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Author Topic: Irregular terrian - xref objects/scene  (Read 5956 times)

OL1976

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Irregular terrian - xref objects/scene
« on: May 14, 2008, 09:32:57 AM »
Briefly, I am creating a drive through visualisation for 38km of highway.
As the data sizes are so large I have had to break all the design and existing triangles up into more managable sections so that I do not encounter memory problems when rendering.
I therefore have 7 scenes for the existing ground triangles which are xrefed into my main scene with all the other Dynamite materials.

Problem being that when I create a forest  in the main scene I cannot select the xref terrain triangles. I believe the triangles need to be in the scene to create an irregular terrain forest?

Nor can I create the forest in the individual ground xref scenes as although the trees come across, I dont have access to the camera to control the direction the trees rotate. Nor does it only show trees only where the camera is pointing therefore creating potentially thousands more trees to render than necessay?

Is there a way to do this that I am missing?

Thanks

Richard

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Re: Irregular terrian - xref objects/scene
« Reply #1 on: May 14, 2008, 10:34:21 PM »
Richard,

Is not possible to use Forest in a XRef scene because the trees don't update with the camera. You can load the terrain as a XRef object and link Forest to it, but i believe that won't be very useful because the memory used will be the same that using the terrain as a mesh.

What about if you create a simplified terrain (applying an 'Optimize' modifier or deleting the unused triangles) only for Forest ? You would set it to non-renderable to hide from the render. Also, i think that will be more easy to place the trees on a single surface, that using several terrain sections.

Don't forget to convert the optimized terrain to an editable mesh, or Max won't free the memory used by the deleted triangles.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2008, 10:38:11 PM by Itoo »
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software