12 miles Lidar scan of Monument Valley

[fixeighted]

Ok, so I have it fixed apparently.
Something must be wrong with that tif info, even though it works in some cases.
I swapped it out for the original 2gb exr and it's all gone back to how I expect it to be
with no mad Z jumps and reasonable disp height values.

Otherwise, I bought a sub of World Creator for a month to check out.
It is very good but sadly is limited at the moment but with apparently a major update dropping this week,
which should then do what I want, and I can get what I need from a month sub, rather than spend hundreds on
one of the others

[damaggio]

Great, you figured out.
Here's a bit more info on my side, the reason I do the exposure in photoshop is not only to see what the map looks like but to visualize my ranges from pure white and pure black,it will also require a lower amount of displacement.( one can even adjust the levels further with an extra node in Max or Maya on the fly).
Your map exposure was completely black so I had to enter a very high amount of displacement seen on Image 1.
Now a question for you , do you get the artifacts at the edge of the map in Max?... this has always happened to me even in the Mental Ray days, it only shoots up on one or 2 sides of the plane regardless of what map I'm using.

My solution for this never ending problem is to create a Transparency ramp or a texture map to kill those edge pixels, now this is a huge problem if you want to combine another plane next to it to extend the landscape, for a perfect seem match you don't want to remove information from the edges by using this method.

One day I'll make a proper post about this.
For other people trying this in the future if you experience crashes with such large maps try to change color space from Grayscale to RGB and try exporting different extensions to be used , Exr, HDr or reduce to Tiff 16bit.

[fixeighted]

I clearly messed something up in the process.
I just checked and yes the tif is very dark, whilst the big exr is clearly visible.
I must have processed the raw lidar differently, but at least now it works and with all the detail I expected.
I thought I just stitched them (with an exposure to visualise, then deleted) and saved as exr initially, but maybe I did something differently to your method.

The edge thing (apparently quite common) I solved by setting the tiling to 1.001 I think, but will check.
I need to fade mine out at the border too, though may just do that in post. A mask is the only way I can think of to do it in render.
As I mentioned the World Creator thing, they are also seemingly saying that huge multi-tiled terrains are coming in this update, so maybe that will solve this issue...

Interestingly, even with this 2gb, 35657x23796 pixel image, Vray had no problem. The dodgy tif was I think much slower to process even at a lower res.

This is ongoing, so by the end of it hopefully it'll be a solid and workable process for us and others

Fucking headache though LOL

[fixeighted]

Um...I just looked at those images and you have a displacement value of 4 million odd....mine maxes out at at 1mil so how did you get that result?

[damaggio]

Well I really don’t know how far I can take that number in the displacement field, remember I’m in Maya…I just kept going up until the height was more or less correct. The edge pixel you get that too huh, how come It doesn’t happen in other edges of the plane, even if you crop the image a few pixels it doesn’t do anything, I’ve tried all kinds of settings and 2D displacement or Normal displacement gives the same results. I’m gonna have to do a post.

[fixeighted]

Aah of course you're on Maya, so maybe the low numbers thing is just an oversight in Max or some weird limitation.

The edge thing is weird, as with the tiling off it should just stop there, but it still tiles that 1 pixel from the opposite edge
on the U and V. Why it doesn't happen on the opposite edges is presumably because it's just reading one U and one V value
which is normally tiled.
I'm sure a dev would know what exactly is happening and maybe it's just unavoidable.
Setting it to 1.001 makes it go away of course...it's effectively still tiling but dragging in the negative, so
normalising the edge values to 0.0?
This is without uvw mapping.
With uvw mapping, with tiling left at 1.0 in the bitmap, uvw mapping set to .999 also fixes it.

Interestingly it appears to be what happens in Gaea/WB/WC etc.
Maybe those programs do a tiling fix in the background to overcome the glitch.

Anyway, these images show the thing but also worth mentioning that this is one raw lidar which in the Vray mod only needs
a value of 10cms to achieve that height on a 1km square....is that what you get in your Maya version?

[damaggio]

It is very helpful seen this from your results , thanks for that.
I did run a test of how you suggested and cropped the UV coverage by one 1.001 and that works better than loading a texture map.

[fixeighted]

That's cool...yeah anything to save on extra steps.

I just heard that we got the job, which is great, although it means I'll have to buy 64gb more ram and
decide on the terrain software purchase and possibly Tyflo Pro (if I can't do it with the free one), which seriously eats into my profits.
Such is life.

[fixeighted]

New version beta of World Creator is really very promising...huge terrains with incredible detail...very impressive.

Talking about impressive detail I'm really struggling trying to replicate the extremely tight masks you managed to get for
the slope/vertical transitions. Is there a trick to it or just trial/error?
Mine always seem blurred in those areas.

[damaggio]

I gotta see what they improved in this new release, I’m not really following their development since Gaea came in the market ant the new terrain tools in Houdini.

[damaggio]

The masks in World Machine have enough controls to squeeze the black and white values , however sometimes I take into Photoshop for more refinement and some paint over.
You just need to experiment until looks right.

[fixeighted]

Thanks damaggio , I'm figuring it out bit by bit

[Buck]

Aah of course you're on Maya, so maybe the low numbers thing is just an oversight in Max or some weird limitation.

The edge thing is weird, as with the tiling off it should just stop there, but it still tiles that 1 pixel from the opposite edge
on the U and V. Why it doesn't happen on the opposite edges is presumably because it's just reading one U and one V value
which is normally tiled.
I'm sure a dev would know what exactly is happening and maybe it's just unavoidable.
Setting it to 1.001 makes it go away of course...it's effectively still tiling but dragging in the negative, so
normalising the edge values to 0.0?
This is without uvw mapping.
With uvw mapping, with tiling left at 1.0 in the bitmap, uvw mapping set to .999 also fixes it.

Interestingly it appears to be what happens in Gaea/WB/WC etc.
Maybe those programs do a tiling fix in the background to overcome the glitch.

Anyway, these images show the thing but also worth mentioning that this is one raw lidar which in the Vray mod only needs
a value of 10cms to achieve that height on a 1km square....is that what you get in your Maya version?

I believe if you turn off "wrap" in the UV node, it will fix this without scaling anything. I've seen this happen on lights before, and that fixes it for the lights anyway.

[damaggio]

Wow Daniel! I think you cracked this long lasting mystery, I did some tests last night and it worked great. Nice Jeep adventures, I miss the desert, thanks for chiming in on this post.

[damaggio]

I owe you a nice cappuccino in Moab one of these days Buck. Cheers