility" and "Distance Falloff" will try to use the selected view.
- When a Camera is (manually) assigned, it will be always used for Clipping/Falloff, until you assign other or clear it.
Please note it will not be any option to assign the "Camera" parameter automatically to the active view, as it was in FP6.
That caused many problems in the past, which is what we're trying to avoid in FP7.
Please tell me your feedback about this possible change. Thanks.
I understand why you've made the change, but the current new method is causing more problems/performance hits than the FP6 method. I'm not sure what problems it caused, but from a user persepctive I didn't have any issues with how it worked in FP6, but in FP7 it's currently unusable for me. And is probably my most used aspect of Forest Pack.
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Also this statement is correct "Ok. From your comments, i assume you want to lock clipping to a specific camera, but use IPR from any view."
Currently it's cumbersome, you'd added extra steps to the workflow, and in its current state you have to repeat those steps multiple times during the same work session which of course costs time - time being the most valuable of all.
I'll try and record a video of how I use it and why the current method is problematic compared to how V6 worked. I spent 2 hours yesterday trying to do something in FP7, it took me less than 30 minutes to uninstall and rollback to FP6 (on 3 workstations) and then complete the task I was trying to do in FP7
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you can see that my camera view is highlighted in yellow quad. lower right. the Forest001 - big area is showing 345.6k items. the top left quad shows a lot of empty brownish land area - which is correct, because i am limiting the grass (aka big area) to the camera view and 200ft. when i click in the camera quad, and move the mouse while clicking and holding the middle mouse wheel (aka panning) the number of items generated drops to 5.3k! which must be what i want.
my point is - yes it is actually rendering correctly, but forestpro still calculates THE ENTIRE object when rendering. i've done another render where it took 6 mins to pre-render (you know, preparing objects loading bitmaps etc...) and when i turned off the forest object it rendered immediately.
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I dont know why is so hard for Itoo to address this issue.
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We have reintroduced the "Camera" parameter in Forest Pro 7.2.1 beta (https://forum.itoosoft.com/announcements/forest-pack-pro-beta-7-2-1/).
It lets you to assign a Camera manually, in case the automatic mode doesn't work well for you.
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i've just installed the beta. it seems to be working ok (the beta aspect of it) - it's really nice to be able to set the camera and then go to a different view and swing around in some cases my total object count goes from 120k to 64k items in this particular scene i'm w orking on now and that makes viewport navigation tolerable, whereas before this beta, it would suddenly fill the whole surface as soon as i switched to another viewport.