Vegtable Sets Information

Owned by Matthew Lagoe
Jan 27, 2014
2 min read

Create Texture/Shape

One texture needs to be created which is shared by all the vegetation in the vegetable set. A simple quad or triangle shape can be created for each vegetation component. The vegetation texture is then UV mapped to the vegetation shape before exporting the shape file.

Assembly

Assemble the veget set using the object viewer.

The following was taken a post by Lionel Berenguier on the (old) Nel mailing list :

General Tuning

  • In Object Viewer, use for each vegetable the most appropriate Distance of creation. As you can guess, the farther, the slower. Choose according to the veget size for instance.
  • In Object Viewer, play with the density track bars. The trick is to have negative Abs Value, so you'll get kind of "block of micro-veget", and hence you will have sometimes nothing, and sometimes lot of vegetable. For example if you setup AbsValue= -10, and RandValue=20, the random-generated density will range from -10 to +10 (well, min/max would be more user friendly here....). Since negative density is clamped to 0, the half of time you will get Nothing, and the other half you will get density from 1 to 10 (Nb: density value means "number of instance per squared meter").
  • You can get more control with the MaxDensity track bar. If you want for example 50% of time blocks of 10 vegetables per squared meter, setup for instance Density.AbsValue=-1000, Density.RandValue= 2000, and MaxDensity= 10. Understand? The "size of block" can hence be controlled with the "Frequency" trackbar.

Polygon-Rate tuning

  • According to the setup of the vegetable in Max, you may get performance hit doubled:
  • Avoid "Alpha Blend Off - Lighted Dynamic". Slow Vertex Shader for not so interesting feature (dynamic lighting, more accurate bending).
  • Alpha Blend On is approx Twice the cost of "Alpha Blend Off". But it has cool feature like smooth appearance and "Fade with distance". This implies that sometimes you can lower the "Distance of creation"
  • Other features are approx "free".
  • In Object viewer, "Num vegetable tri" info you get in the Vegetable dialog may help you controlling your setup.

Fill-Rate tuning:

  • It is obvious, but in Max, avoid using "Vegetable Double Sided" in the Node Properties dialog if you don't need it.
  • Nothing more special, but "test it yourself" and "don't make to big vegetable". Play with the general tuning may help.

Add to tile bank

Add the veget set into the tileset using tile editor.