Day 51

Video conference in the morning with the guys from SESI who will be taking care and supervising us during our industrial attachment program in Los Angeles. Will update more details on it soon!

Point-Instance Proxy Preview

Had a surprise today, had another reply from the thread i started. Claudio worked on a file i uploaded and gave me an awesome example of how to achieve proxy bounding boxes or proxy geometries that scales relative to the instance objects!

In addition, he made parameters to toggle and switch the proxy, way more than I expected but the down-side was the Delayed Load set-up was taken out, he had geo_to_instance in scene level instead of my way of saving them out and bringing back it via delayed load. Studied his file and looked at how he implemented the switches and copying of proxy box or geo.

Took me a while to recreate it but mine is not 100% accurate compared to Claudio's, the sizes of the bounding boxes and geo are of the correct size and proportions as they don't go through the process of delayed load. They can be object_merged back into the instancer.

I decided to keep my "Material SOP" and feed them into the "Copy SOP" which were copying a box or low-poly rock (from "PolyReduce SOP" merged in from rock_generator_v006 object).

Although mine wasn't accurate scaling, it was sufficient to get the job done for now. I could see roughly how big the rock objects are using the bounding boxes and also their orientation, big improvement compared to the first proxy_preview set-up i had where all the bounding boxes were equal size and 0, 0, 0 orientation.

After i managed to make one chain to function properly, i whipped up the same network for the rest and created the enable and switch parameters where you can toggle on and off the proxy display and switch between displaying only box, only low-poly rock or both. Maybe Mr Ron has an idea on how to make it more accurate like the low-poly rocks that are being copied are the exact rock_object*.bgeo which were saved out, gotta have to ask him.

Small Rocks Instancer

Bryan set up a small rock model to rop out and he also made changes to the rockBase_generators (Huge rock spikes). I created another instance object and instance the rock all over the terrain, decided to create 3 more variations as it was still obvious that the rocks were the same one even though they were randomized by "Point SOP".

My first idea was to use "Paint Group SOP" to paint where the small rock would appear, that way we have better control... Definitely gotta change it if i can get that to work, right now i will have to stick to using the terrain as template. Same method of previewing the proxy boxes in the viewport but this one got no parameters like the rock_instancer.

Here's a single frame render after amending based on the comments given yesterday. Fired off around 4 different renders using both MPR and PBR with various render settings, wanted to keep the stations working and i could get some feedback on monday and follow up from there.