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Author Topic: Paint area resolution destroyed for unknown reasons  (Read 1490 times)

TG4018

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Paint area resolution destroyed for unknown reasons
« on: October 05, 2016, 09:08:32 PM »
Hi,

Sometimes when I've painted a paint area with tons of nooks and crannies, the area's resolution will be completely destroyed. If a certain border in the area had 30 (implicit) vertices, the edge will be compressed to only 1 or 2 vertices. I'm not yet sure what causes it, it might be rendering or saving and it just happened without me doing anything in particular. It's happened a couple of times and completely destroys hours of work. A work-around is of course to convert it to spline regularly, but I'd like to know if this is a known bug/feature and if it can be avoided?

I'm using 3ds Max 2014 x64, Forest Pack Pro 5.0.5, Windows 7 x64 Professional.

Thanks!

iToo

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Re: Paint area resolution destroyed for unknown reasons
« Reply #1 on: October 06, 2016, 09:02:42 AM »
Hi,

To avoid that Paint areas grows to a huge number of points, its shape is simplified while painting, deleting vertices that are very close to other according a threshold value.
This threshold value depends of the current stroke radius. It would happen that if you edit a detailed area with a large brush, undesired vertices are removed because the threshold is too large.

Please, would you check if that is the problem in your case ? Please note this process of removing vertices occurs only while painting (specifically when you click with the brush).

Really we didn't notice of this issue until now. To fix it, we would modify the way that threshold value is computed.

Thanks,
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

TG4018

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Re: Paint area resolution destroyed for unknown reasons
« Reply #2 on: October 06, 2016, 09:14:57 PM »
Yep, I was able to reproduce the bug/feature immediately in a new scene with just a plane and a Forest object on top of it. This all happens when using a brush of a size, e.g. 200cm, and then painting with a size of 100000cm. It is definitely the same reason it happened in my actual scene I'm working on, because I vary the size of the brush a lot - we're talking from 300cm to a thousand times that or so. Obviously, this can be pretty problematic if the user isn't aware of this until it's too late. Fortunately, I keep a lot of iterative backups so I was able to salvage most of my work.

Now, am I doomed to having to use multiple paint areas for different brush sizes, or can this threshold be modified? I'm creating a really huge scene that calls for more detail in some places, and some areas are just vast forests, so I need to vary the brush size this drastically. In fact, I find I can't change from 200cm to 2000cm without the resolution of the paint area being compressed. Is there any way to turn this mechanism off? Otherwise I guess I'll have to stick to always doing the larger areas first and then only decreasing the brush size as I go.
« Last Edit: October 07, 2016, 12:39:58 PM by TG4018 »

iToo

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Re: Paint area resolution destroyed for unknown reasons
« Reply #3 on: October 07, 2016, 09:08:01 AM »
No, sorry. I'm afraid the threshold value is hardcoded with the brush size. We must modify the plugin to change that behaviour (we'll do it as soon as possible).

As you pointed out, currently the only workaround is to create separate areas or convert them to splines.
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

iToo

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Re: Paint area resolution destroyed for unknown reasons
« Reply #4 on: October 12, 2016, 09:02:37 AM »
Hi, we just released Forest Pack 5.2 with this issue fixed.
Now spline is optimized only near the brush, not other vertices. That approach should work much better.

Thanks,
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

TG4018

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Re: Paint area resolution destroyed for unknown reasons
« Reply #5 on: October 12, 2016, 10:14:51 AM »
Ah ok, excellent!