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Author Topic: Inconsistent Forest generation  (Read 1233 times)

SnipeyX

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Inconsistent Forest generation
« on: October 20, 2016, 01:39:10 AM »
I'm using FP to put grass on a surface. Just migrated to max 2017 SP3 and FP 5.2, and one particular piece of geometry is giving me inconsistent results. Sometimes it makes grass, sometimes it doesn't, and if I save it with grass and submit to the farm, sometimes it won't render. Toggling my selection of the object multiple times can trigger the forest to generate or not. I've reset xform, detached from the source geometry, made a box and attached, converted between poly and mesh, etc. I found if I move the pivot of the problem object, it also sometimes appears sometimes doesn't. Forest is in XY generate mode.

Screen recording and stripped sample scene attached.

Any ideas what is going on?

Michal Karmazín

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Re: Inconsistent Forest generation
« Reply #1 on: October 20, 2016, 10:32:40 AM »
Hi,

We've noticed, that 3ds max 2017 sometimes has troubles dealing with Editable Mesh objects. I would suggest you to apply an Edit Poly modifier over the "Box001" Editable Mesh object, or use the Covert to Editable Poly. That should fix it.

Best regards,

SnipeyX

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Re: Inconsistent Forest generation
« Reply #2 on: October 20, 2016, 01:32:20 PM »
Unfortunately it started out as an edit poly object, it was originally part of the other object being used as a surface and that one section wouldn't generate, so that's when I detached and tried to reset, at one point converted to mesh to see if it worked any better. Noted that poly is preferred, but I don't think that's going to solve this one.

Edit: New screen recording attached. One forest pro object, one edit poly surface. All I do is select and deselect. The forest object goes between three different states as the selection toggles, sometimes it all generates, sometimes one column generates, sometimes nothing on the foreground element but still on the background element (same surface object.) My next attempt will be unchecking the 'auto' button in the surface rollout and see if i can get it to stick how i want, or maybe once it generates how i want i can convert it to custom to 'save'. Note the random generation also changes if I just continually hit the refresh button on surface rollout.

Edit2: Unchecking 'auto' didn't fix it, it still regenerated on the farm and got different results than what I had when I submitted (backburner rendering). I just refreshed until everything was there, then converted to custom instead of generate mode. All rendered as needed.
« Last Edit: October 20, 2016, 05:05:38 PM by SnipeyX »

Michal Karmazín

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Re: Inconsistent Forest generation
« Reply #3 on: October 21, 2016, 10:22:43 AM »
Hi,

Thanks for all additional feedback on this issue. I've noticed, there were many overlapping faces (as you can see on attached screen-host). Attaching modified scene (being those faces removed), which shouldn't give you these problems. Hope that helps.

Best regards,