exterior impossible without Vray and Wavgen

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This development land is 1,100 acres within a Land area of 5.5 square miles.

The land surface was displaced by 8 layers of huge (Wavgen) ECW gray-scale displacement maps at 7,000x22,000 pixels.

The mesh of the land is some 500,000 polys with a concentration of vertices in detailed areas.

The land surface map is created using 14 layers in a composite shader. Each layer is masked by a 7,000x22,000 pixel gray-scale ECW. This allows camera zoom to about 30 feet still in detail

Every part of this process is still in the stack and no optimization of the mesh has been added.

There are in excess of 110,000 trees totaling 450,000 polys.

The creek water contains 60,000 polys, with one or two other features, there are more than 1,000,000 polys.

There is a surface bump detail in JP2 format ( Cant ECW it) at 10,000x31,250 pixels. This provides lips to sand traps and cut grass edge detail.

Using VRay 1.09.03 as the renderer, the frame attached took almost 25 minutes. My 10 machine render farm will of course bring that down to an acceptable level.

Max alone could not possibly have achieved this.
Even with the displacement maps and masks at 1,000x3,200 pixels in any format and with the mesh seriously optimized, (which destroys close in detail subtlety), Max collapsed every time I tried to render it.

Using (Wavgen) ECW as the mask layers has also massively improved the detail between layers.

This is the value of Wavgen and Vray to the Max user.

Anyone got any coments, thuis is my first Post in here

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awesome!

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quick quesiton. you talk about your mesh for the land having lots of polys and same with the water… did you by any chance use vray displacement on that? why use lots of polys then? and you shuld update to the latest versions of vray, it handles memory much better than 1.09x versions

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Anyone else using this wavgen? First I’ve seen it. Sounds interesting.

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quick quesiton. you talk about your mesh for the land having lots of polys and same with the water… did you by any chance use vray displacement on that? why use lots of polys then? and you shuld update to the latest versions of vray, it handles memory much better than 1.09x versions

No, I didnt use VRay displacement, the Basic Version doesnt have it. In fact, its quite a complicated process to get the land in an editable format.
But since you asked LOL I’ll explain.

First I import a bunch of CAD topo lines from the engineers, on this particular project no road levels or golf course Land sculpting is included although later it will be.

I then mesh these lines with Max ’ Terrain’ and then create a grey scale Z-Buffer image.

Now I create a ‘plane’ rectangle of the exact same size as the original with relatively few say 100x300 polys then, by mapping detailed areas to the surface in the Viewport I am able to select and highly Tesselate the areas.

Then I displace this mesh using the Z buffer image as well as very large (Wavgen) either ECW’s or JP2’s (as big as 14,000 x 44,000 pixels ) to displace the sand traps greens and tees etc. Finally a quick run around looking for Greens at mad angles and leveling those areas with soft select and Voila a believable Golf Terrain that matches the Photoshop Plan images I got from the course designers.

Since I have to place thousands of trees on the surface of the land and the fact that to get proper displacement of the various features requires as many as 8 displacement modifiers in the stack, I cant use displacemnt mapping.

Im trying to get a working demo of the Advanced version to see wether I will benefit from the extra expense. Until this contract goes ‘live’ Im bankrolling the costs myself.

The rest I explained in my original Post.

Here’s a view , same time of day but from the opposite direction

Thanks for the kind words

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This is very good indeed - a real eye opener. Your description, whilst very clear, confuses me in places - I’m a bit dim I think!

I would love to sit behind you and see the thing for real - obviously you aren’t going to share your files, but that would be fantastic.

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im not sure which i like better. they both look great

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Why 8 layers for instance? Please explain.

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Ok here’s a render with the Advanced demo I just downloaded, although now I gotta *#@#^&* well re-install and re-register no doubt, my full Basic version since this has watermarks all over it. Oh well such is the life of a CGer.

A huge improvement in render times
And, I dont remember writing Vray on the 12th Fairway LOL ( although I could zoom right into it if Id put it there myself)

Remember what you see above is only a small section of the overall and its all one huge file so I can swoop and zoom where I like. No GI by the way.

I would share the files with you all but sadly nothing would work for you without both Wavgen and Itoosofts’s ‘Forest’ Plugins. Also the max file is about 46 meg.

OK, why 8 layers of displacement ?. Well because I need to displace the terrain first to its correct hight, in this case a tad under 400 feet. Then I need to displace in the opposite direction the sand traps and all at differing amounts. Same for Tees and greens(up) and then the lakes and creek bed (down). I tried combining the whole lot into one displacemnt but frankly there isnt as much control.

The 14 layers of masked mapping I think speaks for itself right ?

Oh and by the way, I now live in Texas but was Born in Chesterfield Derbyshire. Moved to Texas almost 10 years ago. I still speak Ecky Thump :slight_smile:

my MSN fyi is paul@zeecon.com

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The images looks good! How many different trees are there? It seems as if there are only 4 or 5 different types of trees. you might get a much better layout if you included about 15 to 20 types of trees. “Most golf courses have a good variety” But it is looking really good!

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A small world - I go mountain biking round those parts!

So let me get this straight:you have one big ‘quadpatch’ to which you have 8 different Vray displacements applied - one for grass, one for bunkers etc etc. The big quadpatch has been selectively resed-up to allow for more detailed displacement.

Am I on the right lines?

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Just had a look at that forest pro plugin. Looks pretty flexible. I can imagine doing a shopping mall or something with hundreds of people. Do you assign a selection of materials randomly to all the generated planes?

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Yes you are right, there are in fact just 6 different trees, all actual shots locally here in Texas. I am about to go and shoot a bunch more so I get the count up to around 20 different ones. Been waiting for that spring ‘overgreen’ look to fade. However, we are short on species here in Texas. Mostly Cedar, Live Oak, Pecan and Mesquite.

Here’s a close in shot of the green almost bottom left of the pic above

and heres a bit of the mesh

Not too happy with the trap lips bump, think Ill try displacing it instead.

Also took an age to render almost 30 mins, funny since the wavgen maps usually, in scanline, render faster the closer you get.

Re: 8 displacemnt layers for Tricky. I start with a total land area ‘plane’ of about 100x300 poly’s then I turn this into a mesh and then hi rez various portions of the whole, see attached mesh detail. This makes it possible to maintain high quality contours around details as seen above.

I do intend to do several very hi-rez regions of close detail with specific trees placed with ForestPro’s sister product 'Planes as well as some modeled trees real close in. This is for compositing with live action golfers and talking heads etc.

Re: Trees yes, you can assign them as a random selection over as many images that you have. Each with a grey scale opacity map. You can also randomise the size and x,y flip.

Hope this covers the questions :slight_smile:

msn paul@zeecon.com

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with vray displacement all you need is 1 polygon to do your displacement. not tonnes.

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Thanks, Im just gona check out this wonderous VRay displace tool

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OK well that was a sad. Snags with VRay Displacement.

1/ Not possible to stack layers of displacemnt, requires very complex development of a single image wioth all details.

2/ Nothing to place trees upon i.e., no surface shape upon which over 100,000 trees can sit upon. Maybe I could fake it by using a proxy but thats not as easy as it sounds

3/ Nothing to place buildings upon or tee boxes or for carts to drive over.

:frowning:

thought I was going to be really impressed

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why not just have all your displacement as 1 map. sounds like it would be way simpler and take way less ram rather than loading 8 large sized displacement maps you can load just 1. for placement you can have a stand-in mesh which you can use for placement of buildings etc then get rid of when its time to render

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Ok so here’s a test.

these 2 images are the exact same file one rendered on basic and one on Advanced Demo

Top one is basic and took 13 mins 24 seconds and the lower one is Advanced Demo and too 10mins 24 seconds.

I see very litle difference between the 2 does anyone else ?


but the time saving is welcome.

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ya Im not sure why they should look different. The difference between the basic and advanced versions are the added flexibility the advanced has.

I also think your giving up too easily on the vray displacement. Learn to use it to its advantage and itll rock. I agree not being able to add displacement on top of each other sucks, but its the reality. Having vray subdivide the mesh and then do it on top of itself, and so on, wouldn’t be prudent.

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I didnt expect there to be much if any difference , there is in fact a slight increase in sharpness but you gotta lay one over the other to see it.
My point was the benefit of the 30% or so time saving.

The problem is quite simple Percy, the fact is there are only 256 levels of grey and therefore if one, as I am here, is displacing slightly under 400 feet, one foot becomes sub-pixel level.

Therefore to create a layered displacement map containing all the detail means that there is only 1/256th of the 400 feet available thats about 1’9" or so per level of grey. Creek beds and greens require less than 6" and so if I displace in layers and use a black and white image, I can displace by as little as 3 inches and see the result.

I am looking at the possibilty of using HDRI but the snag there is understanding the granularity of the levels within the image.

I havnt given up just regrouping :slight_smile:

But thanks for your input.